Mlambo-Ngcuka tells media to give women their voice

By Hopewell Radebe, Deputy Political Editor

DEPUTY President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka called on the media yesterday to give female professionals a voice in stories about the country’s developmental and economic issues.

The call was made at the release of the 2005 Global Media Monitoring Project, which revealed that women were being quoted in only 26% of news reports in the country.

Mlambo-Ngcuka said the study proved the media had a poor representation of women worldwide in spite of women making up 52% of its population, and that SA was no different. Women were also more likely to be portrayed as victims compared with men.

“Our voices, perspectives, roles, occupations and lives are often absent and marginalised,” she said.

She said that although the global report showed that the South African media quoted women professionals more frequently than its counterparts globally, this country still needed to build up to a 50/50 representation especially in professional fields of development, economics and politics.

Mlambo-Ngcuka said changes in the media should not be expected to come only through campaigns by women journalists and activists.

Male editors and journalists should also play a constructive part by ensuring that women’s activities were not “trivialised or relegated to the social or women’s pages”.

Government was pleased there was a global nongovernmental organisation, the project, focusing on the media, which tended to think it was above all and its watchdog role beyond reproach. “This exercise of watching the media needs to be encouraged and promoted,” said Mlambo-Ngcuka.

William Bird, director of SA’s Media Monitoring Project, said SA was one of 77 countries that had participated in a third survey focusing on how women and men were portrayed on February 16 last year. The previous studies were conducted in 1995 and 2000.

The study examined the representation of women and men in the media — television, radio and newspapers. An appropriate range of media was selected for the study using a standardised set of monitoring tools to collect the necessary information.

Temporarily available at: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/article.aspx?ID=BD4A165869

Source: Business Day Newspaper