TechHerGRFP one year on, tackling gender inequality through balanced media reporting
By Ofim Kelechi Ofim
In February & March of 2020, TechHerNG with funding & support from both the Ford Foundation and the European Union’s Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption (RoLAC) programme, set out to dismantle patterns of misogyny enforced by media stereotypes & narratives that have dehumanised women for close to a century, via the Gender Reporting for Media Professionals (TechHerGRFP) project. The aim was simple: enable better reporting on women and women’s issues starting with capacity building of media professionals across Nigeria.
Thus, 60 practising journalists drawn from across different ethnic groups, media platforms, genders and ages, converged in both Owerri, Imo State & Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, to co-create a set of tools and build capacity to use their skills and stories to tackle gender biases.
What was the challenge?
The gross misrepresentation of women in the media and society at large is well storied.
Whether domestic violence, sexual abuse or gender bias, women are victims of a seemingly never-ending culture of violence and discrimination.
While religion and culture always get blamed for these lopsided outcomes, the media remains a major facilitator of sexist stereotypes. Outside the family unit, the media sits at the centre of civilization, influencing cultures and behaviour generation after generation. This influence has grown with the advent of new media technologies. Consequently, the proliferation of media, the explosion of new technologies and the emergence of social media are very critical to tackling this challenge.
While gender inequalities and stereotypes are deep social constructs, the media’s role in behavioural change and dislodging these biases, providing much more informed perspectives on women & gender issues cannot be underestimated.
This is why the Gender Reporting for Media Professionals workshop using experiential learning, where participants engaged in reflective conversations with the facilitators on paths towards balanced reporting and gender equality, became a crucial first step in reforming the media industry and society at large.
Training for new outcomes
433 journalists indicated interest in the workshop by the time applications were collated on February 14th, 2020. Female reporters and people with disabilities were especially encouraged to apply with sixty journalists finally selected for the project, although 58 ultimately participated.
Seven expert storytellers and media trainers drawn from the media and civil society took turns sharing their skills with participants, helping them spot perspectives that have perpetuated microaggressions and outright violence against women for decades. Survivors of different types of gender-based violence, as well as discrimination, also shared their experiences, leaving an indelible mark on the journalists.
A few debates occurred and questions were asked, but each session culminated in various points of enlightenment for the participants.
Outputs and Milestones
A detailed training report was published in April 2020 documenting our learnings as well as a few recommendations. One of such was a call for policymakers within the media industry to actively push in key decision-making processes, to improve the coverage of women by the media.
“Having women at all levels of decision making will ease the process of changing regulations that relegate women.
“Enlisting the media as key partners in the coverage of legislation directly affecting the promotion and protection of women; for instance, The Gender and Equal Opportunity Bill is critical to ensuring visibility and continued advocacy,” it stated.
Leveraging the relevance of social media was just as critical to this mandate. This is why we hosted a series of Tweetchats featuring CNN multimedia journalist and features producer Aisha Salaudeen, & Amara Nwankpa, the Director, Public Policy Initiative, at the Shehu Musa Yar’adua Foundation. These conversations helped crystallise the intended outcomes of the workshop and the state of women in the media specifically.
Most importantly, the project produced a handy media toolkit, interestingly curated by the participants. The toolkit outlined a checklist to ensure gender-sensitive reporting, ranging from sourcing a news story, news interest, consistency, dismantling stereotypes and providing proper context.
Tracking participant progress
TechHerNG has closely monitored the progress made by all 58 participating journalists. Right after the workshop, a WhatsApp group was created for the sole purpose of monitoring and evaluating the impact of the exercise on them The platform has also been a way for them to seek and gain support from both facilitators and colleagues as well as access several opportunities as gender-sensitive journalists.
To empirically ascertain just how much the project impacted each participant, we administered a post-training survey and out of 58 participants, 41 — representing 70.69% completed the survey.
33 participants (80.5%) said they are now much more sensitive to gender issues, 32 participants (78.0%) agreed they now make a more conscious effort to use gender-balanced expressions, while 21 participants (51.2%) said they have improved a lot in their news reporting.
Even more encouraging was the fact that 16 participants (39.0%) are working on projects together while 7 of them (17.1%) have already collaborated on projects.
The next stage
An urgent need to sensitize the larger society about gender misconceptions alongside how ill-prepared the media is to undertake this responsibility is still a reality that looms large.
There is an urgent need to expand the scope of the engagement to include the “editors, heads of unions, to mental health experts and legal practitioners. There is also an opportunity to engage with those who tell stories through other formats, including content creators and influencers,” as proposed in the report.
This can be narrowed into “smaller or bigger workshops” depending on thematic areas, need and availability of resources. It will require more than a couple of training workshops to undo decades of regressive thoughts and practices but with the success of TechHerGRFP, the encouraging signs are enough motivation to keep at it.
Ofim Kelechi Ofim is TechHer’s Communications Officer, he writes from Abuja.
