Nithila Kanagasabai
“What inequality? There are more women than men in the newsroom these days!”
This incredulity characterised many conversations with women journalists I met in 2011-12 as part of my research on gender in the newsroom.
In India, the two decades post-liberalisation were a period of tremendous growth for the news industry and witnessed the entry of a large number of women journalists. I was one of them. I knew that journalism schools often boasted more women than men. I had been to one. And in urban, English-language newsrooms – the site of first my job, and then my research – one was likely to encounter many woman reporters, at least at the entry-level. But I also knew that despite the body count, the newsroom remained a space where one’s gendered identity continued to influence, among other things, the allocation of beats, salary negotiations, and opportunities to ascend to leadership positions. I also realised that, like me, most of these women came from highly privileged class locations and exclusively from oppressor caste backgrounds. These fraught intersections were what I was hoping to explore.
Just a year before I embarked on this research, The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP)[i], the most extensive longitudinal global study on gender in news media, had released its 2010 report. It noted that in India women reporters were responsible for only 37% of news stories, but their stories challenged gender stereotypes twice as often as those by male reporters[ii]. If women’s representation in the newsroom was not encouraging, their representation in the news was dismal. Women made up less than a quarter of the subjects and sources of news. It was clear that despite what the journalists felt, gendered inequality within newsrooms and in the news was an undeniable reality.
In the ten years since, women journalists and their working conditions have been in the news on and off with assassinations, sexual harassment and assault cases, the #MeToo mo(ve)ment and defamation cases against survivors who spoke up, widespread online trolling, harassment and doxxing, and contentious debates around maternity leave and period leave.
Cut to 2021. In the midst of a raging pandemic, as journalists (among others) lost lives[iii] and livelihoods, the India report of GMMP 2020 was released on December 3, 2021. India was ranked 15th out of the 16 Asian countries that participated in this edition of GMMP. It showed that women’s presence as news subjects as well as sources has plummeted from 22% in 2010 to a mere 14% in 2020[iv]. This in a year in which the inequitable gendered impacts of the pandemic were widely recognised, and increasing instances of domestic violence against women and girls has been termed a shadow pandemic.
The report also notes that between 2015 and 2020, there has been a sharp drop in the number of women reporters in print, from 43% to 13%; and in television, from 60% to 52%[v]. This has been accompanied by a narrowing of the range of beats women were assigned – there were fewer women covering politics, economy, even health. And though the total number of male reporters have also decreased – due to extensive layoffs – they continued to be assigned to cover a much wider range of beats[vi].
Between 2005 and 2012, even as the Indian economy grew, nearly twenty million women dropped out of the workforce[vii] and this has only exacerbated during the pandemic. As of November 2021, 60% of employable people in India have fallen off the job market[viii]. News organisations have laid off close to a third of their editorial staff, and most of those who have managed to keep their jobs have suffered massive pay cuts[ix].
Even while working with binary gender categories, the story of who makes news – both literally and metaphorically, is bleak. Place this within the larger context of what has happened to journalism within the country and the situation seems unmitigable. In 2021, India was ranked at 142 out of 180 countries in the world in terms of press freedom. Reporters Without Borders called India “one of world’s most dangerous countries for journalists” noting that “They (journalists) are exposed to every kind of attack, including police violence against reporters, ambushes by political activists, and reprisals instigated by criminal groups or corrupt local officials.”[x] The report goes on to note that coordinated online right-wing hate campaigns are significantly more violent when the targets are women. Even amongst women journalists, those from marginalised communities are attacked more viciously. For instance, Meena Kotwal, a Dalit woman journalist has been facing online abuse and death threats after she posted a video of herself burning the Manusmriti on December 25, 2021[xi]. A few days later Muslim women, many of whom were journalists, were put up for ‘sale’ on the Bulli Bai app for a fake online auction[xii].
Why does this matter? This matters because who tells stories impacts what gets told, and how it is told. It matters because we are not simply missing half the story when women are not represented in news, we end up failing to understand issues and come up with viable solutions because we are not listening to what millions of citizens have to say. It matters because many of the ‘numbers’ listed here – like the number of journalists who have lost their lives to COVID – are even available only because of the labour of an informal collective like the Network of Women in Media, India. It matters because despite the problems that plague journalism in India – and there are many – it remains crucial to salvaging democracy in this country we call home.
[i] GMMP has been examining indicators of gender in the news, such as women’s presence in news media in terms of both media content and media workers, every five years since 1995.
[ii] See Who makes the news? Global Media Monitoring Project, 2010 – NWM India
[iii] As of 26 December 2021, 622 journalists and media workers have died due to COVID-19 according to the list maintained by the Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI).
[iv] See India-GMMP-Report.pdf (whomakesthenews.org)
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] See https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/559511491319990632/pdf/WPS8024.pdf
[viii] See Why the Drop in India’s Labour Participation Rate Can’t Be Ignored by Policymakers (thewire.in)
[ix] See Journalism during Covid-19: Loss of lives, layoffs and cutbacks (printweek.in)
[x] See India | RSF
[xi] “You will suffer same fate as Gauri Lankesh,” Dalit journalist Meena Kotwal facing online abuse, threats – TwoCircles.net
[xii] See ‘Bulli Bai Has Made Us Numb’: Kashmiri Women Journalists On Their ‘Online Auction’ (outlookindia.com)
