Missing: Half the Story: Journalism as if Gender Matters

First

Introduction

A Gendered Lens: Seeing What You Want to See

KALPANA SHARMA

Journalists are journalists, but they are also rich or poor or middle class (probably the majority), fat or thin, lower or upper caste, men or women, left wing or right wing or neither. In other words, a journalist is not just a journalist. She or he carries baggage, from earlier socialisation, from present day influences and from realities about which they had no choice – such as gender or caste.

Objectivity is the ideal all journalists strive for. We believe that our training equips us to distance ourselves as we report on a whole range of situations and comment on everything from films to fires to terrorism. Yet, scratch any journalist and you will soon discover that this objectivity is precisely that – a desirable norm that cannot be easily attained. Only the more honest will admit that there can never be anything like objective journalism and that everything that we write is ultimately mediated by our own hidden or open biases. The choices we make in terms of what we include and what we leave out, the choices we make about what we emphasise, the choices we make about who we speak to and those we ignore, the choices we make about the stories we follow through and those we drop – all these are not dictated by some absolute or objective norms. Sometimes they are dictated by the orientation of our particular publication or media organisation. But more often than not, journalists subliminally make their own choices.

And thereby hangs the tale of gender-sensitivity. Why should we write an entire book on gender sensitive reporting? Why do journalists need to read this? Why are we suggesting that there is a slant that is needed, that would not make journalists more biased than they already are but would perhaps make them more balanced and would help them to tell that part of the story that they otherwise overlook?

This book is not intended to be a theoretical treatise on gender. It is not designed to frighten those men and women who run in the opposite direction if they see someone approaching them with a beady eye selling a cause. It has been put together by professionals, journalists who have been in the rough and tumble of the trade, who have reported and commented on a vast range of subjects for several decades, managed and edited independent publications and sections in mainstream media, headed news bureaus, taught in journalism schools and who have emerged from this experience with the belief that there is a missing angle to much of reporting.

This angle is that of gender, of understanding that because society mediates so much of what happens on the basis of gendered hierarchies, the media too needs to understand these when reporting. That if the media fails to understand this aspect of all our societies, not just Indian, then it misses out on at least one half of the story.

When Ammu Joseph and I researched the coverage of women’s issues in the media in the 1980s for our book Whose News? The media and women’s issues (Sage, 1994/2006), we could see why certain of the issues we studied received more attention from the media than others. It was clear to us that there was an unwritten hierarchy of news. If women’s concerns fitted into the hierarchy, then they received attention. Otherwise they were relegated to the features sections.

We had argued then that what was needed was not just more attention, and fairer coverage, of what might be called women’s issues, but the feminisation of news. We suggested that all news coverage had a women’s angle to it and this had to be integrated into news reporting. At that time, we articulated this specifically in terms of women’s perspective and not in the larger gender perspective that has emerged over time. So what we are suggesting here, as a step beyond what was suggested in Whose News? is the genderisation of journalism if you will, something that applies to reporting, editing and feature writing.

This book has been an exciting collaborative effort, facilitated by the wonders of email that allows instant communication even if we are based in different locations. And indeed, we were. While Laxmi Murthy was in Kathmandu, Rajashri Dasgupta lives in Kolkata, Ammu Joseph in Bangalore and Sameera Khan and I are in Mumbai. Even as the book was being conceived, five of us exchanged notes and points, based on our individual experiences of reporting, editing and teaching, and jointly arrived at its content. I might point out that this kind of collaboration between journalists, who are not deprived in the ego department, is fairly rare. We were able to do this because we have worked together for almost a decade to build and nurture a network of women journalists across India – the Network of Women in Media, India (www.nwmindia.org). This is also, probably, the first book of its kind by media professionals in India that specifically addresses the aspect of gender in journalistic writing.

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So where and when do you need a gendered lens? At all times, in all kinds of reporting, or only when you cover an issue relating to women alone? We suggest that a gendered lens allows you to gain deeper insight into all issues that we cover as journalists because events, policies, politics, business etc. impact men and women differently, just as they do the poor and the rich. Hence, understanding what determines the difference can help us to see dimensions of a story that would otherwise be overlooked.

Take a mundane subject like agriculture, covered routinely by those assigned the agriculture ministry at the Centre, or by reporters sent out to cover a drought or a massive crop failure. Can there be a gender dimension to this? Apparently, there can as women do over 60 per cent of agricultural work. Hence, policies and programmes, as well as disasters, have a specific impact on women that might be missed out if we assume, as most do, that the farmer is usually a man.

