WUNRN
ILO - International Labour
Organization
PAKISTAN - UNDERRATED,
UNDERREPORTED: CHANGING THE IMAGE OF WORKING WOMEN IN PAKISTAN'S MEDIA
Gender
stereotypes are common in Pakistani media and continue to make it difficult for
women to play an equal role in the country’s workforce. A recent ILO project
focuses on Pakistani journalists themselves, using media to re-shape public
opinions about working women.
February
2014 - BANGKOK (ILO News) – As a reporter for Pakistan Television, Nida Fatima
Zaidi sees many of the country’s most pressing social problems. But for her one
of the most difficult was also one of the most personal – gender equality.
“Women in Pakistan in particular are portrayed by the media mainly in two major
roles, either as sex objects or housewives,” she said.
“The working woman, the labourer, the career girl, the high academic achiever,
the productive citizen contributing greatly to the economy through her skills
is underrated, underreported and hardly celebrated,” she added. “This
undermines her identity as a labourer, skilled worker and a professional.”
After almost a decade of reporting, Nida was getting tired of fighting the
“invisible war” for working women. She was frustrated that the dramatic
expansion of Pakistan’s media sector in the last decade had done little to
change attitudes to women and work.
The expansion of the media industry also caught the attention of Frida Khan,
the National Project Coordinator of the ILO's Promoting
Gender Equality for Decent Employment (GE4DE) project, and the fact that so
few journalists had received any formal training in reporting, let alone how to
report in a gender responsive way. She saw a “real opportunity to work with
media to improve the situation for working women in Pakistan”.
Women
– All Babies, No Briefcases?
Frida’s
aim was to “change the way that reporting on women perpetuated a world view
where men carried the briefcases and women carried the babies”, by sensitizing
journalists and editors themselves to not only incorporate women’s perspectives
in their reporting but to consider a broader and more subtle range of issues
that affect Pakistani women who are working or want to work.
In January 2012, with funding from the Canadian Government, the ILO
GE4DE project started running training programmes for Pakistani journalists.
The idea was to change the way the rapidly expanding media sector reported on
working women, to help re-shape broader public opinion. The training was
followed by a competition for the best stories on working women.
The
first hurdle in bringing women’s issues to light is to fight against people who
don’t want them to come to the surface”, Nida Fatima Zaidi, Pakistani
journalist.
GE4DE
was the largest media development project in terms of outreach to media
practitioners in Pakistan’s history. 673 journalists from 41 districts in
Pakistan were trained. The training included not only reporters, but
sub-editors and news editors, to ensure that stories about working women were
not just commissioned and written, but actually published.
For Nida, who took part in the training, this inclusion of media-decision
makers was a key element of the programme. “Whenever you try to do a story on
women’s issues, the usual knee jerk response from everyone around you in this
patriarchal world is very discouraging,” she recalled. “The first hurdle in
bringing women’s issues to light is to fight against people who don’t want them
to come to the surface.”
In the competition that followed the training, Nida’s 20-minute documentary
won first prize in the electronic media category. The film focused on the
economic contribution of women and followed two women in very different jobs, one
in an urban factory and one on a rural farm, who share a common problem; that
even though they work as hard as men, their contribution is not valued equally.
The
Role of Gender in Good Journalism
Before
the training started, GE4DE commissioned research on media opinions and found
that many journalists were not familiar with concepts of gender and work or the
situation of working women. Aoun Sahi from ‘The News on Sunday’ was one of
them. “Initially I was reluctant to give serious thought to gender issues in
Pakistan,” he said. “[But] when I learnt that less than one per cent of the
total female labour force work in decent conditions, it changed my perspective
about gender and its role in good journalism.”
Aoun’s article on the importance of including women in labour
inspections won first prize in the print media
category. He said: most activities or decision making, and this can be seen as
a major obstacle towards development in Pakistan. Their voices need to be heard
without stereotyping."
“It
does not make sense that 50 per cent of the population, which consists of
women, can simply be kept away from the economic activity. They should work
especially at senior and influential positions to encourage other women to
follow their footsteps and bring an end to male dominance.”
As
well as focusing on individual stories, Aoun’s feature also pointed towards a
key longer-term trend; the negative effect that the mis- and
underrepresentation of women in the media and in the workforce is having on
Pakistan’s longer-term development.
“Women have no contribution in most activities or decision making, and this can
be seen as a major obstacle towards development in Pakistan. Their voices need
to be heard without stereotyping,” he said.
“I want working women to understand their strength and not to sit back and let
men decide their fate.”
The ILO’s Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific, Mr Yoshiteru Uramoto,
said “the approach taken by the GE4DE project is part of a wider ILO strategy
to start tackling long-standing challenges in the world of work, such as gender
inequality, with new tools, such as the power and influence that the media
commands.”