Gender

This report covers progress made by Gender Links as the lead agency for the policy arm of the Media Action Plan on HIV/AIDS and Gender. It begins with a general overview followed by country reports. Attached at Annex A is a list of the country facilitators for the MAP policy roll out and their contact information. Attached at Annex B is a composite plan for the roll out in each country for 2007/2008, showing how facilitators plan to complete work started as well as approach new media houses to achieve the MAP target of eighty percent of all media houses in the region having HIV and AIDS and Gender policies by the end of 2008.

The ICT arena is characterized by the strategic control exercised by powerful corporations and nations - monopolies built upon the intellectual property regime, increasing surveillance of the Interned and an undermining of its democratic substance, and exploitation of the powerless by capitalist imperialism, sexism and racism.  Within the ICT arena women have relatively little ownership of and influence on the decision-making processes being underrepresented in the private sector and government bodies which control this arena.

Women can benefit from ICT policies that encourage growth in the sector, provided these policies remain gender neutral.  Gender-sensitivity among those working in regulatory agencies and multilateral initiations helps ensure that gender-neutral policies do not become gender-blind during implementation.

The ICT sector is one of the last areas to open to a gender perspective.  There is substantial evidence to support the contention that policy making in technological fields ignores gender issues.

"The power of the media to make and unmake the image of women, to hasten or retard the progress of women in society, cannot be denied or underestimated" (Ogundipe-Leslie, nd:55). However, since the 1980's, when the roles of African women have been undergoing a fundamental change to increased participation in the political, social and economic sectors of society, the tendency of the media has been to ignore or distort these significant events. In fact, in the first United Nation's document recognising the media as a "critical area of concern" for women, the media are listed as one of ten major obstacles to women's advancement" (Ziyambi,1997:1).

In highlighting this rather polemic insight, this essay attempts to go further and grapple with defining and understanding the underlying relationship between the media and gender issues, primarily in Africa. The study will include gender formation, media content and portrayal of women, employment patterns, SADC media policy on gender and, suggestions for the media on gender reporting.

At the outset, it is necessary to provide a theoretical framework for the discussion by listing and discussing the three various types of media including mainstream, alternative and folk media, in terms of their relationship to gender issues. The concepts of sex and gender, which are critical to such a research, will then be outlined.

Why are gender issues important in the Information, Communication and Technology sector?

ICTs have only recently emerged on the African continent and especially in the Francophone African region. Women are currently marginal users of ICTs and have had very little participation in formulating the policies, strategies, regulations and norms that are guiding the region. 

The different processes associated with globalisation have led to rising rates of paid work by women often in contexts where male employment is stagnant or declining. This paper explores how women and men are dealing with this feminisation of labour markets in the face of the widespread prevalence of male breadwinner ideologies and the apparent threat to male authority represented by women's earnings. Responses have varied across the world but there appears to be a remarkable resistance to changes in the domestic division of unpaid work within the household and a continuing failure on the part of policymakers to provide support for women's care responsibilities, despite the growing importance of their breadwinning roles. Many of the services previously provided on an unpaid basis are being transferred to the paid economy but most working women continue to bear a disproportionate burden of domestic responsibility. There is evidence that women may be using their newly acquired earning power to challenge the injustice of the double work burden in ways that pose a challenge to long-term processes of social reproduction.

Although women have historically played an essential role in politics, revolutionary struggles, and public life in Sub-Saharan Africa, since the early 1990s the number of women in African parliaments has increased significantly. This consolidated response discusses factors stimulating the advancement of women in politics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the highlighted factors include gender quotas in politics, national women's movements, and the spillover effect of democratic values throughout the continent.

The interface between gender, development and democracy is handled competently by first establishing the nexus between gender and development; then elucidating the development and democracy interface; and then, finally, completing the triad by linking all three areas.