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Women: International
An Absence of Women
At newspapers in South Africa, few women are at the top.
Some wonder why and ask why it matters.
By Pippa Green
About a decade ago in South Africa,
when apartheid was already
on its deathbed, Mamphela
Ramphele, then a university professor,
spearheaded a study on employment
equity at the University of Cape Town.
The results were mainly unsurprising
in a country coming out of 40 years of
institutionalized racism. More than 90
percent of top-level academic and administrative
positions were held by
white men.
What was surprising was the almost
complete absence of white women from
the structures of power at what was
considered a fairly liberal university.
One of Ramphele’s aides, who’d conducted
the research, remarked at the
time that the legacy of apartheid edu-
Through Her Eyes
Taking pictures and telling stories,
women in two poor communities a
continent and an ocean away share
their lives and hardships with each
other and with the world at large by
participating in Through Her Eyes, a
project based in Oakland, California.
Co-directed by documentary
film producer Cassandra Herrman
and documentary photographer
Mimi Chakarova, Through Her Eyes
began in Cape Town, South Africa by
giving cameras to women to document
their lives. A similar project is
taking place in East Oakland. The
hope is that through this work these
women find commonality in their
experiences, first by exchanging
images and stories and eventually
by meeting one another. More information
about this project, as well as
additional images, can be found at
www.throughhereyes.org. ■
Mother and child, Guguletu township, Cape Town.
Photo by Mimi Chakarova. (Chakarova is co-director of
the Through Her Eyes project.)
cation, poor social and
living conditions for
black people, as well as
racist job hiring practices
built into the law, could
explain the racial discrepancy.
What could explain
the absence of
white women from toplevel
positions—women
who’d presumably had
the same privileges of
education and opportunity
as their male counterparts?
The prejudices
that excluded women
must be so deep, she
reasoned, that they were
especially hard to unravel,
let alone combat.
The same question
might be asked of the
media in South Africa.
Seven years after the end
of apartheid, and three
years into a new employment
equity law intended
to promote
blacks and women, there
are only three women
newspaper editors in the
country. One is black,
two are white. One is
editor of a weekly, one
an editor of a business supplement
that gets inserted into the dailies of the
biggest English-language group, and
the third is editor of a business weekly.
None is editor of a daily. There was one
black woman editor of a small circulation
daily in Port Elizabeth, but her
management closed down the newspaper,
and she now works for the government.
The depth of the prejudice was
shown a few years ago at the special
hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) about the media.
A senior newspaper company executive
said that when his (foreign)
company had bought out the largest
English-speaking news group in 1994,
they could find no blacks or women in
the entire company worthy of
editorship.
It was, in retrospect and at the time,
an astonishing statement. Women
“manned” the engine rooms of newsrooms
then, as now—they were copyeditors,
chief copyeditors, news editors,
and assistant editors. They were
reporters on the frontlines covering
72 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001