Women empowerment and the media

Staff Reporter
Rieta Rahman Although, mainstreaming women in national life is a coveted agenda, the media in Bangladesh are still conquered by male. Men occupy positions, and at all levels. Yet a recent trend of more women making a career out of journalism also indicates that the profession requires a serious gender balance in the age of information revolution. What is particularly encouraging is that they are proving their worth in this challenging profession. Although media organizations are increasingly opening up to them, an ideal gender balance is yet to be reached. The lack of security impedes the full participation of women in this profession. The threats that journalists working in certain sensitive areas face - when exposed - only dampen the enthusiasm of media women to take up more challenging journalistic reporting and investigations. Yet some have already stood up to the challenges and one may appreciate their very successful presence in the electronic media. The difference in the success of women in the electronic media as opposed to print is due to the fact that the reporters of the TV channels are always accompanied by a cameraman and vehicle, but a reporter working for newspapers is unaccompanied -- no vehicle, no company -- they thus hesitate to be on their own. "When I try to interview someone during my assignments, I find them not cooperative in most cases… rather they discourage me for taking up reporting as a career….. I think it is also the attitude that discourages women", said Eline Anjum one of two women reporters working for the daily New Age. One would agree with her, media are not yet tailored to ensure protection to women considering also the added difficulty of access to information. Bangla papers, however, have more women reporters working for them than the English dailies. Their presence in all spot coverage is a heartening phenomenon. Moreover, women in media rarely known to have risen to the position of decision-making, except for a few examples. Among all the leading dailies, gender issues are rarely addressed. However, as the issue crop up, the assignments are done instantaneously without having a guideline or briefing. Perhaps women issues owe their precarious treatment by the media, to the aloofness or bias of the decision-makers with the issues. The few women reporters, who have overcome their inhibitions, while working on challenging beats, resolve their problems with their colleagues. The male colleagues, albeit, are usually sympathetic to their female equals. The assignment on gender issues in newspapers is usually given to female journalists if the organization has any in the team. It is quite common that women journalists lose interests in the beat and soon skepticism takes over, mostly due to realization that neither can they promote the issue nor themselves. The occasional attention to women's issues suffers due to the absence of appropriate policy guidelines. During various international Days like Women's Day etc., the issues get an occasional highlight in the media. The whole perspective could have been different if more women were involved in the decision-making panel. Drawing attention of the policymakers to the praxis that women's empowerment is strongly connected with development issues could have been easier. The pressing poverty, the absence of basic requirements for the general public, the sustainability of all development are interconnected with gender empowerment. If we take lessons from the developed world what we see is an open horizon for equal opportunity. The retarding factors- dropping gender participation- have barely been addressed in the configuration of the media. All newcomers, for that matter, require training, some in the form of apprenticeship, for which there is no fix curriculum or guideline to follow. Only few available programmes are the occasional donor sponsored training programmes of the press institutes, besides the university offered courses. Gender equality in print media can effectively help lower disparity in terms of gender empowerment. Despite the recent trend, many newspapers still have a lower proportion of women journalists. Some newspapers have no female journalist in their office at all. One of the leading English dailies in Dhaka has only two lady reporters as opposed to twenty-five male and fifteen women in the house of one hundred working journalists. In another house, except for some female presence in the computer section, there is no woman journalist. In most of the Bangla dailies, of course, women are either working in the feature sections or at the desks. They prefer feature or desk to reporting, essentially because reporting involves enormous amount of risk and hassles during the assignments, and also requires working till late. Actually in most cases the ratio of women to men is regrettably low. The situation is undeniably detrimental especially considering women's place as political leaders and front-liner in policy making. Yet penalty of the social taboos and conservative values, confining women within the four walls, are gradually phasing out minimizing the dredging disparity of gender balance also in media. The city women are increasingly inclined towards journalism as a career. Yet the in-house environment in the media still requires being more women friendly in terms of its amenities and approaches. Women journalists, nonetheless, are generally employed here without any prior advertisement and the job is offered usually through personal contacts. Qualified journalists can easily lose their jobs and remain jobless for very long. Another trend observed in recent years is that media employers look for new hands rather than experienced ones, only to avoid paying more (wage board). The new hands are only paid a provisional amount as apprentice and by the time she qualifies to get wage board (if she can survive the time) it has already been two to three years. On the contrary, competence in

19 June, 2013 Wednesday

Women empowerment and the media