slowly
Five years into the new radio and where is the gender equality, asks Charl Blignaut
It’s the Monday morning after the elections and AMLive co-anchor Sally Burdett is having a small domestic breakdown. She still can’t quite believe she got through the biggest political broadcast of the year in one piece.
“Uh … Yes,” is her initial reply when I ask about the nerve-wrack factor of the SAfm Election ’99 transmission from the Independent Election Commission results centre last week.
“Thursday was the worst day. The AMLive team were on air for six hours. By the end we were shell-shocked.” Listening to the results come in, you’d certainly never have guessed that each time Burdett needed the loo she had to zip up her jacket and pitch herself out of the hi-tech election nerve centre and into the winter morning to the Porta-loos strategically positioned in the Pretoria Showgrounds.
I’d listened to all six hours of Burdett and co-anchor John Perlman’s broadcast. Certainly the election special must have made some kind of impression because I find jotted in my notes the words: “Sally Burdett rocks.” So does Perlman, but that’s another story.
I’ve ditched the TV and have been listening to the radio for almost a month now, in search of women’s voices and to test the state of the prickly “gender issue” in local radio. Five years into the new radio and has anything changed?
SAfm changed, that’s for sure. In 1994 it was still Radio South Africa. The news, from the English Service days, was a male thing, broken in paternal tones, “the voice of God” as Burdett puts it. Now it’s 1999 and we’re getting the national election results on SAfm from a 31-year-old female journalist on a show produced chiefly by women (senior producer Karima Brown; executive producer Sue Valentine) and it’s not an issue.
Every woman in broadcasting that I have spoken to over the past few weeks agrees that in the five years since the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) began to regulate commercial and community radio licenses, women have made their presence felt most strongly on the news desk. They are also generally frustrated by how slow the gains have been both in management and on prime time.
“My position with regards women in radio right now is that we’re all plodding along, trying to make strides in confined spaces … It’s frustrating,” says Nandipho Strydom. “Plus then I’m still trying to discover exactly what it is that `a woman in radio’ is supposed to be saying.”
As co-presenter (with one T-Boz) on Radio Metro’s breakfast show, Strydom is the only other woman in mainstream radio besides Burdett to have landed a coveted morning slot and, like Burdett, she feels she is treated with respect and that, within her team, gender is no issue.
Yet neither feel that radio is even vaguely representative. “The male jock is still very much alive,” says Burdett of commercial music stations, “Yes, it’s still a boy’s club.” Of course it’s true. Although women are the majority in South Africa that is not reflected on the radio. But even that is changing. Slowly.
Among others, Phindi Gule does a brilliant mid-morning show on Yfm, and the station also has Busi Ntuli on the weekends. Metro has Penny Lebyane late night. There’s Tove Kane on Highveld, Keoamogetsi “KG” Moeketsi on Kaya FM and the inimitable Kate Turkington on 702 Talk Radio on Sundays. SAfm also features Michelle Constant on Saturdays and Patricia Glynn on Thursdays.
It may seem like an impressive list, but it’s still a case of one woman to seven men on air – and a couple extra thrown in on the weekend.
Why? Because, say the researchers, men’s voices sell product far better than women’s do.
“Yes, but women’s voices carry better,” counters Burdett. “They have more resonance and can carry a message better.”
The other reason offered to explain the lack of women’s voices outside of the traditional “recipe hour” routine is that women are more hesitant to promote themselves as music DJs. Anthony Duke, station manager at 5fm, says that only one in 50 audition tapes that he receives are from women. Dirk Hartford says the same of Y, where he is also station manager. Both say they are constantly scouting for new female talent.
“Where? Where are they looking then? Because I see it all over the place,” says Strydom, who is tired of the same excuses.
Hartford says that Y has twice scouted the community stations as well as Gauteng’s campus radio operations, but that women DJs are in short supply. Possibly it’s true.
“My biggest challenge has not been a gender thing,” says Burdett. “It’s been self- confidence, believing I am good enough to compete.”