Or take business. The business pages of most major newspapers are monochromatic – they depict men in suits from the corporate sector, they carry stories about men as achievers – or sometimes as crooks – and they analyse business and the economy as if women do not exist. Yet millions of women are involved in a variety of formal and informal businesses – from home-based work to export, IT, engineering and more. If they are featured, they appear in the magazine sections or features sections as exceptions to the rule. Their work, their problems as businesswomen or as women professionals, the difficulties they face accessing finance, the discrimination they face at work, the jobs they are denied by virtue of being women or their achievements despite all that is ranged against them are rarely accorded the same status as that of men. In fact, women are largely invisible from business pages.

What contributes to this invisibility? It is not necessarily deliberate. It happens because journalists do not understand how patriarchal systems work, how they determine what women can and cannot do, and how patriarchy reduces the value of women’s work to such an extent that it appears to have no value at all. This deliberate downgrading of women’s work results in it not being acknowledged as significant, or important, and therefore ignored by the media.

It is precisely because we want to take away this curtain of invisibility that we believe journalists need to understand what is meant by terms like gender or patriarchy.

For this purpose, the book has been divided into three distinct sections. The first section attempts to put forward an understanding of the term gender. Are sex and gender one and the same thing? Are the terms interchangeable? Or do they have distinct and different meanings?

In chapter one of Section One, Ammu Joseph unpacks the terminology and explains in simple, non-academic language what is meant by gender. She explains that the term was adopted by feminists in the 1970s to distinguish between sex and gender, to describe the socially constructed differences between men and women, and to argue that many noticeable differences between women and men are socially produced and, therefore, changeable. In other words, you might be biologically male or female but it is society that determines the qualities that define a man or a woman.

Laxmi Murthy probes this further by asking whether biology alone defines who is a woman or a man. She takes off from the case of the 18-year-old South African sprinter, Caster Semenya, who clocked the fastest time in the 2009 World Championships in the 800 meters event. But her victory was dogged by controversy when questions were raised about whether she was taking performance-enhancing drugs or whether she was really a woman, as she did not fit the usual image of a woman. Murthy asks: how is the gender of a person determined? She looks at the entire range of issues that have now come out in the open about the biological determination of gender including the many genders, if you like, that cannot be easily classified into the two categories of male and female. Journalists often do not attempt to understand this world of the emerging other, as Murthy terms it, and as a result constantly make mistakes in language and representation about this group of people. But the very existence of these other genders brings into question the usefulness of sticking to the dominant binaries of male and female in classifying gender. Mainstream media is now being compelled to address these issues as transgender and intersex people organise and make their voices heard in addition to gay and lesbian communities that have already become fairly vocal.

To further understand the gender dimension of issues that journalists report, we also need to know what is patriarchy – another term not easily understood – and how it works as gender differences are rooted in the presence of patriarchy in our societies. Ammu Joseph explains this by also looking at history, or herstory, and traces briefly how men and women’s roles came to be defined and the resulting subordination of women to men, something that has continued to the present day. She also points out that feminists have opposed patriarchy, not men, and that the system of patriarchy produces a whole web of customs, norms and mechanisms… to deprive women of autonomy, free movement and economic independence, and to minimise any chances of rebellion. A basic understanding of how patriarchy works helps to put in perspective developments that otherwise seems uni-dimensional.

Section One also includes a chapter on the Indian women’s movement, or movements. As Ammu Joseph points out, women’s movements worldwide are probably the most important social movements of the 20th century. In India, women’s involvement in social and political struggles began with their participation in the national movement fighting for Indian independence from British colonial rule. The growth of women’s movements since Independence is a fascinating story of struggle and engagement, one that is essential for us to know and understand if we want to report on issues that touch on women’s status, their rights and their perspectives. In the last 62 years, women’s groups – both autonomous and linked to political parties – have been instrumental in bringing about changes in the law, fighting for land rights, for environmental conservation and many more issues. Stereotyping or under-reporting of these struggles by the media has meant that people have not appreciated the full scope and diversity of the different struggles led by women in India.

