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Women: International
Breaking Down Barriers in the Arab Media
Women activists have shown that obstacles to progress take many forms.
By Naomi Sakr
What is the point of drawing up
policies to make women’s
rights central to national development
when, at the same time,
negative stereotyping of women goes
on daily in the national press and on
television?
Women’s rights campaigners in several
Arab countries are organizing today
to end this anomaly. They are exposing
the negative aspects of media
messages and working to overcome
the hurdles facing women journalists
and to empower them to counter the
negativity. A multiplicity of deterrents
means the campaign has to take place
on several fronts.
Paradoxically, as I realized while
researching a report on women in the
Arab media for a media freedom center
in London, the challenge facing women
has become more daunting as the number
of Arabic-language media outlets
has increased. A popular perception
has arisen in recent years that women
are everywhere in the Arabic-language
Arab Women Media Center
In December 1999, the Arab Women
Media Center (AWMC) was launched
in Jordan. Its mission is to assist women
who work in various media, including
print, audio and video. The center’s
focus is on improving coverage of
women, children and family, and human
rights violations. Its vision is that
more Jordanian women will become
engaged in the work of their nation’s
development. To accomplish these
objectives, staff at the center gather
research about these topics, write and
disseminate reports to inform journalists
and governmental policymakers,
and educate and train women in new
media technologies. After a pan-Arab
media, above all as glamorous news
presenters on satellite television channels.
The proliferation of Arab-owned
satellite channels has also generated
an increase in airtime for advertising,
Women’s Media Conference was held
last spring, the need for a network of
support for Arab women in media became
apparent; providing such a network
became another goal of the center.
Also in 2001, AWMC began
publishing AYAMM, a magazine that
highlights the written work of youth in
Jordan. The founding director of the
center, Mahasen Al Emam, was the first
woman editor in chief of a weekly Jordanian
newspaper and the first female
elected to the 10-member Jordanian
Press Council. More information about
the center can be found at http://
odag.org/awmc. ■
with commercials featuring women in
large numbers mainly as impressionable
consumers, decorative objects or
cleaners and cooks. Indeed, in terms of
both numbers and images, it seems
that women’s growing presence on
Arab television, far from ending their
subordination in the media, might be
reinforcing it.
Evidence collected by Lebanese reporter
May Elian and others supports
this concern. It suggests that women
are used by the appearance-conscious
visual media to attract viewers. Worse
still, they are used in a way that associates
women with a superficial role, in
the sense of reading from other
people’s scripts or delivering “just one
question” reports.
Print journalism, in contrast, is still
seen as a male domain because it involves
“hard work” and needs to be
“taken seriously.” Elian presented comparative
data to a seminar on Gender
and Communication Policy held in
Beirut in the run-up to the U.N.
Assembly’s Special Session on Women
in 2000. She found that, whereas the
dominant Lebanese television stations
have many more women than men on
their news desks, the gender ratio on
newspapers is quite the reverse.
Women media professionals surveyed
by the Beirut-based Institute for
Women’s Studies in the Arab World
concurred that important editorial decisions
in all media were still invariably
made by men.
Hurdles confronting women in the
media workplace are universal, as the
International Women’s Media Foundation
has shown. The main ones are
juggling family obligations with erratic
work schedules dictated by breaking
news, together with a lack of successful
role models. Nagwa Kamel, a Cairo
University professor, told the opening
conference of the Arab Women Media
Center in Amman in June 2001 that
108 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001