Dealing with gender stereotypes -

Article: Salome Donkor
Inequalities between men and women, whether in the economic or cultural sense or both, certainly mean that women work hardest to produce food and water, yet benefit the least from their work.
This is because women have less power over the resources they produce.
Gender inequality impacts on access to food, property and land rights, as well as access to credit.
The World Development Indicators, 1997, Womankind World-wide, indicate that women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, produce half of the world’s food and yet earn only 10 per cent of the world’s income and own less than one per cent of the world’s property.
To promote the EC/UN Partnership Programme on gender Equality for Development and Peace, the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), under the auspices and sponsorship of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), recently organised a two-day forum to share experiences and exchange views with media practitioners on practices and principles for promoting gender equality as a priority development issue.
The forum discussed the Accra Agenda for Action endorsed by ministers of developing and donor countries responsible for development and heads of multilateral and bilateral development institutions, after the Third High level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held in Accra from September 2-4, 2008.
The document provides the framework for promoting gender equality and also provides UNIFEM with a platform to introduce its new programme for 2010 - 2013.
According to the National Programme Co-ordinator of UNIFEM, the Proposed New Programme on Financing Gender Equality and Aid Effectiveness, Programme Country Strategy, developed after the adoption of the action programme, would address four key gaps and challenges in the country.
She mentioned the need for capacity building or the strengthening of key government institutions on their roles and functions in the implementation of the national gender equality agenda, the need to strengthen gender equality and the role of civil society organisations and non-governmental organisations in monitoring and evaluating government and donors’ commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment agenda in national development plans, budgets and development co-operation frameworks.
It will also address issues associated with limited progress on mutual accountability of governments and donors, as well as the lack of relevant gender desegregated data and information on financing for gender equality, costing of gender equality and women empowerment programmes and gender responsive budgeting implementation in the country.
In identifying the main activities that will be carried out and the programme partners to achieve the expected results, UNIFEM mentions ministries, departments and agencies, United Nations agencies and other multilateral, as well as bilateral, agencies, the private sector and the media.
One important way in which the media can deal with gender inequalities is to publish stories that challenge stereotypes and these include those that overturn common assumptions about women and men in relation to their attributes, traits, roles or occupations.
Conversely, stories that reinforce stereotypes will reinscribe the generalised, simplistic and often exaggerated assumptions of masculinity and femininity in a given cultural context.
The preliminary report by the Global Media Monitoring Project, 2010, states that stories in Asia are almost eight times as likely to reinforce gender stereotypes than to challenge them.
It said in Africa, stories were almost 16 times as likely to reinforce than challenge stereotypes, adding that the larger percentage of stories that reinforced rather than challenged stereotypes suggested a need for media practitioner awareness on understanding, recognising and challenging stereotypes in reportage.
The top five topics in which women are central pertain to women in politics, violence and crime. Specifically, these are women in political power and decision-making, gender-based violence, violent crime, domestic politics and disaster. Further, the preliminary results show that women are not central at all in several news topics that are of importance to them, such as labour (employment, unemployment) and poverty (housing, social welfare and aid).
The report shows that the breakdown of topics with the highest coverage in all regions indicates that the media in Africa devoted 25 per cent of news coverage for politics and government, 21 per cent for social and legal, 19 per cent for the economy, 18 per cent for crime and violence, nine per cent for science and health,, six per cent for celebrity, the arts and the media and sports and zero per cent for the girl-child.
The hierarchy of priorities reveals the need for a radical transformation of the news media agenda towards one that is cognisant of and responsive to gender interests in the news.
The topics, ‘science and health’ and ‘social and legal’, are relevant to women’s gender interest. What is needed is a re-alignment of the priorities on the news media agenda to reflect the interest of the majority.
The most significant of participants’ commitment at the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness was their resolve to work together to help countries across the world build a successful future for all, a future based on a shared commitment to overcome poverty, a future in which no countries will depend on aid.
The participants agreed that by 2010, each of them should meet the commitments they had made on aid effectiveness in Paris in 2005 and in Accra and reach beyond those commitments, where they could.
They agreed to reflect and draw upon the many valuable ideas and initiatives that had been presented at the High Level Forum and asked the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness to continue monitoring progress on implementing the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action and report back to the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011.
As was rightly pointed out by Dr Doris Dartey, a communications consultant and media educator, the media should not reinforce gender stereotypes or publish gender-blind stories.
There is the need for media practitioners to set their personal agendas and use the media to get people to tell their stories.
That should be done in such a way to champion cultural change, safeguard women’s rights and shine “the dark spots in society”.