MEDIA-ASIA: Women Present News, Men Still Make Them

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Adaline Lau

SINGAPORE, May 23 2001 (IPS) - Most news presenters across Asia may be women, but it is still largely a man’s world when it comes to the newsmakers.

“Women have made a tremendous contribution politically in Asia. It’s really a misnomer, a stereotype of Western journalism that women haven’t had a role in politics here in Asia,” comments Rena Golden, executive vice president and general manager of CNN International.

Golden was among the news executives from around the world who met here last week for the ‘News World Asia Forum’, which also discussed women’s role of newsmakers and people who influence politics and governance in the region.

But it is not only in Asia that women newsmakers are marginalised, according to the findings of a one-day global media monitoring project conducted by the World Association for Christian Communications (WACC) last year.

The results of the project, which involved volunteers in 70 countries, showed that while women are increasingly reporting and presenting the news, they rarely become news subjects themselves.

Women account for 41 percent of the world’s journalists but only 18 percent of people interviewed for the news, the WACC study showed.

Likewise, women newsmakers account for 81 percent of interviewees whose occupation is described as homemakers or parents. They make up only 10 percent of those portrayed as politicians, 12 percent as scientists and 9 percent as athletes, the same study showed.

Activists say that having more women in media does not necessarily translate into more gender-aware news and reportage, often due to the culture in many news environments.

For instance, Dana Lam, president of the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), says that either the women who have made it in media had internalised “patriarchal news values” or they self-censor because they know what is expected in the news they produced or contributed to.

She quotes a broadcaster as saying that although they are aware of the less than accurate and realistic picture of women that media gives, she and her female colleagues tend to be wary of proposing “too many women’s stories” for fear of being “pigeon- holed”.

Indeed, media do not always show how Asian women, for instance, have gone quite a ways ahead in areas like politics, despite the problems women in the region face.

For instance, more women have reached powerful political positions across the region in the last quarter of a century.

India’s Indira Gandhi, Sri Lanka’s Sirima Bandaranaike, Pakistan’ Benazir Bhutto and Indonesia’s Megawati Sukarnoputri are some of them. In Muslim Bangladesh, both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition are women.

As Riz Khan, a journalist widely known for his interviews for CNN observes, “Asia has been one of the few places where women would be able to succeed and strive to be leaders, you do not see much in the western countries in the same way.”

Still, some journalists say media itself can be used to send the right and realistic messages about women in the region.

The Indonesia bureau chief of Singapore’s Channel News Asia, Haseenah Koyakutty, gave one example of how political leaders can use the media to raise the profile of women.

Indonesian Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri, touted as the next president of the world’s largest Muslim country, deliberately chose a woman legislator to deliver her party’s speech supporting the censure motion against Wahid in Parliament recently.

According to Koyakutty, Megawati’s partymates said this was the vice president’s way of sending the message across that there was more than just one woman leader in Indonesia, and that she does not stand for gender discrimination.

That message was aimed at some Islamic clerics who harbour opposition to a women leading Indonesia, although the Islamic groups in Parliament that had opposed her candidature as president in 1999 have now switched sides — and want her to replace President Abdurrahman Wahid.

As a female journalist covering political issues, Koyakutty says she had to make the extra effort to be informed about relevant issues to build her credibility. She says it is not uncommon for news sources to take women less seriously, be dismissive to them or refuse them access.

In Thailand, the portrayal of Thai women by the country’s media is more often than not distorted and sensational, says Sutichai Yoon, editor of the Nation Group.

Senior vice president of Star TV India, Jaya Ramanathan, says she tries to use the ‘India Matters’ segment in her news channel to question issues like gender discrimination in her country, especially among the lower middle class.

But CNN’s Golden, a female journalist who has the power to set the news agenda, argues that there may not be such a thing as a gender perspective in approaching news writing and production.

“I’m not sure if there’s really a woman’s perspective or male perspective,” she says. As individuals from different family backgrounds and cultures, “we each bring to it (the story) many different things and being woman is just one of those things.”

This reflects a debate among journalists about gender awareness in media not being about writing about women, but reflecting in news stories the roles they play in society as well.

In recent years, the situation for women journalists had improved dramatically, journalists here say, For instance, they have moved out of writing for fashion and leisure columns to writing for politics and all other fields, notes Golden.

BBC’s western India correspondent, Sanjeev Srivastava, points out that women are now going into roles in media which used to be purely the male domain, such as reporting on war situations.

But most of the high decision making powers in the news businesses are still occupied by men, they say.

To this, Golden says: “I do feel I have the obligation to help young women succeed — and I do intend to make it easier for the young women coming up.”