Anyone wanting to read more on any of these theoretical constructs such as gender and patriarchy or feminism and the women’s movement will find plenty of useful references and footnotes in these chapters. Journalists often do not have the time to do painstaking research before writing an article when we are staring at a deadline. But there is nothing to stop us from taking time to delve deeper into some of these issues as and when we do get the time. Constant research and reading are an integral part of improving our skills as journalists, something we forget these days with instant answers provided by Google Search or Wikipedia.

This section concludes with a practical chapter by Laxmi Murthy containing tips for journalists who do want to integrate the gender perspective in their reporting. Again, some of this might seem obvious. Or some would argue that addressing all people as men should not be considered all that important and that men is a generic term that includes men and women. But Murthy illustrates how from that premise, a whole host of terms are automatically presumed to be referring to men when, in fact, they could mean women or men. With women now entering almost every profession, it is time we learn to change the language we use and find a way to make gender-neutral language the norm. It is really not that difficult or complicated.

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Does gender-sensitivity apply only to feature writing? Can it apply to the way news is covered, to the sense conveyed in headlines, to the choice of photographs used, to what news story is followed through and which is dropped, to the choice of people quoted in stories? We believe that such a perspective is not a stressful, artificial add-on, something that you do only if you have a boss who insists, or if as a student you are asked to do an exercise that incorporates gender-sensitivity. Our own experience over several decades as journalists has taught us that this is how you can be a more effective, credible and serious journalist.

To illustrate this further we have Section Two of the book that looks specifically at areas that journalists have to cover – such as sexual assault including rape and molestation cases, environmental issues such as the impact of deforestation or climate change. How does one cover a subject like sanitation by incorporating a gender angle, is there something different about the way we look at health from this angle and do disasters and conflicts impact men and women in the same way? Also is there more to gender in a business story or a political story than mentioning the exceptional women who are now featured all the time in the media? These are questions we asked as we thought of some of these subjects and explored how they could be covered in greater depth if the additional factor of gender was woven in.

The one issue in which women are central and that always receives a great deal of attention is that of sexual assault. But the attention of the media is selective. When the victim or victims are of a certain class, there are campaigns, articles, analyses of the law and continuous follow up. When the victims are tribal or poor women, there is a mention but the issue is forgotten.

However, the inordinate attention that women of the middle and upper classes get when they are the victims is not always in their favour. As Sameera Khan points out in her chapter, the challenge before the media is growing as crimes against women increase. In India, police records show that a woman is molested every 26 minutes; a rape occurs every 34 minutes; sexual harassment takes place every 42 minutes; a woman is kidnapped every 43 minutes; and every 93 minutes, a woman is killed, she writes. Yet, in its coverage of some of these events, the media tends to victimise the victim through the use of language, through innuendo, through giving equal space, or sometimes more, to her detractors while knowing that she is not a position to speak out.

The chapter on sexual assault also illustrates how apart from the obvious gender bias, a class bias dominates the choice of stories that the media chooses to feature. The stories the media chooses to focus on, writes Sameera Khan, are of people like us. Some of them are diligently followed. Yet by chasing individual stories, the media overlooks the larger issue of violence by not indicating the extent to which women live under the sword of constant sexual violence, within and outside their homes.

So what norms should govern the coverage of sexual violence in the media so that victims are not persecuted? Gender sensitivity would ensure that journalists understand the basis of much of the violence – that it is not lust as is often made out but power. It is the power that men know they can assert on women by using violence that is at the core of such actions. And ultimately it is women’s powerlessness in a society that doubts the survivor of violence that makes it virtually impossible for them to seek justice.

The environment in India is also facing another kind of violence, one that fails to respect nature, the laws of sustainability and the survival needs of those who depend on natural resources. As a result, forests are being cut to make way for roads and highways, for power stations and dams, for urban settlements and for mines. Why do we need to conserve these forests? They are essential for soil conservation, for absorbing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is contributing to climate change, for preserving the biodiversity of flora and fauna, for ensuring the rainwater does not just run off but seeps into the soil and replenishes underground aquifers, etc. But above all, the story of India’s depleting forest cover is a story of the people whose lives are being denuded and destroyed, the poor, the tribals and women. In most parts of India, women fetch the fuel with which their cooking stoves are lit. Women end up doing this work precisely because of the gender division of labour that deems this as a woman’s task. Thus a receding forest will affect women more than anyone else for it will increase their workload as they walk further in search of fuel.

