Gender gaps in the Southern Africa media are slowly closing

Southern Africa has made significant progress towards achieving better gender balance in the news and in newsrooms, but it is still far from achieving equality by any one of the measures used in the third Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP).

• Other than women sources as a proportion of the total other significant findings for the region include:
   There has been some improvement in women’s voices being heard in “hard” news:  For example, women sources in the political topic category increased from 8% in the GMBS to 14% in the GMMP.
• Women are still, however, not heard in proportion to their strengths in any one of the professions. For example, women in Southern Africa comprise 20% of parliamentarians, but only 14% of the politicians quoted.
• Women in Southern Africa are least likely to be the subjects or focus of the event or story; women are more likely to be consulted as human interest subjects; as eye witnesses or as part of popular opinion surveys.  These categories are also the ones in which overall the least number of sources are consulted. 
• Blatant and more subtle stereotypes abound: For example, 17% women in Southern Africa are likely to be identified as victims compared to 7% men. The proportion of women likely to be identified according to their family status in Southern Africa has doubled from 11% in the GMBS to 22% (higher than the global average of 17%) while that for men has increased from 2% to 6% (also higher than the global average of 5%).
• Gender still hardly features as a topic: In both the regional and global findings of the GMMP, stories focusing on gender equality (and lack of it) constituted a mere 4% of the total; up just 2% compared to the GMBS. 
• Women are still more likely to be presenters than reporters of news, but this is improving: In Southern Africa, women constitute 49.7 percent of news presenters, but only 31% of reporters; lower than the global average of 37% but higher than previous studies in the region showing that women only comprised 25% of reporters.
• There has been a dramatic increase of women in the print media and there is a greater diversity of women in different beats:  There has been an increase of women reporting in the print media from 22% in the GMBS to 39% in this study. The proportion of women reporting hard news stories (such as crime and violence, economy and business) has also increased.  
• Women journalists are more likely to consult female views: Women sources constituted 28% of the total sources consulted by women journalists compared to 19% of the sources referred to by male journalists (compared to 25% for women and 20% for men in the global findings).  
• The monitoring yielded examples of gender aware reporting: Southern Africa is the only sub-region in the study in which the proportion of stories categorised as challenging stereotypes (4%) is higher than those classified as reinforcing stereotypes (3%). The GMMP 2005 also highlighted examples of how, through consulting a wider range of viewpoints balance, fairness as well as fresh perspectives and insight can be brought to such reporting. 
• But the major challenge is still to find gender angles in all beats and all stories: There is still a tendency to see gender-aware reporting as stories about successful women, rather than seeking out gender angles, perspectives and sources in all beats and stories.