Women are Moving Up in the Indian Media But Not Fast Enough

How empowered is the Indian woman journalist?

I am a journalist, and the newsroom I work in is dominated by women like me and we feel empowered. But are things really equal for women in the Indian media? Not quite.

Clear Gender Imbalance

There’s a clear gender imbalance in the number of contributors to the press, as made clear by a Newslaundry review of four leading Indian English newspapers. Of the 8,681 articles reviewed, 73 percent were written by men. This means that for every piece written by a woman, three were written by men.

A UNESCO report on women journalists says that even today, women in the media account only for 24% of all opinion-makers.

But if you looked at absolute number of employees, the imbalance is not as skewed. Seema Chisti, Resident Editor of The Indian Express in New Delhi  believes that the media is one of the few industries in India where women can outnumber men, at least in metro dailies, websites and TV channels. That doesn’t mean however that these women are making it to the top.

According to a report by the International Women’s Media Foundation, women account for only 13% of all senior managers in the media in Asia and Oceania. In South Africa however, that number is skewed the other way, with 79.5% women in senior management positions.

Soft News for Women, Hard News for Men?

Though not so prevalent in television these days, women have often been asked by editors to focus on “soft stories”. They are asked to write features, and report on issues that men can’t – or perhaps don’t want to cover – for instance, gender, fashion, lifestyle, health and education.

Reporting on hard stories like terrorism or crime is more difficult to break into. Still, even here the glass ceiling has been breached.

Boots on the ground

Dhanya Rajendran, Managing Editor of The News Minute says that reporting is in fact easy for a woman. Rajendran says that her experience as a reporter in southern India has been better than it would have been had she been a man. She says that even in tense, crowded situations in villages in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, people have been better behaved with a woman journalist.

But the job is needless to say, not without challenges.

Crime Stories? Gritty Business

Sameeksha Uniyal, who worked as a crime reporter for the channel TV9 left her job in a year.

My job of a crime reporter was challenging. The cops don’t take you seriously.
– Sameeksha Uniyal, ex-Crime Reporter, TV9

Cops are not the only ones who don’t take a woman reporter seriously.

“Smile and Get the Story”

A sprightly “hard-news type” reporter from CNN-IBN who didn’t wish to be identified told us that whenever she would come up with a big news break, her male contemporaries would dismiss it, saying she must have smiled and got the story. And if she would get a story out of a woman, they would just credit it to “mahila-mahila bonding”.

“Regional Media Has More Sexism”

Language press has more sexism, sexual harassment, and a bigger pay gap for women, says Dhanya, who has worked alongside reporters from the language-press and regional television news networks.

Speaking of sexism – while television news channels have thrown open all doors for women reporters and editors, women are routinely judged on the basis of their looks, especially if they appear onscreen.

In Television, Looks Really Matter

The same reporter from CNN-IBN told us that once, while reporting on a death, a senior male colleague phoned her and told her that her earrings looked ‘tacky’, a comment that made the reporter livid. “I was reporting on a death, for God’s sake!”, she says.

She was also told that her hair looked frizzy, and that she must get her hair straightened. Many good-looking women are hired by television channels as news readers. Male reporters routinely dismiss them in offhand conversations, calling them “just pretty faces”.

The First Woman Editor

Seema Chisti says Pakistan had its first female editor even before India did.

Vidya Munshi, said to be the first woman journalist in India, began working in 1952 as the Calcutta correspondent for Blitz, an investigative journalism weekly. While just a few months earlier in October 1951, Pakistan had already got its first female editor, when Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah founded Mirror, a popular Pakistani social magazine. She was the Editor-Publisher of the magazine for a decade.

In June this year, Veena George became the first woman Executive Editor of a Malayalam news channel after 16 years as a television journalist.

Contrast that with Jammu-based English newspaper Daily Excelsior. It still has a policy against employing women journalists.

Times, are they really changing?