The Margin Dweller’s Point of View

A Presentation at the 4th Female Researchers Panel, themed “Women in the Margins: The Irony of Media Coverage” at the ACSPN 9th Annual Conference.

I am a Managing Editor in a newsroom, and I am scarce. And no, I am not the only woman in this “enviable” position which is why the theme of this panel is “women in the margins.” We acknowledge that there are more women in places where we were scarce before; otherwise, the theme would have been “let women in the room.”  There has been some growth, but it has been marginal, and the margins are cramped. We need more room. 

Only margin dwellers can understand the unique experiences and so perspectives of fellow margin dwellers, but it behooves them to share these experiences with the land occupiers. To make a consistent case for why land occupiers must yield grounds for the dispossessed land owners who, though having equal land rights, are dwelling in the margins. 

Several conversations allude to the fact that these conversations have been had enough, that there is no need for the passion and fervour, often misinterpreted as aggression, with which gender issues are discussed, but data tells us otherwise. The challenge of collecting gender data, especially in developing countries like Nigeria, means that the scale of limitations or the disparity in the parity between the genders is still largely unknown. According to the report by one of the foremost gender data repositories in the world titled “Mapping Gender Data Availability in Africa,” – Nigeria lacks critical up-to-date gender data across most indicators, especially on economic opportunities, education, and environment. Where these data exist, they sometimes do not conform to internationally recommended definitions.

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According to UN Women on Nigeria, “As of December 2020, only 46.7% of indicators needed to monitor the SDGs from a gender perspective were available, with gaps in key areas, in particular: unpaid care and domestic work, key labour market indicators, such as the gender pay gap and information and communications technology skills. In addition, many areas – such as gender and poverty, physical and sexual harassment, women’s access to assets (including land), and gender and the environment – lack comparable methodologies for regular monitoring. Closing these gender data gaps is essential for achieving gender-related SDG commitments in Nigeria”. 

Now, across many of the theories that attempt to help explain or give language to gender development, whether the socialisation theories that include the social learning theory or the cognitive class that includes the cognitive learning theory, which propounds that gender behaviours are learnt from the interaction of the biological, affective and cognitive; there is a running theme, modeling. Models are part of how we learn and/or understand gender, and in almost every instance, the mass media is described as a model.

The agenda-setting and gatekeeping theories of the media reinforce the media’s positioning as models. While one places the media in a position to determine what the public talks about and, by extension, what it thinks about, the second place’s power in the hands of mass media to determine what makes it out on their platforms. 

While there have been arguments about the causal relationship between public thought and media agendas, especially with technology and the democratisation of information, inherent in that argument is a possibility that the agenda set by the media, which is almost directly proportional to what media gatekeepers allow to become an agenda, has shaped the worldviews of the human drivers of the technology, who are changing the information landscape.

So inherent in the technology created is the social construct of its creators. And this worldview, if cognitive learning theory is to be believed, is shaped by both internal and external factors, and the media is one such external factor.  Technology, viewed from the Social Constructivist lens, with its intrinsic limitations,  lends credence to this assumption.

However we look at it, there is no absolvement for the media in its role in the development of gender ideologies. So how well has the media performed this role? From the margin dwellers’ point of view? Not very well.

The global media monitoring project answers the question, who is seen and heard in the media? And this is a direct quote from the report “Only 24% of news subjects – the people interviewed or whom the news is about – were female. Women’s points of view were less frequently heard in the topics that dominated the news agenda; even in stories that affected women profoundly, such as gender-based violence, the male voice prevailed. When women did make the news, it was primarily as “stars” or “ordinary people,” not as experts, professionals, or figures of authority. While the studies turned up some exemplary gender-balanced and gender-sensitive journalism, overall they demonstrated a glaring deficit in the news media globally: half the world’s population was barely present”. 

It will take 67 years to close the gender equality gap in traditional new media. 

