Gender stereotypes bar mediawomen from playing equal role

Gender stereotypes are common in Pakistani media that mostly make it difficult for women to play an equal role in the country’s workforce.
This was the upshot of a comprehensive study, a part of recent ILO project focusing on Pakistani journalists themselves, what they say on gender equality and their observation how they see things getting improved besides what it takes for media re-shape public opinions about working women.
In January 2012, with funding from the Canadian Government, the ILO GE4DE project started running training programmes for Pakistani journalists. The idea was to change the way the rapidly expanding media sector reported on working women, to help re-shape broader public opinion. The training was followed by a competition for the best stories on working women.
The expansion of the media industry also caught the attention of Frida Khan, the National Project Coordinator of the ILO’s Promoting Gender Equality for Decent Employment (GE4DE) project, and the fact that so few journalists had received any formal training in reporting, let alone how to report in a gender responsive way. She saw a “real opportunity to work with media to improve the situation for working women in Pakistan”.
Frida’s aim was to “change the way that reporting on women perpetuated a world view where men carried the briefcases and women carried the babies”, by sensitizing journalists and editors themselves to not only incorporate women’s perspectives in their reporting but to consider a broader and more subtle range of issues that affect Pakistani women who are working or want to work.
As a reporter for Pakistan Television, Nida Fatima Zaidi sees many of the country’s most pressing social problems. But for her one of the most difficult was also one of the most personal – gender equality. “Women in Pakistan in particular are portrayed by the media mainly in two major roles, either as sex objects or housewives,” she said.
“The working woman, the labourer, the career girl, the high academic achiever, the productive citizen contributing greatly to the economy through her skills is underrated, underreported and hardly celebrated,” she added. “This undermines her identity as a labourer, skilled worker and a professional.”
After almost a decade of reporting, Nida was getting tired of fighting the “invisible war” for working women. She was frustrated that the dramatic expansion of Pakistan’s media sector in the last decade had done little to change attitudes to women and work.
Another journalist Aoun Sahi said women have no contribution in most activities including decision-making and this can be seen as a major obstacle. “Their voices need to be heard without stereotyping” he said.