More than 100 Indian women journalists have formed a "Network of Women in Media - India" in order to confront media commercialization and globalization and a range of issues related to women's inequality in India's news industries. The Network is the result of the three-day workshop, held in New Delhi, January 28-30.
Bangalore-based journalist Ammu Joseph, author of Whose News? and Women in Journalism: Making News, coordinated the event for Voices, a non-governmental women's organization in India. Plans for the three-day event began more than a year ago after Voices' members defined a series of persistent problems related to India's news industry.
With regards to the working conditions for female journalists, some of the concerns identified by the network are sexual harassment and a lack of a gender perspective in news of war and militarism. In addition, organizers said they were concerned about the impact on women's journalists as a result of restructuring in India's media industries.
The issues raised by the Network are by no means peculiar to India's news industry. Paris-based feminist media researcher Margaret Gallagher gave a keynote to end the three-day conference in which she pointed out similar gender problems in other nations. Gallagher said that although women are entering media industries in larger numbers in almost all regions of the world, women still have very little real decision-making power.
Quoting a study by Bettina Peters, International Federation of Journalists, for Nieman Reports (2001), Gallagher noted that fewer than 3% of senior media executives and decision makers in the media around the world are female. That indicates we need to increase numbers of women in top posts, she said.
Gallagher added: "But in parallel with this we need to work at the level of media policy, ethics and accountability. We need alternative media spaces where overlooked stories by and about women can flourish. We need wide-scale programmes of media education. We need constructive dialogue between media professionals, researchers and activists. And we need critical self-reflection on the part of media practitioners themselves."
Network members have adopted an 11-point statement outlining issues they will address, including globalization's impact on social and gender justice, commercialization of the media, deteriorating work conditions for women in newsrooms, decline of media accountability, and standards of professional ethics and behavior.
Voices will publish the conference proceedings in a special future issue of the group's journal, Voices for Change. The group's website is www.voicesforall.org.
|
