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62 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001
combining with business decisions to leave many women’s stories untold. Visibility of women
in the media, she writes, “does not necessarily translate into gender equity in terms of the
content of what goes on the pages.” After working for 18 years at two of India’s largest
newspapers, Angana Parekh directs the Women’s Feature Service, which provides access to
stories about women’s lives. Her goal: “to create ‘space’ for women’s voices and experiences
in mainstream media, where such topics don’t usually receive this same kind of attention.”
From Pakistan, Massoud Ansari, a senior reporter for Newsline in Karachi and contributor to
Women’s Feature Service, demonstrates how journalists, through their coverage of news,
maintain women’s lesser cultural status.
By turning the camera’s eye on their own lives, women in rural China created a collection of
photographs called Visual Voices which were, in turn, used to generate discussion about
aspects of their daily lives. Similarly, women’s photographs taken in Cape Town, South Africa,
as part of a project called Through Her Eyes, accompany our coverage of Africa.
Surveys of women journalists done by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) show
the varied pace of progress in different regions of the world, according to Bettina Peters, a
director at IFJ. From Chile, Veronica Lopez argues women bring “a certain look, a certain
feeling” to news coverage, and what they bring is what the public now wants. Blanca Rosales,
a Peruvian media consultant, describes what she learns from listening to women journalists
discuss their situations. Sadly, she reports that women who’ve reached top positions “don’t
feel the obligation to be trailblazers for other women.” Colombian journalist María Cristina
Caballero, who demonstrated great courage in reporting on her nation’s war and reached top
positions at her newspaper, recently turned her attention to helping other women journalists
as she became interested in “exploring the causes of the gender inequalities in the media
workplace and in seeking ways to possibly overcome these situations.”
For more than 25 years, as a journalist, editor and analyst, Naomi Sakr has covered the
Arab world. Using findings from her 2000 report, “Women’s Rights and the Arab Media,” Sakr
describes the tough roads women there must travel to break down barriers to their progress.
Photographs by German newspaper photographer Katharina Eglau accompany Sakr’s story
and that of Iranian-American Naghmeh Sohrabi, who explains how important stories about
women’s lives are submerged by inaccurate assumptions, particularly regarding the wearing of
a veil. It is, she writes, “rare to read a news report about the social and cultural situation in
Iran without a mention of veiled women.” And, in these stories, “a veil is used to either
demonstrate a person’s conservative viewpoint or to show the opposite—that despite the veil,
a woman holds views close to our own more liberal, democratic ones.” She offers four timely
suggestions to journalists that can be applied to improving coverage of women throughout the
Muslim world.
In our next issue of Nieman Reports, women journalists who work in the United States will
address issues related to these same questions. ■