TOUGH FOR WOMEN JOURNALISTS

‘Women make lousy journalists because they are incompetent and easily intimidated.’

‘Women have a problem because their productivity and output is naturally low.’


These two comments come from male journalists in Swaziland. The second comment comes from a senior editor of one of the kingdom’s top two newspapers.

The comments are contained in a research report on gender and employment in the Swazi print media industry.

Nok’thula Hlophe studied the experiences women have as journalists in Swaziland by interviewing men and women who work at the Times of Swaziland and the Swazi Observer. Hlophe interviewed people of different ranks from reporters to editors and senior managers.

The two comments highlighted above represent just two of the discriminatory attitudes women journalists face in Swaziland. Of the people interviewed by Hlophe, men mostly held negative views of women in the newsroom.

Here are some of the comments reported.

One male reporter said that the number of women in the newsroom should be kept to a minimum. ‘Journalism is not office work but more like field work, there are assignments that women cannot handle because there are so many factors governing their natural being.’

A male senior editor said that there were few women in the newsroom because when recruiting only a few proved their capabilities.

The male senior editor said, ‘Women fall pregnant and cannot do the job very well. That period requires the reporter to stay away for some time and we lose a lot in the process. Some males get drunk and never turn up for work and others lose stories in the process. In worse situations management is forced to fire reporters.’

A male reporter said that there are no particular problems with women reporters. The problem is that women do not want to compromise their commitments such as marriage.

Another male reporter said, ‘If you could come into the newsroom after 5pm you could notice how impatient women become to leave.’

Seemingly working conditions in the media clash with the roles that women are expected to play. A female reporter said that the newsroom conditions are unfriendly for women because of their commitments. She said, ‘Every day we are expected to be at work by 8am and most of the time we leave around 9pm, you can imagine how bad the situation is for married women’.

Not all men had negative views. A male reporter said it was ‘necessary to have both men and women in the newsroom because we complement each other.’

Another male reporter said, ‘Journalism is not a muscle job so women are capable of doing the job men are. In our newsrooms there is too much male domination and that you can tell by merely reading the newspaper.’

Unsurprisingly, Hlophe, who undertook the research while a student at the University of Swaziland in 2004, wrote that women reporters believed that gender equality should apply in the newsroom.

A female reporter said, ‘Women are as capable as men are so they should be given the equal opportunities as men but what confuses me is that how can we have such a large number of men in the newsroom when there are many capable women out there?’

Another female reporter said that the main problem women faced was stereotyping. They are told that the best can never come from a woman and they believe it. As a result women were stagnant and did not strive for the best. ‘Even the little things they do are not given the attention they deserve because they never focus on their jobs and lack self-confidence.’

Another female reporter said that women tend to shift responsibilities to men, not because they cannot do the job themselves but because they have developed an inferiority complex because they have been discriminated against in the past.

Women report being discriminated against within newsrooms. According to one female reporter, editors do not trust them with the minor assignments they do every day so it would be very hard for them to entrust them with bigger tasks. ‘When you come back from covering an assignment the Editor will breathe down your neck questioning every statement you write such that you can really feel that this person doubts your work,’ she said.

Women journalists reported they were treated differently outside the newsroom, as well as inside. Sources tended to take advantage of female reporters and sometimes intimidated them because they knew women could be soft targets and that costs the women good stories. ‘The employers do not understand this and as a result women are perceived as incompetent,’ according to a female reporter.

Contrary to what the male editor said about women having a ‘naturally low’ productivity and output, a woman reporter told Hlophe that gender does not affect performance and productivity was monitored in the newsroom. ‘I learnt from this that performance does not have anything to do with whether you are male or female but it is about how you deal with the situations you face: do you have confidence in yourself?’ she said.

A male reporter said it was difficult to detect the failure or incompetence in women because the number of women in news reporting roles was so small. ‘The fact that they are never given major responsibilities they are always given easier assignments makes it even harder because it is obvious that they cannot fail to do a simple story from a press release.’

The attitudes to women displayed in Swazi newsrooms reflect those of Swazi society generally. A woman senior manager said, ‘Women are relegated to a lower level by culture such that if women rise to higher positions in society some people view that as an abnormality. The belief is that a women’s place is in the kitchen.’

In the research Hlophe reminds us that media play a large role in promoting (or not) gender equality and in the past the Swazi media has been seen to be perpetuating gender inequality by concentrating on men alone.

Hlophe puts the situation in Swazi newsrooms in a larger context. She quotes Gender Links saying that women’s voices are underrepresented across the media in Swaziland and are virtually missing in certain topics. Older women are invisible in both the print and the electronic media. Women’s voices are not even heard in proportion to their strength in occupational categories, such as agriculture.

This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon if the negative attitudes male dominated newspapers have to their own women staff is anything to go by.