Media must cover rural women, too

“The pace of media is rapidly changing and any media organisation that cuts itself from the world of training is going to become a failing institution and will be further isolated from news ways of storytelling.

“We are also seeing a rapid transition towards visuals, so the days of being a writer only or concentrating on a specific field of media are now gone. There is a need to upgrade journalists' skills to make them more versatile to any kind of reporting that comes their way,” Davies said.

Davies also said that media organisations should rethink their training policy, for instance, by bringing trainers into the newsrooms instead sending journalists to train for a couple of days.

Media training and literacy

According to Gender Links, media training and literacy is one of the several strategies that it is using to promote diversity in the media and to engage the public in media and gender discussions. However, it is believed that journalists need special skills - something crucial to help them report well on gender issues, without bias, stereotypes and discrimination.

“We have a much more complex issue in society, which is gender, and journalists need to mirror society through learning to speak the language of gender knowledge to be able to cover gender-related stories very well,” Davies added.

Furthermore, Davies deplored the lack of regular coverage of rural women by print media, whose journalists mostly focus on high-profile women (so-called celebrities and wealthy businesswomen) living in urban areas.

“There is a general temptation for journalists to look for ‘superwomen' as potential sources, especially by focusing on their relationships and private lives, which is stereotypical and discriminatory, while a large part of our communities (rural women and rural children) is absent from our media world, especially newspapers.

“Rural women have very important stories to tell but their voices can only be heard through radio.

“Unfortunately, radio is ephemeral, meaning one or two broadcast programmes and then gone and forgotten. We need the presence of print media in rural areas, encouraging magazines and newspapers to send their staff to cover stories in rural society. I think it is a dilemma but we would need the support of advertisers to achieve that feat.”

Sibongile Mpofu, senior lecturer of journalism at the Zimbabwe's National University of Science and Technology of Bulawayo (NUST), said that the struggle for gender equality should not be left to the newsrooms alone.

“Training institutions must also enter the fray and play a vital part in this struggle,” Mpofu said, using the NUST as a case study for gender representation.

“Sometimes, newsrooms are not compatible with women's issues or are not that women-friendly. Myths of ‘male superiority' and ‘female-mediocrity' still prevail.

"Courses especially for women"

“So perhaps, media training institutions should develop courses especially for women, remove gender stereotypes in their curriculums and recruit more women into their ranks. But mostly, female journalists must do their best to advance themselves.”

Lastly, Mpofu called on gender organisations to support female media practitioners. “It is still a complicated system out there full of old men who resist change, so we need the full support of these organisations.”

Maude Dikobe, of the University of Botswana, urged training institutions and media practitioners to collaborate in the view of promoting strategies of improved media performance.