By CHRISTOPHER KAYUMBA

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Last week, the Rwanda Media Commission announced that despite progress  made towards gender equality in other areas, the media is still dominated by men with women constituting only 28 percent of media practitioners overall.

The situation is even worse at the leadership and ownership levels as there are no female chief executive or chief editors in any public or private media nor media owners (with the exception of two or three inconsequential magazines).

And what’s interesting here isn’t the statistics nor is it news that women are few in the media industry. That has always been the case. Nor is it even unique to Rwanda.

Instead, of interest is what officials from the industry and government perceive as the “why” women remain few in the media despite gender equality policies; its consequence, and “how” the challenge can be overcome.

So, what do officials perceive as the “why”?

Broadly, three points were mentioned at the aforementioned event and are often repeated:

The first is the supposed non-respect for the “Beijing Principles” and noncompliance with the 30 percent provision for women inclusion in the media as is the case in the political realm.

Compliance

The second is the alleged lack of institutions to ensure compliance and finally, alleged lack of “self-confidence” for women!

As solutions, most call for media owners to hire more women; advocacy to ensure compliance with gender equality; “educating” women to overcome lack of self-confidence; giving women more opportunities; etc.

For me however, attracting more women to the media industry will require going beyond “Beijing” and the quota to first come to grips with both why there a fewer women and why we need more women in the sector.

Before looking at why fewer women, let me state that, what’s critical isn’t “balancing” male and female voices in stories or getting women jobs per se as some officials posit, but making the media “feminist”!

By “feminist” I mean belief in the truth that neither men nor women are intellectually or humanely superior to either and both deserve respect as well as equal access opportunities.

With this, the needed “feminist media” is one that would editorially promote, and defend equality between men and women; not more or less of either; although feminists would say one can’t access the experience they haven’t lived; and therefore presence of women critical.

Secondly, media policymakers need to be alert to the fact that unlike in other realms of power where women have historically been excluded ─in the military, political, or economic, the media is the most insidious with the capacity to bring about parity in other sectors sustainably!

This is primarily because of all forms of power, the media is the ONLY one that determines not merely what may or may not be brought forth for discussion but affects our perceptions, preferences, choices and what we think without us realizing it!

To secure equality in other sectors requires using this form of power and the consequence of lack of women in this sector means maintaining the patriarchal social structure that keeps women in “their place”.

Pull and push

Attracting more enlightened women in this sector would require comprehending at least three related broad factors:

The first are the incentives (pull) and disincentives (push) factors for well-educated women to join the industry.

For example, financial incentives aren’t not only low or even nonexistent in some media outlets but there is low respectability for journalists despite being somehow “feared” by some politicians!

On a scale of respectability, I would for example say that the military, politicians, civil servants, businesspeople, lawyers and doctors are by far socially more respected than journalists.

In addition, than perhaps any other profession, journalists are the most likely to be abused, illegally detained and harassed by the police or ridiculed by political authorities publicly.

In part, that perhaps explains why, as we have argued before, while male and female students join first year in schools of journalism wishing to specialize in journalism by third year, most females settle on communication and public relations!

Secondly, there seems to be denial of women’s agency in debating why less women join the media!

Takes time

For example, presenting women as ‘lacking confidence” and as species  that require “education” to overcome their “insecurities” is not only to blindly take women as individuals who don’t knowingly choose other professions over journalism but as “needy” souls that require “help”!

Yet, of course, while its true education is needed, this is for men and women.

Finally, media policymakers need to recognize that unlike in politics, recruiting women into the media is more difficult and takes time. This is because, unlike in politics, the effect of recruitment in the media is immediate; and one’s gender is beside the point where the profit motive is concerned.

And since the government has an activist policy of looking out for and recruiting the best, especially females, it’s difficult to recruit them to the media when the incentives offered are inferior.

In that sense then, to change the imbalance, we need to seriously ask ourselves the incentives/disincentives for women to join the media rather than taking them as uneducated victims that need “help”.

Christopher Kayumba, PhD. Senior Lecturer, School of Journalism and Communication, UR; Lead consultant, MGC Consult International Ltd. E-mail: [email protected]; twitter account: @Ckayumba Website:www.mgcconsult.com