This report was released in the year of COVID, and so COVID-related stories dominated news coverage the world over; the increase in science-related stories, however, was proportional to a decline in women’s voices in that section after a rise between 2010 and 2015. Unwittingly, again the media has reinforced the “science is for men” stereotype. 

The reduction in female voices in the news during Covid is even more ironic when compared with FP Analytics report “Elevating Gender Equality in COVID-19 Economic Recovery” which revealed that women and girls suffered more from the socioeconomic impact of the pandemic and are increasingly more likely to face poverty, economic insecurity, gender-based violence, and barriers to accessing critical health services. 

The GMMP report revealed that seven to nine stories out of 10 on sexual harassment, rape, and other gender inequalities reinforce or do nothing to challenge existing stereotypes. 

The numbers are, to put it nicely, abysmal.  

Although the world moved forward by 1 point, African media is stagnated. There is no improvement in gender representation in news media. A snap monitoring of business or economy stories across six media organisations in Southern, Western, and Eastern Africa on the 29th of October confirms this diagnosis is still correct in 2022. 

Nigeria is a perfect reflection of the African status, and if anyone has the time, a quick survey of the pages of newspapers on any day will confirm this. Male-to-female representation, as subjects, experts, or even featured images, is often roughly 80% male to 20% female. In one instance, a news story about the devastation of flooding experienced by sellers in a market spoke to seven men to share their experiences, and no female. It is a safe assumption from that report that the sellers in that market are only male; in reality, we know it is not true.

The Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development’s media monitoring report on media coverage of conflict in Nigeria covered ten media organisations across print, broadcast, and digital. Female voices on conflict issues as sources are 5% to male voices 95%, less than 1 in 10 news sources were male. The authors of the stories are also predominantly male, 80% male to 20% female.

When we, the margin dwellers, look at the media, a sea of men is reflected back to us. Among the many implications of lack of representation is the exclusion from the design of solutions, a dangerous complexity in equality conversations. A simple social experiment, asking men and women, “when you think about being kidnapped, what is your greatest fear?” yielded interesting results, and if we do the same experiment in any room in Nigeria, the results will be similar. 

Overwhelmingly, men feared death, ransom payments’ impact on their families’ economies, and, to a lesser degree, trauma. For women, 9 out of 10 times, the fear is rape, abuse, and trauma. Now, if a room full of men are designing policies and strategies, they are unlikely to create solutions that deal with this uniquely female angle, and it is through no fault of theirs; it is simply not in their frame of reference. Now, when the media portrays kidnappings and the myriad of security challenges from a male perspective, the media unwittingly postures to the public, especially decision-makers, that the issue is male. 

The maths is that simple.

Perhaps this is the same challenge the media itself has, that the gatekeepers who determine agendas are predominantly male. So their frames of reference or worldviews are limited to the male perspective. It does appear so because worldwide, women make up only 33% of the journalism workforce and less than 25% of its management and boards, including media owners and editors.

For example, the infamous rejection of gender bills is by itself heartbreaking, but media coverage of the rejection is even more so. Yes, there was coverage, but was it nuanced or mere informational describing yet another incidence in the chaotic landscape of Nigerian governance?  But even more disheartening is the lack of local coverage beyond National news organisations. Indicating that Gender is still a uniquely elitist conversation, yet much of our nurture happens locally.

Here is a summation “if the media reflects it, it exists. If the media does not challenge it, it will continue to exist”. 

From their cramped spaces, the margin dwellers are speaking up to one of the vital power brokers of land shares, the media. Our unique perspectives and experiences are missing from your outputs. We do not blame you, you don’t live within our margins, nor have you learned to walk circumspectly within the bounds of our limitations. But we do ask that you listen and take action, not just the “act of listening” but acting upon what you have heard in a way that clearly affects your processes and, by extension, your actions.

Bio: Adenike Aloba is the Managing Editor and Program Director of Dataphyte

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