Sierra Leone has made some progress on gender equality, putting in place legal frameworks, a Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment policy, and gender focused initiatives but cultural attitudes and practices in a deeply patriarchal nation remains a critical issue.
Women in Sierra Leone struggle to overcome stereotypes which excludes them from fully participating in political processes. As we approach the 2023 elections, Sierra Leoneans are reminded once more that Elections are periods of unease and heightens concerns about incidences of violence against women in elections (VAWE). The negative use and effect of the media was indicated by women as one of the barriers during the Karene consultations on the 2018 elections.
In 2018, UNWomen engaged the Initiatives for Media Development (IMdev) to monitor key newspapers, radio, and television during the elections. 20 media outlets were selected to be monitored on the basis of their perceived credibility, reach, audience, and frequency. The 20 media outlets comprised six newspapers, three Television stations and 11 radio stations in all five administrative regions of the country. The picture of gender sources represented in the media during the elections period in Sierra Leone dating from 18th February to 5th April 2018 tells the story of an unhealthy imbalance in gender sensitivity. While there are evidence of an increase in the use of female sources as the weeks progressed, the overall picture is one dominated by male sources by a wider margin. And even within this depiction, on being balanced, newspapers and TV stood out as the media that did poorly and very poorly respectively, in terms of the use of female sources. This is very important considering the role newspapers and TV play as media of persuasive communication, and from which the political elites get their information to help them make informed policy decisions and also carry out media campaign to mitigate or minimise the effect.
This year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) campaign calls for action to create a world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination, and has the theme of “gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow.” In this age of new media, we all bear responsibility for promoting and using our media channels to reflect the world we want to see and live in. The traditional media play a pivotal role in defining who we are as individuals and as a society and has real- consequences, including the promotion of stereotypes, discrimination, violence against women as entertainment, online abuse against women and girls. These conditions allow gender inequality, injustice, and violence to fester and grow.
According to the Global Media Monitoring Report 2020 “All things remaining equal, it will take at least a further 67 years to close the average gender equality gap in traditional news media.” This is indeed alarming. What we see, hear, and read in media of all kinds affects individual and collective thinking and action – filtered in turn by the narrating-self.
In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari writes about two selves that co-exist in every person: the experiencing-self and the narrating-self. He describes the experiencing-self as a moment-to-moment consciousness, that “remem¬bers nothing, and tells no stories and is seldom consulted when it comes to major decisions”. In contrast, there is the narrating-self, which retrieves memories, tells stories, and makes big decisions. Crucially, the narrating-self “doesn’t aggregate experiences – it averages them.” In short, the narrating-self clings to the familiar and comfortable, seek¬ing points of conformity and least resistance, in order to protect itself in a world of contradiction and confusion. People’s perceptions about life and death, peace and conflict, justice and injustice, and women and men, are coloured – sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes boldly – by what seem to be majority views in a form of socio-cultural conditioning.
In 2015, the period remaining to full gender equality based on the GEM Index was 72 years, thus the 2020 result signals consistency in the slow cumulative pace of change over time. Full gender equality on numerical counts, however, is in¬sufficient without improvement in the quality of journal¬ism from a gender perspective. Even with the gender difference, it is important not to lose sight of the overall decline or stagnation across time on these indicators in the output of all journalists, women, and men alike.
The findings of the Global Media Monitoring report 2020 reinforce the perception that there is still a long road ahead to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” (Sustainable Development Goal 5). Identifying strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures in the ways women and girls appear in the news media is part of a larger, collective endeavour to transform information and communication systems. Only then will Harari’s “narrating-self” find fair¬ness, balance, and equality in news media content. Story quality from a gender perspective tends to be marginally higher in the output of women journalists, in terms of likelihood to clearly challenge gender stereotypes, to raise gender (in)equality issues and to make reference to legislation or policy that promotes gender equality or human rights.
“The failure to extend the opportunity for more citizens to tell their own stories in their own words, to tell the stories which are important to them and, also, to a broad range of people, compromises the value of the news to its multiple and diverse publics. The failure to represent the diversity of people and opinion present in society not only has im¬plications for public discourse and decision-making, but it also plays a role in eroding trust in news journalists.” (“GMMP 2020 : 6th Global Media Monitoring Project show ...”)
Worth noting also, is that the media also has redeeming qualities, as the media can and has been a powerful force for justice and equality. There are so many stories to tell – yes there are news reports that portray women and men accurately and fairly, which strengthens our understanding of our communities.
Together as media organisations, we should not just imagine a gender equal world, but work towards a world where all are valued, diversity is celebrated, inclusion is the standard, and equitable is the norm.
Global Media Monitoring Report (GMMP)
Every five years since 1995, GMMP research has taken the pulse of selected indicators of gender in the news media, including women’s presence in relation to men, gender bias and stereotypes in news stories and other content. The sixth research was completed in 2020.
The GMMP is also the largest advocacy initiative on changing the representation of women in the world’s news media. GMMP data has shown that news paints a picture of a world in which women are virtually invisible. "Women are dramatically under-represented in the news, with only 24% of them serving as news subjects and sources." (“WACC | Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP)”)
The Initiatives for Media Development (IMdev) is the local media monitoring partner in Sierra Leone.