South African newsrooms lead world in gender equality
South Africa leads countries covered in percentage of female editors. Sadly, that doesn’t correlate with gender equality elsewhere in the country.
By Amanda Strydom and Chris Roper
As part of the annual Reuters Digital News Report 2020, Reuters commissioned “Women and news: an overview of audience behaviour in 11 countries”. Code for Africa contributed an analysis of the results for South Africa, which were, on face value, very positive in terms of numbers of women in top editorial positions.
The report finds that 23% of the 162 top editors across the 200 brands covered globally are women. In South Africa, that number is at 47%, the highest percentage of the 10 countries covered, and ahead of leaders in gender parity like Finland and Germany. In the category of the percentage of online news users in each market that say they get news from one or more major outlets with a woman as the top editor, Japan comes in last at 0%, and South Africa is first at 77%.
Although South Africans might be tempted to feel a modicum of pride in these results — we’re more used to being at the top of lists like “Countries with the biggest gap between rich and poor” — that pride would need to be tempered. The salient point is contained in the report’s observation that “looking more broadly at gender inequality in society and the percentage of women in top editorial positions, we find no meaningful correlation”. The observation is framed from the perspective of a country’s success at combating gender inequality, stating that “higher gender equality does not in itself point to more women in top editorial positions. Journalism clearly has its own, internal, dynamics influencing career paths and the gender composition of top editorial ranks.”
The South African perspective is from the other end: despite our massive problems of gender inequality, exacerbated by South Africa’s grotesquely high GINI coefficient and extraordinary levels of gender-based violence, we have a disproportionately high percentage of women in top editorial positions (these are stats as at March 2020). This anomaly is not restricted to the media, but extends into government. In 2019, for the first time in its history, South Africa achieved gender parity in its cabinet.
South Africa ranks low on almost any other gender equality scale, but South Africans won’t need these to verify what they already know to be true — South Africa is a terrible place to be a woman. There’s an argument to be made that one of the reasons for this awareness (besides, sadly, lived experience) is that media does actively make a point of covering issues of gender-based violence, but the data shows that this isn’t reflected in overall gender parity in the share of news voices. The most recent research from the Global Media Monitoring Research Project (2015, and due to be updated for 2020) showed that women only command 29% of coverage in SA media.
For a more recent statistic, an analysis of coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic by the organisation Media Monitoring Africa revealed that 80% of those quoted in stories about the virus were men. Steps are being taken to address these issues. For example, the same organisation has recently started a project called Lens on Gender, which will monitor media to get an overview of how they have been reporting gender-based violence pre and during the Covid-19 pandemic, and to establish the presence of women’s voices in media coverage. The Lens on Gender project will not only advocate for better coverage in terms of portrayal, but will also call and fight for the equal representation of women in media coverage in terms of voice.
Another organisation, Quote This Woman+, runs a database of women experts across a number of sectors as a resource for journalists to expand their sources. This not only expands coverage about women, but also amplifies women as experts in their field — an example of the work that needs to be done to provide women editors with the tools with which to change the tenor and focus of coverage — tools that are not always made available by newsrooms constrained by budgetary cuts. Having women as editors when they have fewer resources would not necessarily reflect more balanced gender reporting, without concomitant gender equity.
As with much of the rest of the world, one of the key issues for women in media is the level of online aggression directed against women journalists. In South Africa, this is compounded by a generalised attack on the media, to varying degrees, by all the major political parties. The most egregious offenders are the Economic Freedom Fighters, a populist party that has both made and encouraged threats of violence against women journalists specifically. There are a multitude of examples of this.
For example, the EFF’s leader Julius Malema published a journalist’s mobile number on Twitter, with accompanying text accusing her of attempting to spy on the party. This led to threats of rape and death, and a subsequent court case in which the party was ordered to pay costs, and delete the tweet. Perhaps predictably, this led to further attacks on the journalist on social media. A cursory online search would reveal many other examples of targeted social media attacks. This aggression has led to physical violence against journalists. A recent example was eNCA journalist Nobesuthu Hejana being harassed and chased away by EFF members as she attempted to cover a protest in September of 2020. The EFF’s response to the outcry against this included a tweet by Member of Parliament Mbuyiseni Ndlozi stating that “merely touching her is not harassment. The touch has to be violent, invasive or harmful to become harassment.”
One of the stumbling blocks to addressing issues of gender inequality in South African media is the lack of current data on newsrooms. In August 2020, the UN Women South Africa and GIZ Partnerships for Prevention of Violence against Women and Girls programme issued a call to the media industry to commit to promote gender equality by signing a statement of commitment, but actual data-driven research is sparse. Without that data, and outcomes based on monitoring it, implementing continuing change in South African newsrooms becomes a more difficult task. And just having women in positions of power in newsrooms is no guarantee of more gender-equality in editorial coverage and personnel. Also crucial, given the parlous economic state of the news industry, is data on whether women editors in positions of power in South Africa are being given sufficient resources to succeed in their positions.
If you’re an African women data journalist or data scientist, please take a look at Code for Africa’s WanData network for opportunities for collaboration and/or training.
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The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is part of the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, and affiliated with Green Templeton College. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism is dedicated to exploring the future of journalism worldwide through debate, engagement, and research.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 12 countries. CfA builds digital democracy solutions that give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions, and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability. This includes building infrastructure like the continent’s largest open data portals at openAFRICA and sourceAFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative and the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network.
CfA also manages that African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR), which gives the continent’s best muckraking newsrooms the best possible forensic forensic data tools, digital security and whistleblower encryption to help improve their ability to tackle crooked politicians, organised crime and predatory big business. CfA also runs one of Africa’s largest skills development initiatives for digital journalists, and seed funds cross-border collaboration.