The absence of sources of fuel also means that food is not cooked or only cooked once a day in many poor households. The main responsibility for cooking and feeding the family rests on the woman’s shoulders. The resultant malnutrition or under-nutrition hits women the hardest as by tradition they eat least and last. These undernourished women then give birth to low birth weight babies who cannot survive. Many of these women also cannot survive the stress of pregnancy and die during childbirth, which explains the high level of maternal mortality in India.

Thus, felling a tree creates ripples that go far beyond its immediate surroundings. Understandably, not all these aspects can come into a story. But if we as journalists comprehend the linkages, we will find stories all around us, our eyes will open up to angles that we have never noticed before, and we will be able to bring alive what we write through the real life experiences of people whose problems are compounded because of existing and entrenched societal norms.

Another clear example of a gender dimension is a natural disaster. The 2004 Asian tsunami devastated parts of several countries and killed thousands of people. India got away relatively lightly. Yet, overall, when the numbers were crunched of the dead and the injured, one fact came through – that more women were killed and injured than men. An analysis of why this happened went to the heart of the way society determines what women and men do, what women and men wear, and how women and men respond in a crisis. Ammu Joseph, in her chapter on covering disasters and conflicts highlights these facts.

Health reporting in India has often been reduced to either covering epidemics – and usually reporting what is officially set out without independent investigation – or uncritically writing about new products and drugs pushed by the pharmaceutical industry. Yet the gender perspective is absolutely central to balanced reporting on health. Women have been the biggest targets of the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to all manner of medications including contraceptives. The bogey of the population bomb has justified experimentation with drugs to control women’s fertility. The biggest horror stories have been the kind of problems women have faced when administrated invasive contraceptives without being informed or warned about side effects.

Reporting on such an issue should expose not just women’s lack of agency in refusing to use such drugs, but also the collusion that often takes place between government agencies pushing such population control programmes and drug companies. But more often than not, new contraceptives introduced in the market are written about uncritically, clinical trials go unreported or barely reported, and the stories of thousands of women who are afraid to speak out about the ill effects of such drug pushing strategies remain untold. Rajashri Dasgupta emphasises in her chapter that a gender perspective while covering health would ensure that reporters ask questions about the contra-effects of drugs on those who are receiving them, that they find out whether the concerned women have access to health care, and that they have given their informed consent if they are part of a clinical trial.

While epidemics or pandemics, like the recent H1N1 (or swine flu) receive considerable media coverage – much of it ill-informed and contributing to panic – little is written about a much more insidious health disaster, that of maternal mortality. India has a maternal mortality rate comparable to some countries in sub-Saharan Africa even as it projects itself as an emerging economic power. The real story about this shameful statistic is not just the absence of a good public health system and strategy but the gendered reality that determines women’s health in this country. Millions of women are malnourished; they seek out health intervention only when they are desperate always deferring to the men and children in their families, and they have no control over their sexuality. The high maternal mortality rate is not just a statistic; it is the story of the lives of these women.

Looking at the average business page in any newspaper would make one assume that there are no women engaged in making money, running their own businesses or industries. The only women who feature on these pages are the exceptions, those who have risen to the top of the corporate world. Yet, in reality, millions of women work out of their homes, in small sweat shops, are employed as domestics, work in offices and in factories, run small and big businesses, work as agricultural labourers, are heads of households etc. This world of business and industry is largely invisible in the media.

Similarly, political coverage features exceptions but ignores the millions of women involved in politics at the grassroots, in panchayats and nagarpalikas, in political struggles for land, for the right to information, against displacement etc. Can routine political coverage keep in mind a gender perspective that ensures that women’s voices are also heard and that all women in politics are not typecast as the betis, bahus and behenjis of male politicians?

There are many other areas of news coverage that we have not included in this book. One obvious gendered section of newspapers, for instance, is the Sport section and it could certainly do with a dose of gender sensitivity. Survey a week of Sport in any newspaper and you will find hardly a mention of any sports played by women. Does this mean women do not play sports? As in politics or business, sportswomen find a mention only if they do something exceptional – like winning an Olympic gold medal. Or if they become the subject of a controversy, such as Caster Semenya, where your status as a woman is questioned. Or they are exceptionally good looking like Anna Kournikova, the Russian tennis player who hardly ever won in any major tennis tournament and yet got columns of coverage on sports pages around the world because of her stunning looks. Or if someone is the girlfriend of a well-known male sportsman. So women do feature on all sports pages, but usually only when they fall into one of these categories and increasingly the latter. Women’s bodies are always useful for attracting male eyeballs. But women’s sports? It is virtually invisible.

