The highly romanticised notion of what a journalist’s work is all about is responsible for the lack of representation of women in the media
Khadija Magardie
The Human Rights Commission’s (HRC) hearings into racism in the media produced an interesting, though not entirely novel offshoot. Both participants and prominent media persons testifying at the hearings called for a similar inquiry into the position of women in the press.
The issue is two-fold. There is the need to address “human resource inequity” regarding the numbers of and levels at which women enter media.
Then there is the way in which the media actually portrays women, and how this enforces negative stereotypes of women as nothing more than sex objects, victims, un- opinionated housewives, and so forth.
Looking at the demographic make-up of the electronic and print media does indeed reflect a less than rosy picture of the degree to which women have advanced.
But it is the second part that is most interesting – because it essentially begs the question – namely, to what extent this same stereotyping of women as brainless sex objects affects women actually joining the media.
The notion of the journalist as a jet- setting glamour-girl; the WKRP In Cincinatti babe of yore, is defining the parameters according to which women themselves choose a career in the media.
A survey of women studying journalism at a technikon or university would likely (with few exceptions) find young women, like those who send in their demo tapes by the thousand to the SABC, who say they want to become a journalist. And when asked to elaborate, they would most likely say they want to be a continuity announcer or newsreader.
The idea of a perfectly made-up, “not-a- hair-out-of-place” CNN-style female correspondent dodging mortar-shells in the trenches of Bosnia is what seems to appeal to women looking for a career in the media.
To trace the reasoning behind young women seeing journalism as a career option that comes with the perks of pretty clothing and a smiling face, one need look no further than the public broadcaster. The SABC, for instance, has often been criticised as the first home to the “beauty-drain”. Given that the corporation counts no fewer than four former Miss South Africas as regular continuity announcers in the past seven years, is it then any wonder that journalism comes to be associated with the unquestioning need to look good, instead of to write well?
The corporation may argue that its operation is both glamour and news – but this does not change the widely held idea that continuity announcers and newsreaders are “journalists”, and vice versa. To be fair, the SABC is not alone – it is an international trend to have “pretty young things” read the news. To compile the bulletins is, of course, another story.
It is seldom that women are bulletin compilers, or producers, and even if so, the behind the scenes nature of it all dictates that the pretty newsreader is the “public face” of the media. Hence the idea.
Similarly, the power-suited pretty face sitting behind a desk editing Cosmopolitan contributes towards what women think the print media is all about.
Spending endless hours on the telephone chasing a representative from the Ministry of Home Affairs, or losing sleep over deadlines, are often the last thing on their minds.
Anyone who has been in the profession knows that journalism is as far from this idea as Elle is from Business Day, but the bottom line is that the image persists. And it is this flawed idea that certain media organisations have, unfortunately, cottoned on to, and taken full advantage of.
Last year, Unesco commissioned the Graduate School on Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Natal to do research on affirmative action in the media,with a particular focus on the position of women. Not surprisingly, as its predecessors found, the survey indicated that by and large, affirmative action had failed women in the newsroom.
Among other things, it found that women are seldom adequately trained to take up leadership positions in middle and upper management; that women are poorly represented in the area of skilled labour (journalists fall within this category); and that, interestingly, there appears to be gender-based allocations of assignments within the newsrooms. Many of the interviewees in the survey complained that many media organisations stacked upper management with “token women”, in order to fulfil quotas.
All of these are serious issues, which need to be addressed, because media organisations, like other companies, are obliged to redress imbalances in relation to race and gender, in terms of the Employment Equity Act.
But what is of a more pressing concern is the need to address the way in which stereotyped images of women which predominate in the media, feed the way in which newsrooms themselves are stacked.
In her presentation to the commission, an influential black female journalist questioned the degree to which black editors in the country have taken steps towards “improving the lot” of black woman journalists within their respective organisations. It is also a question not without bitter irony, since those who lament racial victimisation are those that have done the least to advance women within their newsrooms.
The print media is guilty of pigeon- holing women journalists and women’s issues, by allocating certain sections, and even pull-out supplements, to them – thereby enforcing the idea that there are “women issues”, and “important issues”.
One prominent newspaper, for instance, with a predominantly black readership, has a special section on women every week. But a mere perusal through the contents of the supplement indicates that its sphere of interest, and indeed that of its almost entirely female staff, is confined to typically “woman beats” – beauty, fashion, and the occasional domestic violence story. Little if any space is devoted to substantial issues affecting women in this country.
What also came out of the HRC hearings was a request for the advertising industry to be called to account for its sexist stereotyping of women. A noble gesture, but it only makes sense when accompanied by those purveyors of all that is “feminine”, the glamour magazines, which according to many surveys, are read more by women than any newspaper.
There are no quick-fix solutions. After all, certain industries are built on image, and one guesses it would do little for audience ratings to have a middle-aged, wrinkled woman reporting live from Parliament. It would do a similar disservice for some newspapers to devote more time to explaining the Maintenance Act, and less to Naomi Campbell’s latest love affair. One has to be realistic. Yet what remains clear is that women who are seriously considering the media as a career option need to be realistically informed about what it is really all about. The mixed signals being sent out by media houses, who either have woman reporters do little other than follow socialites around, or broadcasters who hire newsreaders on the basis of model- like attributes, are part of the problem.
But if women themselves like the idea of their perfectly coiffed images beaming into living rooms, and don’t think highly of sitting behind a desk making mundane phone calls, and having boring lunches with ministers to get information, they can only blame themselves.