Remarks by Roberta Clarke UN Women Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific “Inside the News – Challenges and Aspirations of Women Journalists in Asia and the Pacific”
Date:
We launch this report INSIDE THE NEWS 20 years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. We launch this report in the year that the world negotiates what comes next after the Millennium Development Goals. We expect that in September 2015 at the UN General Assembly an ambitious universal agenda will be adopted that promotes poverty’s end, people-centered development, shared prosperity, planetary protection and peace. Across the 17 goals that seem now generally agreed, gender equality is accepted both as a goal in and of itself as well as instrumental to the realization of the other 16 goals taking us to the world that we all want.
But as we move forward, we must also look back. And it is backward/forward agenda with which we are concerned in the report ‘Inside the News’.
If you read the Beijing Platform for Action (and I do encourage this), you members of the media will be struck, though perhaps not surprised, at the many references to communications and media. The Beijing Platform for Action (BFPA), a document 134 pages long, refers to media no less than 102 times. Over and over the role of the media is reiterated for transforming values, attitudes and practices in keeping with equality between women and men and the empowerment of women and girls.
The Beijing Platform for Action cites women and the media as a critical area of concern in two main reasons: the low level of women’s participation in media at all levels and the stereotypical representation of women in the media.In a way that could only be hint at the information revolution in the making, the BFPA noted advances in communications technology, satellite and cable TV and global access to information and points out that these developments represent opportunities for women to participate as well as for the dissemination of information about women. These expansions of communications and information channels are also avenues to reject the spread of stereotyped and demeaning images of women, in the words of the BFPA “for narrow commercial and consumerist purposes”.
The BPFA concludes that “until women participate, they will continue to be misjudged and awareness of the reality of women’s lives will continue to be lacking.” The media has great potential to promote the advancement of women and the equality of women and men by portraying women and men in a diverse and balanced manner.
Through this report, UN Women and UNESCO working with the International Federation of Journalists seek to ascertain and record the progress which has been made in the implementation of the BPFA in the Asia and Pacific region.In the overall review of the implementation of the BFPA in the Asia Pacific region in November 2014, member states and civil society organizations reflected on the mixture of achievements and persisting inequalities. While more and more women have access to education and health care and are participating in the labour market, women’s political participation especially at the decision making levels remains low, the prevalence of violence against women remains high and women and girls’ continue to have their human rights constrained by stereotypical and limited gender roles.
This Inside the News report also finds similar contradictions, a mix of achievement and challenges. Some key findings include:
- On average across Asia and the Pacific, women make up 28.6 percent of the media workforce. The proportions are lower in decision-making roles in media organizations where women make up 17.9 percent of executive roles, 19.5 percent of senior editorial and 22.6 percent of mid-level editorial positions.
- Women continue to be restricted by stereotypical beats, and face more job insecurity, lower wages and gender discrimination but they are multi-skilled and usually working across more beats than men.
- Sexual harassment remains a key issue with 34 percent of journalists in Asia and the Pacific saying they had witnessed sexual harassment at work. At least 17 percent of female journalists have personally experienced workplace sexual harassment and 59 percent of the time it is a superior who is the perpetrator.
Inside the News gives us evidence to reflect on the efficacy of our work over the last 20 years but perhaps more importantly, it is meant to be a catalyst for further change.The media can be a siren, calling attention to the marginalized and giving voice to those rendered voiceless by power inequalities. The media is also a monitor of the powerful, a documenter of the realities of the diversity of women, reinforcer of hope and aspirations and is an agent of change.
Gender equality is everybody’s business. But there is no doubt, given the reach and influence of the media (traditional and social), that members of the media have great responsibility to portray women and men in diverse and balanced ways, rejecting stereotypical and demeaning depictions. You members of the media can accelerate that change and in so doing change the media from the inside as well.
Roberta Clarke
22 June 2015
Bangkok, Thailand