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NEW YORK - A new study into the representation of women in media says news organizations should do more to include female perspectives.
The first step to achieving that equity is for journalists to acknowledge that imbalance exists in newsrooms and news production, Luba Kassova, who authored the report, told VOA.
The report, “The Missing Perspectives of Women in News” — commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — focused on India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Britain and the U.S. It looked at four indicators: diversity in the workplace, newsroom leadership, women as sources and as figures in news stories, and coverage of gender equality issues.
Overall, marginal progress has been made in the past 10 years, the report found. It challenges policymakers and newsroom leadership to double female representation in coming years to present more balanced perspectives of issues.
When it comes to workplace diversity, “there are no success stories” in any of the countries the study examined, Kassova, who is director of AKAS, said at a media briefing Tuesday. AKAS is an international audience strategy group commissioned to carry out the study.
Top positions in the newsroom remain largely a reserve of the men, and the absence of female voices in the decision-making process means news about women and for women is mostly decided by men, Kassova said.
The world “is missing out on the perspective of half of its population,” Pamella Makotsi Sittoni, executive editor of Kenya’s Daily Nation, told VOA
Women will continue to be denied their right to be heard or to take up leadership or influential positions in the media if the imbalance persists, Makotsi Sittoni said.
“There is an opportunity when you have equality to tap from both sides and to tap from both perspectives, and that is what we are missing out on by leaving out women,” the Kenyan journalist said.
The study found an imbalance in the news gathering process, which continues to give preference to male voices. Between 2005 and 2015, “fewer than one in five experts globally in the news were women,” and today, the report said, men are quoted in online news five times more often than women in Nigeria, and six times in India.
The report analyzed news content and academic articles to create a database, and it used Google trends and surveys to collect data in the six countries. More than 2,000 articles and three case studies were considered, and the content of nearly 12,000 publications and more than 56 million stories were analyzed.
The researchers found that women have the best coverage in lifestyle stories, where their voices are captured more than in news linked to policymaking or current affairs.
Similarly, of the 19 beats analyzed, lifestyle reporting was where female journalists have most parity. Women tend to be assigned coverage of education, environment, and issues of poverty and development, with fewer assigned to investigative reporting, the economy, or politics within newsrooms, the study found.
When it comes to expert sources cited in politics coverage, men’s voices were up to seven times more likely to be heard than that of women. This further dwindles in economic issues where male experts were up to 31 times more likely to be featured than women. In all six countries, women were two to 15 times more likely to appear in the arts and media news genre than in articles on the economy, researchers found.
The study found that with the exception of India, “gender representation in political news coverage is lagging behind women’s actual position in political life in Kenya, the U.S., South Africa, and the UK.”
The researchers found no indication that the Me Too movement had an impact on coverage of women’s issues in the U.S. and Britain, Kassova told VOA. The campaign against sexual harassment and abuse gained prominence in 2017 when Hollywood celebrities and others spoke publicly about their experiences.
Generally, researchers found that the more rooted the patriarchal norms, the bigger the barrier to gender equality. In such countries, both sexes appear to believe that women must be subservient to men — a perception mirrored in the news environment.
The report’s findings should be addressed holistically and intentionally, Makotsi Sittoni said. The Kenyan journalist said those in the media should be more proactive and inclusive in eliminating gender biases in newsrooms.
Report author Kassova agreed, saying change is possible but only if newsrooms push for it.
Lesbian Visibility Day, April 26 was first observed in 2008, and was created to ensure the visibility of the lesbian community. Let's mark the day by making lesbians feel recognized, safe, and visible in the world where they continue to face discrimination and inequality.
Burroughs was born May 2, 1879, in Orange County, Virginia, the daughter of John and Virginia “Jennie” Burroughs. In 1883, her mother left her husband, taking Burroughs and her sister, and moved to Washington, D.C. Burroughs attended the M Street High School where she studied domestic science and achieved high academic honors. During this period of her life she met Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper, two prominent Negro women who became her role models.
When she graduated, Burroughs attempted to attain a position as a teacher in the Washington school system but was denied the job. She then moved to Philadelphia to work in the office of the Christian Banner while also working part-time for Rev. Lewis Jordin at the National Baptist Convention (NBC). She later relocated to Louisville, Kentucky to become a secretary for the Foreign Mission Board of the NBC. A speech she gave at the 1900 annual conference of the NBC, in which she argued for women’s increased involvement in the organization, led to the creation of the Woman’s Convention Auxiliary (WC). Burroughs served as corresponding secretary until 1948. She was then elected president and served in that capacity until her death in 1961.
In 1909 Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls. It was the first school in the nation to provide vocational training for African-American females. She was instrumental in persuading the National Baptist Convention to sponsor the institution and purchase the land for it. Burroughs ran the school and it was managed entirely by African-Americans. Many disagreed with the school curriculum that trained young women to become efficient wage earners as well as community activists. Burroughs also created her own history course to inform women about societal influences on Negroes in history. The school was renamed in her honor in 1964.
A well-known, eloquent speaker and writer, Burroughs was active in the National Association of Colored Women, which helped found; the National Association of Wage Earners; and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. She toured the country denouncing segregation, employment discrimination and inequality. A staunch feminist, Burroughs believed suffrage for women was the key to political power to end discrimination. In spite of or perhaps because of her criticism of President Herbert Hoover’s silence on lynching, she was appointed in 1928 to chair a commission on housing for African Americans in conjunction with his White House Conference on Home Building.
Burroughs never married. Instead she devoted her entire life to her work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual and evangelist. She defied societal restrictions on her race and gender and her work foreshadowed the women’s and civil rights movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
She passed away of natural causes alone in her Washington home on May 20, 1961.