Women and men in the news in Southern Africa.

In celebration of World Press Freedom Day on 3 May, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) and Gender Links launched a regional Gender and Media Baseline Study (GMBS) and 12 country reports that give information about women and men in the editorial content of the region as a whole and in individual countries. The first such study in Southern Africa, the GMBS is also the most comprehensive regional study on gender and the media ever to be undertaken.

The findings are as shocking as they are challenging? Initiated by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) that seeks to foster a free, independent and diverse media in the region, as well as Gender Links, a Southern African NGO that promotes gender equality in and through the media, the study set out to provide baseline data for monitoring progress towards achieving gender balance in media coverage, build capacity in the region for monitoring media content from a gender perspective and become a key advocacy tool in the campaign to ensure that the voices of women and men, in all their diversity, are equally represented and fairly portrayed in the media of the region.

The study covered 114 out of the 317 print and electronic media in the 12 countries analysed, or 36 percent of the media in these countries, during September 2002. The study focused solely on the news.

Some of the key findings of the research:

* Women's views and voices are grossly under-represented in the media. Women constituted 17 percent of known news sources in the media monitored in the study, while women constitute 52 percent of the population in Southern Africa.

There are significant variations between countries.

These ranged from women constituting 26 percent of news sources in Angola (the highest) to 11 percent in Malawi (the lowest).

* Older women are virtually invisible. To the extent women's voices are accessed, they are likely to be in the 35-49 year bracket for both print and electronic media.

* Women in the media still carry their private identity more than men. In all countries, women are much more likely to be identified as a wife, daughter or mother than a man is likely to be identified as a husband, son or father.

* Women in certain occupational categories are virtually silent. The only occupational categories in which female views dominated were as beauty contestants, sex workers and home-makers. Male voices predominated even in agriculture, where women perform most of the work. Women politicians are not heard relative to even their strengths in parliament.

* Women constitute an average of 18 percent of the members of parliament in the region. Yet women constituted only eight percent of the sources in the politician category. Countries that have the highest representation of women in parliament--South Africa, Mozambique and Tanzania--also had some of the lowest proportions of women politicians being accessed as news sources. South Africa, for example, has 31 percent women in parliament and a similar proportion in cabinet. Yet women constituted only 8 percent of the politicians quoted in the media monitored.

* Gender equality is hardly considered newsworthy. About a quarter of all the over 25 000 news items monitored related to politics and economics, and close to twenty percent were on sports. Gender specific news items accounted for a mere two percent of the total, and about half of these were on gender violence. The only topic on which women's voices outnumber men's is on gender equality. There were more male than female voices even on the topic of gender violence.

* Men's voices dominate in all the hard news categories. Women constituted less than ten percent of news sources in the economics, politics and sport categories. The highest representation of women in the media is as TV presenters. And they have to be young! The heaviest concentration of female electronic media practitioners is in the 20-34 year bracket. In essence, women stand their best chance in the electronic media (especially TV presenter category), but have a limited "shelf life". All this highlights the fact that the main factor for women's success in the visual media is looks rather than ability.

* Women are least well represented in the print media, constituting only 22 percent of those who wrote news stories. They are also under represented in the critical images/cartoons and opinion and commentary categories. Women media practitioners predominate in the soft beats. There is not a single news category in which women media practitioners predominate. Their absence is especially marked in the economics, politics and sports, mining and agriculture beats.

* The only beats that come close to achieving gender parity are health and HIV/Aids, human rights, gender equality, gender violence, media and entertainment.

* Women do tend to access more female sources. The positive correlation between women journalists and women sources suggests that having higher levels of women journalists in all beats of the media would increase the extent to which women are given greater voice in the media. But the growing number of men writing and producing stories on gender issues is an important trend. The fact that there are numerically more male journalists writing and producing stories on gender equality and gender violence is a positive sign and should be built on through training.

There are still cases of blatant sexist reporting in the media, portraying women as objects and temptresses. But increasingly the challenge is one of subtle stereotypes that are conveyed in a variety of ways. These include the relative weight given to male and female sources; stories that go to the opposite extreme and glorify women as well as stories that perpetuate the traditional roles of women and men.

* The majority of stories suffer from "gender blindness"--story opportunities that are lost through failing to explore the gender dimensions of every day situations, such as the power dynamics at play in the HIV/Aids pandemic, the different impacts of the national budget on women and men etc. But examples of gender aware reporting gathered as part of the qualitative analysis show that transformation is possible.

The qualitative analysis also yielded several "best practice" examples of gender perspectives being integrated into every day news and yielding more balanced, more interesting and ultimately more professional stories.

Experience has shown that gender parity does not happen all by itself and the stated purpose of the study by MISA and Gender Links is for an advocacy campaign to ensure that the voices of women and men are equally heard on all subjects in the news. To this effect the country reports were launched on May 3 and as this important event was celebrated, MISA challenged the media to re-examine their coverage of gender issues and to remember that we cannot talk about press freedom when half the voices are missing.

In June each participating country will run workshops where the country and regional reports will be discussed in detail and plans for a concerted national advocacy campaign will be made.

(Source: MISA. Sister Namibia will report on the Namibian study in our next issue.)