Women and the Media World
The following sections are extracted from a research paper entitled The Portrayal and Participation of Women in the Media, by Margaret Gallagher, (Institute of Educational
Technology - The Open University - U.K.) The paper was published by UNESCO (Paris), December 1979.
It is an excellent paper which gives us a glimpse of the status of women in media internationally, and deals with women both as subjects and as participants. It has an extensive bibliography and is a useful source of information.
Distribution of Resources
In an overall sense, it is evident that the distribution of mass media in the world isstrongly disproportional to the distribution of population. The majority of the world's population lives outside the small number of countries in the developed regions where mass media are concentrated.
In terms of individual media, the number of daily newspapers in the developed world is 4,620, whereas in the entire developing world it is only 3,280. In 16 African countries, the ratio of radio receivers to population is less than 10% ; in 19 countries in Asia, it is between 1% and 8% . Twenty African countries are without television, and in most of those which have television services less than 1% of the population have receivers. In Asia, the proportion of television receivers per population is generally less than 5%. In contrast 96% of all American homes had at least one television receiver in 1978.
Access to Resources
A further factor which must be considered is the access of various sectors of the population to those mass media which do exist. Clearly, as far as television is concerned, only the elite urban strata are covered in many developing countries, and even there, differential access is likely between women and men. A Kenyan study, for instance, found that men were more than twice as likely to ever watch television than were women. In the case of radio, however, the same study found a much smaller differential: while 70% of men listened to radio, almost 60% women also listened
As far as radio is concerned, the ratio of receivers to population is less significant than in the case of television, largely because of the portability and flexibility of the transistor radio. The Indian government, for instance, has subsidised the purchase of community radio receivers, and All India Radio broadcasts in some fifty dialects, as well as in the country's major languages. There are reports from many countries of group listening to educational radio programmes while at work in the fields or in the marketplace. In the West, the majority of radio listeners are women and not just those who are home-bound: the radio is a common source of news and entertainment while at work in factories, industrial concerns and so on. In Egypt, for example, it has been estimated that women account for 70% of the audience for radio literacy courses. At the same time, differences between urban and rural women remain important: studies carried out in India found 80% of rural women claiming never to hear radio broadcasts, compared with 30% of urban women.
When it comes to the print media, differing literacy rates between men and women take on special importance. Worldwide, half again as many womenas men are illiterate. On every continent, the majority of the illiterates are women. In Africa, Asia and the Middle East, there is a difference of at least twenty points between male and female literacy rates, and in all three regions the difference has grown since 1960. Overall, 40% of the world's women have no access to what is the cheapest, most durable and most accessible medium of communication, but the proportion reaches 51% in Asia, 83% in Africa and 85% in the Arab States
Even access to film and cinema attendance are very much more limited for women than for men. Studies carried out among rural women in Kenya indicated that only 2% saw films regularly and even among urban people, men were twice as likely to visit the cinema on a regular basis. Similar studies in India found that less than 1% of rural women saw films regularly, and 78% had never seen a film. Among urban women, nearly a quarter saw films regularly. Both the Kenyan and the Indian women said that domestic chores prevent their attendance at the cinema or mobile film unit in the early evenings: later at night, they are not expected to go out, either alone or in groups.
Thus, despite an overall growth in world communication facilities in recent years, a large percentage of the world's population - women in particular - is not reached by the
mass media.
International Media Marketing
Quite apart from the problem, which exists in all societies, of the concentration of media facilities under the control of urban elites (and a consequent irrelevance of much content to rural less privileged groups), there exists in many developing countries a lack of resources for the production of local materials: this is particularly true of television programmes which are exported on a massive scale by the United States. Small local networks find it much more economical to import American programmes than to produce their own, and the US exports to almost all countries with television systems. In some countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, US imports account for up to 5 0% of the total programming, while in Western Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia more than 20% of programming is made up of US imports.
Considerable debate - though less detailed research - has centred on the implications of this vast traffic. To what extent are culturally alien social models and values imposed on and learnt by viewers in countries which "buy American"? Although there is scanty empirical evidence to support it, it may seem intuitively correct to suppose that the large-scale display of American images of women must have an impact of some kind on the formation or transformation of local perceptions, both male and female, in Australia, 3 0 % of whose programmes are of US origin, research has indicated that the content of these imports was related to the substance of children's perceptions of social reality in their home country. Other studies, for example, in the Philippines, Egypt, Yugoslavia — all countries with a high proportion of American imports — report contradictions between imported media images of women, and indigenous cultural values. In the case of Finland, images in these imported programmes are said to run counter to current social and media policies vis-a-vis the portrayal of women.
