Resilience Under Surveillance

The face of African journalism has changed. News coverage has metamorphosed. More female journalists are sharing the screen with their male counterparts. African media is representative now more than ever, having obtained new presentational make-up tricks. However, women hold just 26 per cent of positions in African media governance.

With two-thirds of the African tertiary student body enrolled in bachelors & masters programs during fall 2013 semester taken up by women, only 36.1% of total bylines in Kenyan newspapers are by female journalists. Over the past decade, there has been definite progress made in the transformation of the news media. However, it is of great important that we address the areas in which we are still lacking.

The newsroom is fragmented and audiences divided by language and socio-economic factors that dictate access and ideas around what is considered news. As such, the newsroom should maintain a diverse landscape to guarantee exhaustive representation — in Africa and around the globe. As news content develops into a rich, divergent framework, a great challenge that still faces journalists, both men and women, is the resistance of the culture of casual stereotype in the newsroom.

“Forty years after women began entering newsrooms in substantial numbers, it’s urgent to address the challenges women face in achieving parity in the newsroom,” said Barbara Cochran, president of the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

The portrayal of African women in the media has exposed familiar fixed images of a puppeteered character. The mass audience has found a resonant reconciliation of the woman being an ‘either-or’. The alluring sex kitten, the seraphic procreator, the double-dealing witch, the pragmatic corporate and presumptuous political climber.

In spite of the newsroom breakthrough made over the last 20 years, having there being more women in media and notable female executives than ever before — the imbalance in the newsroom is still enduring. That is a dismal prospect given that it is more than 50 years since laws were introduced penalizing discrimination against women and providing for the allocation of basic political and social rights, equal pay, and employment rights.

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