One way of testing the state of gender on the airwaves is to look at the grassroots. Community radio is supposed to have provided training and a forum for women broadcasters, and in certain regards it has, says Faiza Smith, something of an expert in the field. She is pleased that women have – since 1994 – overcome the technical stumbling blocks and that emerging careers in radio news have been sustained, but she’s hardly ululating. She says that the female-male ratio in community radio is roughly 20-80 – much the same as on the commercial stations.
Smith proceeds to outline a string of sexual harassment charges to have surfaced in community radio – particularly in Soweto, Alexandra and Mpumalanga – in the past few months. Right now the National Community Radio Forum is considering what action to take about accusations against at least two stations. In one case that emerged last week a station manager is being accused of getting drunk and fondling the female staff.
The same old stuff, except that now the station manager in question won’t be able to ignore the gripes.
The real change is in how charged the gender issue has become. Monitoring groups have mushroomed – from the Gender Commission to the Media Monitoring Project to Media Watch and a new women’s committee, Tshwaranang.
The latter recently had a go at Yfm’s jocks for perpetuating stereotypes and harping on and on about “fat chicks”.
“There’s more awareness now, but still all the same stereotypes,” says Smith. “Of course,” she adds, “you are starting to see women programme managers and the like, but still no station managers.”
Busi Ntuli, who presents Eargasm Corner on Y on the weekends, is a classic new radio success story. Plucked from community station Voice of Soweto, she first read the news on Y before landing the Eargasm show. But while she was doing that she was also developing her own business and consultancy -Flexi-P, a personnel concern – on the side. She’s not investing her entire future in radio, but she loves doing her show. On air she plays new tunes and makes soccer jokes, but also talks about Aids and openly disses kwaito misogynists.
“Of course I use my show to get a message out,” says Ntuli when I meet her for coffee just down the strip from the Y headquarters in Johannesburg, “Who doesn’t?”
It’s important for her that the radio environment normalises. She, like Burdett and Strydom, is perfectly aware that commercial radio is more often than not just looking for “the voice” – either sexy and husky or else one of the blokes, with a head for sports.
It’s also important to her that she puts out a healthy image.
“When I was growing up there was not a single woman on radio that made an impression on me until Shado Twala on Metro,” says Ntuli as we leave the coffee shop and head back to Y, where she is standing in for one of the boys. “One role model and that’s it.”
Michelle Constant, who developed her Girlie Show at 5fm before suddenly leaving the station, has similar memories.
“Apart from Esm Euverard, the only women’s voices you heard on local radio were in the dramas … The Mind of Tracy Dark!” she recalls with glee. Squad Cars.
Then, in September 1986, a black chick with dreads who really knew her music popped up on the country’s first black, urban music station Radio Metro.
“Shado Twala was my absolute idol. She was the first,” says Constant today.
Of course, when Twala was growing up it was even bleaker. “As kids we’d listen enthralled to LM Radio and Radio Zulu,” she recalls over the phone from Cape Town, “but there was not one woman up there until much later, in the mid-Seventies, in the mornings on Radio Zulu there was Winnie. We’d all come running for story time.”
Twala’s unceremonious dismissal from Metro after she “bumped up against management” in 1996 seemed to mark the start of a particularly bleak period for high-profile women in South African radio.
In 1997, for example, it seemed as if Charlene Smith had nudged aside the glass ceiling when she became the first-ever female station manager at SAfm. She lasted just a few months. Her ideas were rejected, petitions drawn up. It was useless – from both sides – to continue. Constant never managed to get the Girlie Show to settle at 5 and left. Jane Hicks and Amanda Forrow tumbled at 702.
But the tide seems to be turning. Radio is moving forward. Another 250 applications for community licenses have been submitted to the IBA. Several new female appointments – particularly Charlotte Mampane’s as CEO of SABCRadio – have bucked the trend.
Today Twala is again off air after resigning as DJ/music manager from Cape “smooth jazz” station P4 Radio (mainly because her jazz taste was on the rougher side). She’s wiser, not bitter. She’ll be more particular about what she wants if she were to work in radio again. Right now she’s happy editing South Africa’s first monthly jazz magazine.
And Constant, who makes infectious radio on SAfm’s Saturday Wired, is not dropping the idea of the Girlie Show. Instead she’s taking it to the Grahamstown festival, where Rhodes Music Radio hase offered her a slot. She’s moving on regardless.