MEDIA-PERU: Women Outnumber, But Men Have the Power

• by Blanca Rosales (lima)
• Thursday, March 26, 2009
• Inter Press Service

But the great majority of decision-making posts in the print and broadcast media continue to be held by men.

'We have to face the facts: women have numerical superiority in the newsrooms, but they do not call the shots,' Zuliana Laínez, the secretary general of the National Association of Journalists (ANP), told IPS at the Third National Meeting of Women Journalists, held in Lima earlier this month.

'As is also the case in countries as different as Russia or Sweden, women in Peru are the labour force of journalism, but they don't get to be in charge,' she said.

No commercial Peruvian newspaper is headed by a woman. Only magazines focusing on women's issues or dealing primarily with entertainment and show business have women editors-in-chief.

Just three out of the 49 radio stations belonging to the National Radio Coordination Committee (CNR), an association of community stations, have women directors, and women head only a handful of the radio programmes broadcast nationwide.

In television, women head only two national news programmes, one of which airs on Sundays. However, women are almost always selected to present the news programmes and read the news on the radio, usually teamed up with a man.

There are currently no detailed statistics on the proportions of men and women working as journalists in Peru. But the non-governmental organisation Calandria says that dramatic changes have occurred since 1997, when it released an in-depth report on gender and the labour market in the media.

Twelve years ago their study, 'Comunicadoras: Competencias por la Igualdad' (Women Communicators: The Potential for Equality), reported that 31 percent of journalists employed by newspapers were women. In television, the proportion was 26.8 percent.

Rosa María Alfaro, the author of the study, said that the increasing presence of women in newsrooms and in the student body graduating every year from the 34 university departments of communication or journalism studies in Peru is in stark contradiction with the proportion of women in this profession who are editors, producers, executives or editors-in-chief.

Nowadays, as in 1997, 'there is an imbalance between the public perception of women's participation in the media and their real clout in the communications industry,' Alfaro, who is coordinating a new Latin American study on Gender and the Media that is in its initial stages, told IPS.

Calandria, founded in 1984, is an association of social networks promoting gender equality in communication as a means of boosting women's leadership in order to improve governance.

UNIVERSAL GLASS CEILING

The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) studies the representation of women in the media from a gender perspective every five years. It is organised by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), a London-based ecumenical professional organisation that works with faith-based and secular partners to promote communication rights for social change.

The most recent GMMP study, released in 2005 and titled 'Who Makes the News?', reported that 57 percent of television presenters were women, but only 29 percent of television news was written by women.

Meanwhile, only 32 percent of so-called 'hard' news was written or covered by women, who were more often found reporting on 'soft' subjects, such as social issues, the family, or arts and 'living.' Up to 40 percent of 'soft' stories were covered by women. In 2002 a report by the Canadian Newspaper Association (CNA) said that women held only eight percent of editor-in-chief desks, and were 12 percent of editors. The Eastern Africa Journalists Association (EAJA) said in 2008 that less than 20 percent of editorial positions in the region were occupied by women.

Laínez linked these facts with the situation in Latin America, where according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), 27.3 percent of journalists are women - a tiny minority of whom will ever attain a top decision-making position.

What must be done to break this spell that seems to have newsrooms in thrall? The IFJ has an answer to this question, raised at the Meeting of Women Journalists in Peru: unions and professional associations must act with determination to increase the number of women on decision-making bodies in the media.

The IFJ handbook for journalists, 'Getting the Balance Right: Gender Equality in Journalism,' released this month, emphasises the need to address how women are treated in the workplace, and how they treat each other, appealing for gender solidarity.

This is the only way to build the kind of women's leadership within the media that will open doors and opportunities to ever better qualified women, the handbook says.

BATTLING PREJUDICE

Enith Fasanando, the director of a radio programme in Tarapoto, a city in Peru’s northern jungle region, told IPS about a personal experience that many women journalists can identify with.

'It was difficult to head a team of five men and give them directions, because they would not take orders from a woman. For instance, when a colleague and I were presenting the news, he would make me look bad or belittle my opinions,' she said.

'It is very hurtful to experience discrimination from someone in your own profession, who refuses to value you as you deserve just because you're a woman, when you have earned your position by your own efforts,' she said. Fasanando had to take up the problem with the (male) owner of the radio station in order to solve it.

Zenaida Solís, one of the most popular journalists in the country, who for three decades was in the public eye on a daily basis on television and radio, told IPS that she had to rebel against being pigeonholed in the role of 'pretty girl.'

When she got into television, men were in charge of the news and the most important interviews, but gradually she managed to introduce her commentary and opinions, creating a unique style which she maintained 'without betraying my conscience.'

Eventually Solís became responsible for her own daily radio programme for 15 years, which she left only for short periods to raise her children, as she worked long and exhausting hours. Politicians, businesspeople and opinion leaders appeared live on her call-in show.

'I had problems with all the media owners I have ever worked with,' said Solís, who is convinced that confrontation comes with the profession for women journalists. Members of the business community tried to avoid her harder than politicians did, 'but none of them got an easy interview,' she said.

In her view, it is ultimately economic power that determines the continuation or not of a journalistic project and its team. Owners of the traditional media always try to build relationships with journalists in line with their financial interests, 'and sometimes they achieve that, especially with the younger professionals,' she said.

'So if you are honest and behave with integrity, and on top of that you're a woman, the time comes when you have to leave, and so you go,' she concluded.

EQUAL JOBS, UNEQUAL PAY

Do women enjoy equal conditions in journalism? Fasanando did not hesitate to reply: 'No. We do our work out of commitment to the profession, but there are all kinds of obstacles, pay being the first and foremost.'

'My colleague, who had the same responsibilities as I did, was earning three times as much, even though it was I who took full responsibility in front of the audience,' she said.

Solís told an anecdote about the owner of a publication who paid men more because he insisted that 'men are the breadwinners,' and did not hire many women because 'they only do good work until they fall in love.'

For the same level of responsibility, women continue to be paid less than men. At the same time, since many women take part-time or freelance work to fit in with family responsibilities, women are more vulnerable in terms of job security, promotions and legal status, participants at the Meeting of Women Journalists said.

But there is apparently an oasis of gender equity in journalism unions. 'There are two women who are union leaders and the rest are men, but we work together as equals, promoting the same goals, and they push for our demands,' Fasanando said.

WOMEN VICTIMS REPRODUCE STEREOTYPES

The Meeting of Women Journalists in Lima also addressed the problem of victims as victimisers, as in the case of women who suffer from discrimination and sexist stereotypes in newsrooms and through the media, and then tend to reproduce such discrimination in their work as reporters.

Women who are victims of discrimination in their lives and professions may internalise, repeat and impose 'machista' or sexist perceptions of women, and portray them as objects from the newsroom, said the 1997 Calandria study, every detail of which fits many cases today, women journalists say.

It is as though some women journalists agree to 'continue in their role as dish washers, but this time in public,' said a participant at the meeting.

The so-called women's publications, a greater proportion of which are run by women, were identified as those most likely to portray women as objects and reproduce the most anachronistic and machista clichés of women's roles: 'the glamorous sex kitten, the sainted mother, the devious witch, the hard-faced corporate and political climber,' as listed in the IFJ handbook.

This kind of stereotypes that limit the power of women in society were condemned in the declaration adopted at the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

In its Platform for Action, the Beijing Conference called on media owners and professionals to develop regulatory mechanisms that promote more positive, accurate, balanced and diverse portrayals of women by the media.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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