Section three is a compendium of articles that illustrate what we have been saying. These can provide a handy reference to journalists who set out to take this perspective seriously and keep it hovering constantly as they bash away at their keyboards on a whole range of stories and features.

One clarification before I conclude. The examples given from different newspapers in the various chapters are based on a random selection and not on any kind of systematic survey of the media and its coverage of these issues. The writers have used the examples that best illustrate the points they are making. We felt we should indicate this so that it does not seem that we are picking on one newspaper or media group. We are not.

And finally, this book would not have been possible without Population First, an organisation that has tried to enhance awareness of gender-sensitivity through its Laadli Media Awards that recognise media persons who incorporate the gender perspective in their writing, films and advertisements. When Population First approached me, we initially talked of putting together a compendium of writing that illustrated gender-sensitivity. But from there the conversation progressed to the idea of a book that could become a handbook for future journalists, and for those already in the profession, to understand more fully what is meant by that term. Population First left it to me to develop the framework and contents of this book. So I take full responsibility for the contents and remain grateful for the opportunity to create something which, I hope, will be of value to future generations of journalists.

Section One

Understanding Gender

This section looks at terms like gender, patriarchy and feminism and unpacks them so that they can be understood. It also unravels the many new terms that now appear in the media but are often not fully understood by journalists, such as transgender, transsexual and intersex. With the emerging other gender becoming more vocal, visible and organised, journalists need to know the difference between all these terms, their precise definitions and how to write about these communities in a way that is sensitive and accurate.

SECTION ONE

Understanding Gender

This section looks at terms like gender, patriarchy and feminism and unpacks them so that they can be understood. It also unravels the many new terms that now appear in the media but are often not fully understood by journalists, such as transgender, transsexual and intersex. With the emerging other gender becoming more vocal, visible and organised, journalists need to know the difference between all these terms, their precise definitions and how to write about these communities in a way that is sensitive and accurate.

The Battle of the Sexes and Other Myths

AMMU JOSEPH

In a country that contributes to more than 10 per cent of suicides across the world, with well over 100,000 people committing suicide every year and the steadily rising suicide rate reaching 10.8 (per 100,000 of population) in 2007, ¹ it is not surprising that suicides are reported with depressing regularity in the media. However, it is remarkable that few stories go beyond the routine crime beat report variously headlined, Girl takes own life, Apathy drives mum to suicide, Another techie commits suicide, Woman hangs self.

Of course, suicides connected to a political cause or the extreme hero worship of a public figure often make it to the front pages of newspapers and prime time on television. Occasionally a spate of student suicides or a sensational case – like the11-year-old reality TV star who committed suicide in Mumbai in January 2010 – or even (less often) a series of suicides by farmers lead to some probing of possible contributory factors and some discussion on ways to deal with the problem.

However, unlike in the late 1970s, when an apparent rash of suicides or kitchen accidents claiming a large number of young women’s lives prompted action (including investigation by the media) that uncovered the phenomenon of bride-burning or dowry deaths, suicides today seem to be viewed and portrayed as more or less gender-neutral. Yet there is evidence that at least some of the reported differences between suicides by men and women could be gender-related.

More men than women seem to commit suicide in India, although there is not much difference between the number of boys and girls under 14 ending their own lives. According to figures published by the National Crimes Records Bureau (NCRB), the overall male:female ratio of adult suicide victims was 65:35 in 2007 (the corresponding boy:girl ratio was 48:52).²

The NCRB has observed that most male suicides can be attributed to social and economic causes while emotional and personal causes tend to drive female suicide. Among the listed causes for suicide in its 2007 report,³ those accounting for substantially more male deaths were, reportedly, bankruptcy or sudden change in economic status, professional/career problems, unemployment, poverty, property disputes, failure in examinations, social disrepute, ideological causes/hero worship, family problems, illness and drug abuse/addiction. The proportion of reported female deaths by suicide was considerably higher under causes like dowry dispute (98.8 per cent), illegitimate pregnancy (91.1per cent), barrenness/not having children (70.9 per cent), divorce (61.2 per cent), physical abuse (60.3 per cent), cancellation/non-settlement of marriage (58.0 per cent) and suspected/illicit relations