Why Gender in Media Matters

‘… it is essential to promote forms of communication that not only challenge the patriarchal nature of media but strive to decentralise and democratise them[…] media that reaffirm women's wisdom and knowledge, and that make people into subjects rather than objects or targets of communication. ’ ?The ‘Bangkok Declaration’

Numerous regional and global agreements underscoring the need to include the media in interventions to counter gender-based discrimination have been developed since the landmark Bangkok Declaration was issued in 1994. The most important of these is perhaps the Beijing Platform for Action for the Advancement of Women (1995), Section ‘J’.

As such, the symbiotic relationship between gender in media and gender relations in society has been acknowledged in multiple instances.Gender biases and stereotypes in media inform and areinformed by practice, shaping a reality of pervasive gender-based inequalities.

The normative values underlying mainstream media content and journalistic practice reveal that these in fact serve to normalize inequitable power relations, one of which is ‘gender’. Critical forms of communication become necessary as a strategy to trouble the relations of dominance and subordination so characteristic of our societies today.