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Media is the most pervasive and powerful tool around the globe; woven throughout our daily lives, it has insinuated messages into our consciousness at every turn. Media, with its universal relevance and being the fourth pillar of democracies, plays a role in dictating and shaping the narratives of millions.
With news media consumption being highly polarised in certain domains compared to others, gender-based differences are especially greater for news that talks about international affairs, business, finance, and politics.
Highlighting that gender plays a role in how people engage and disengage with news media, with women more likely to purposefully avoid news which are incomprehensible, aggressive, and depressing (Benesch 2012; Toff and Palmer 2019).
Over centuries, such narratives have been the result of structural inequalities, socio-economic differences, and disparities in education, which have led to the rise of the preconceived notion of “women being only avid consumers of daily soaps, dramas, and gossip.”
This has created a two-fold impact of under-representation and mis-representation of women’s audiences and women’s achievement.
Gendered media poses grave concern, especially in light of recent events, with Journalists such as Palki Sharma Upadhyay, Ruchira Kamboj, the Permanent Representative of India to the UN, and Nirmala Sitharaman, the current Finance Minister and former Defence Minister, are women in Indian politics and geopolitics whose achievements are not given the same recognition as those of men and not taken seriously in their domain.
These are often the names that get lost in the crowd. This isolation and domination of a particular gender is not only the result of social inequalities alone but also of lesser incentives for the big capitalist media houses in the prevalence of an unproportionate consumer base, thus featuring more male panellists, journalists, writers, and debaters than women.
Women are often assigned to cover ‘soft beats’ such as Lifestyle and Fashion, while men predominate in the ‘hard beats’. On average, women's contribution to articles looks like Science and Technology (33.3%), Culture and Entertainment (32.8%), and Public Life (32.6%), while Sports (6%), Defence and National Security (10.5%), and Politics (19.8%). Women appear in 15.7% of all flagship debates and comprise 22.4% of the panellists on average, far less than the male presence.
This indicates that women are represented in less than one-sixth of such debates. The problem isn't the existence of men in these panels; rather, the dominance prevents women from having their voices heard.
Especially with merely 2.6% of all articles written on gender issues comprising only 39.6% written by women in these media houses. Such imbalances in power and representation give voice often to men to speak on issues that serve to entrench patriarchal structures and prejudices.
In India, feminist authors such as Kamla Bhasin, Kiran Prasad, Anita Desai, and Ritu Menon have questioned the role of mass media in regard to women's concerns and how they portray them in an inaccurate way.
It is crucial to liberate the news media from the symbolic annihilation that promotes stereotypes and leaves out realistic portrayals, as well as gender bland sexism, which attempts to disguise sexism against women by downplaying their athletic performances in comparison to men's and not celebrating them on the same scale even after the sport being the same as that of cricket. It makes sense that women's rights have been viewed as less significant given the media's persistent oversimplification and hypersexualisation of women.
With the news being a tool that’s dictating the minds of millions, it is important that this under-representation and mis-representation be countered. The significance of women's voices in media extends far beyond and deeper than simply recognising their viewpoints and deeming them essential enough to be promoted and pushed to the front pages as their male counterparts.
In other words, it's not a contest to determine whose viewpoint is superior or more significant, but rather an arena where women's opinions are fairly represented and acknowledged to play a significant role in matters on sports, geopolitics, defence, and more – rather than just culture and entertainment. Growth in this direction can only be achieved by the collective efforts of men and women.
Women audiences must become more engaged in ‘hard beat' domains of politics, and geopolitics and express their voice without retrospective thoughts or disputing their own abilities, and men must also create space for women to do the same without being hypercritical of them. The space which emphasises female leaders and their viewpoints governs and makes history on a par with others.
BY AGRIMA KUSHWAHA
TEAM GEOSTRATA
Female representation in journalism is the need of the hour! World must get the real definition of feminism and not the pseudo feminism of social media!