Breaking Down Barriers in the Arab Media: Women Activists Have Shown That Obstacles to Progress Take Many Forms. (Women: International)
What is the point of drawing up policies to make women's rights central to national development when, at the same time, negative stereotyping of women goes on daily in the national press and on television?
Women's rights campaigners in several Arab countries are organizing today to end this anomaly. They are exposing the negative aspects of media messages and working to overcome the hurdles facing women journalists and to empower them to counter the negativity. A multiplicity of deterrents means the campaign has to take place on several fronts.
Paradoxically, as I realized while researching a report on women in the Arab media for a media freedom center in London, the challenge facing women has become more daunting as the number of Arabic-language media outlets has increased. A popular perception has arisen in recent years that women are everywhere in the Arabic-language media, above all as glamorous news presenters on satellite television channels. The proliferation of Arab-owned satellite channels has also generated an increase in airtime for advertising, with commercials featuring women in large numbers mainly as impressionable consumers, decorative objects or cleaners and cooks. Indeed, in terms of both numbers and images, it seems that women's growing presence on Arab television, far from ending their subordination in the media, might be reinforcing it.
Evidence collected by Lebanese reporter May Elian and others supports this concern. It suggests that women are used by the appearance-conscious visual media to attract viewers. Worse still, they are used in a way that associates women with a superficial role, in the sense of reading from other people's scripts or delivering "just one question" reports.
Print journalism, in contrast, is still seen as a male domain because it involves "hard work" and needs to be "taken seriously." Elian presented comparative data to a seminar on Gender and Communication Policy held in Beirut in the run-up to the U.N. Assembly's Special Session on Women in 2000. She found that, whereas the dominant Lebanese television stations have many more women than men on their news desks, the gender ratio on newspapers is quite the reverse. Women media professionals surveyed by the Beirut-based Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World concurred that important editorial decisions in all media were still invariably made by men.
Hurdles confronting women in the media workplace are universal, as the International Women's Media Foundation has shown. The main ones are juggling family obligations with erratic work schedules dictated by breaking news, together with a lack of successful role models. Nagwa Kamel, a Cairo University professor, told the opening conference of the Arab Women Media Center in Amman in June 2001 that media women in the Arab world face several other hurdles as well.
In Arab countries, where heavy media censorship puts publishable news stories at a premium, the best route to obtaining information is through the shilla, or friendship clique. Given the dearth of female ministers, lawyers or other highly placed female sources, the clique, whose members include representatives of the ruling establishment, is bound under current circumstances to be almost exclusively male. Thus a vicious circle is created, in which young women entering journalism are assigned to slow-moving coverage of the three "f's"--food, family and fashion. Since recognition in this field is hard to come by, training and promotion go to other staff and discouragement sets in.
Mundane explanations such as these for women failing to reach the upper ranks of media firms do not make headlines. Yet they do describe cycles that can be broken and challenges that can be overcome. The risk is that they will be overlooked when more violent (and, under current news values, more newsworthy) reasons are also valid. Examples of the latter include the brutal killings of women journalists during the civil conflict in Algeria and the assassination in March 2001 of Kuwait's prominent woman publisher and women's rights activist, Hidaya Sultan al-Salem. …