Media ‘Neglecting Plight Of Women’

SOUTH African media are contributing to the disempowerment of women, despite the fact that issues involving gender equality, women's poverty and health are of primary importance to the country's agenda, according to research by Media Monitoring Africa (MMA), which was released last week.

Tanya Owen, a gender researcher from Australia based at the MMA, said last week that women were bearing the brunt of a variety of social, health and service delivery ills but that these issues were not being adequately addressed in the media.

"The MMA's latest monitoring demonstrates that this has not been reflected in the media's election coverage, when these issues should come to the forefront of many, if not the majority of, reports," she said.

Owen said the MMA results showed that topics relating to women and gender were extremely scarce across election coverage, with gender topics accounting for only 0,6% of election coverage. She added that female information sources in election coverage did not in any way reflect demographics.

"It is extremely unfortunate that the media on the whole have appeared to neglect women-related subjects, almost as much as women's issues have been neglected by political parties who appear to believe it sufficient to say that women's issues and equality are important, and not to have policies and action plans to back this up and for citizens to assess," she said.

"Those who ... rely most on government policy and service delivery are continuing to be marginalised without channels to have their voices and concerns heard," she said.

Professor Sheila Meintjes, head of political studies at Wits University, agreed that the media had a negative bias towards women's issues.

She said that most public debates were about inclusive national political issues which mostly affected women but that the media tended to ask men to comment on these issues, thus giving only men a platform to speak on national politics.