SOUTH AFRICA: News Reports Still Not Gender Sensitive-Gender Links

Media in Southern Africa still has a long way to go towards gender sensitive reporting in newsrooms, a study by Gender Links has revealed.

Most Southern African media houses in 14 countries had very few reports on gender based violence from mid October to mid November in 2009 in a study carried out during that period. A media progress study and gender in media education audit workshop by Gender Links in Gaborone yesterday also revealed that Botswana remained in the lower ranks of most categories of the study.

Locally, a total of 879 news items from seven local media houses were analysed. The media houses were Daily News, Sunday Standard, The Voice, Mmegi, BTV, Radio Botswana and Yarona FM. The study showed that during the month of study, only five percent of stories were gender based violence stories while the rest did not hint on violence despite escalating records of violence cases on a daily basis. It was revealed that local media houses do not approach women as their news sources while men made 80 percent of the sources that were quoted in the stories. Again, the problem is regional where women made only 19 percent of sources with men making 81 percent. However, the study did not reveal why this is the case both locally and regionally. The study also states that female journalists are in most cases the group that would quote female sources compared to male journalists. It has also been revealed that not enough has been done to sensitise media graduates on issues of gender since it is not formally included in the curriculum review. It was also revealed that there are institutional mechanisms to ensure gender is mainstreamed while there is actually no policy that guide reporting on gender issues.

On the other hand, the study revealed that journalism is still a profession that does not keep a lot of women despite observations that there are more female than male media students in training institutions. The study revealed that in Botswana only 46 percent of media students are male while 54 of them are female. It was revealed that in Botswana women make up only 42 percent of staff in media houses and that only 30 percent of them are managers. Regionally, female students make 61 percent of the population while males make only 39 percent. However, it is not understood what happens with females after training since they cannot be found in media houses and management positions.

However, the landscape changes in broadcasting where females are the regular presenters both locally and regionally.

Still yesterday, Press Council of Botswana adopted a gender code of ethics, which would be mainly to govern the conduct and practice of all media practitioners, media owners, publishers and institutions that are members of the council. Media houses were able to evaluate the draft of the code of ethics, and yesterday agreed on adopting the policy even though the final copy would still have to be drawn.