Meanwhile, although it is true that the particular sex biases expressed in the media of the United States can be detected in many countries of Western Europe, in certain Latin American output and in the media of countries such as those mentioned above, these account for only part of the total picture. The overall findings of at least one cross-cultural review that, from one culture to another - even in those countries which rely less, or not at all, on imports — the media present a somewhat distorted picture of reality vis-avis the demographic characteristics of men and women, is of sufficient significance to indicate that media bias against women starts at home, even if this becomes reinforced and perhaps transformed by other, foreign influences.
Women and Media: Cultural Differences
Mass communication processes and media organizations cannot be separated from the social, economic and political systems in which they are located. Although at the level of theory the media may be somewhat abstractly identified as agents of the range of socio-economic and political policies prevailing in the wider society. It is no accident that in those countries in which women have made quickest progress towards full social, economic and political participation for example, China, Cuba, countries within the U.S.S.R. - economic imperatives have underlain formulations of policies on women, and the mass media have in general reflected government commitment to these policies. Elsewhere, in the economies of the capitalist world, the media have tended to respond to other, commercial, pressures which characterise women's participation primarily in terms of consumerism.
Consistency and Diversity: Some Examples
An extensive review of cultural similarities and differences is hampered primarily because of the lack of data from certain world regions, notably Africa, the Pacific and Eastern Europe. However, scattered information does exist even for these areas, and can be illuminating. As a general statement, however, despite clear cultural variations in emphasis, certain themes and trends recur in each regional cameo. The picture is remarkable only for its consistency when compared from one country to another.
North American and Western Europe: Conservative Consumerism
Analyses of the media of the industrialized countries of the West produce consistent if depressing results. The picture which emerges is of a world in which women are vastly outnumbered by men; of women who are defined primarily in terms of their relationship with men; who are for the most part confined to the home where housework is their obsession; who are economically and psychologically dependent, incompetent, indecisive and foolish; who rarely occupy positions of authority and are often unsympathetically portrayed if they do; who are more likely to have their problems solved for them by a man than to solve their own or someone else's problems. The canvas is not entirely black: an increase in nontraditional portrayals has been noted in both broadcast and print media, which may be attributable to an awareness of and response to public discussion of women's issues and problems. However, these developments may more accurately be interpreted as a commercial answer to changing market forces, rather than as a specific break with previous conceptualisations: the threat of falling sales or poor audience ratings results in a tendency to cautious conservatism rather than a readiness to innovate.
Latin America; Ideology and Morality
The intense commercialism of most Latin American systems, allied with a morality largely based in Catholic ethic, leads to a conservatism very similar to that found in North America, although reflecting a somewhat different value system. A strong emphasis on motherhood and reproduction is sublimated in romantic love; at the same time, the consumer values associated with commercialism place women firmly in the home. Problems are generally ascribed to personal, rather than social causes; their solution is almost inevitably found through love or marriage, which is also associated with social mobility. Overall, these images present a fairly consistent, though oppressive, picture of a world in which happiness comes not through personal effort but through male intervention. Here again, the media can be said to be functioning as a conservative force, maintaining a status quo dictated by commercial, ideological imperatives.
Africa: Self-Conscious Development .
Although information is fragmentary and the evidence is perilously thin, there is some indication that images of women in certain African countries may reflect and benefit from a relatively self-conscious use of the media in the general process of development. Reports suggest a growth in stories about women, as well as a stress on their potential contribution to development at national and international levels. Analysis of the Zambian daily press between 1971 and 1975 found positive and strong images of women as equal partners of men in national development. The appearance in Ghana, Kenya and Senegal, of explicitly or implicitly feminist magazines which have become established in recent years, is a further indication that alternative self-images are available. At the same time, many of the features noted in media treatment of women elsewhere can also be detected in the younger media of Africa: under-representation of women as newsmakers, the use of women as a commodity in advertising; an ambivalent attitude to women evident in certain stereotyped images in which women are exclusively and unalterably "good" and pure, or definitely and unchangeably "bad" or immoral
Asia: Progress and Problems
This vast area contains within it an enormous diversity of social systems and media, spanning extreme capitalist to extreme socialist political and economic types, and reflecting a continuum of social development which includes some of the least developed and most advanced industrialized nations of the world. Industrial development is not, however, necessarily paralleled by improvement in the status of women. To take just one example, exceptionally rigid rules appear to govern the lives of women in Japan. In a country where there is almost total media saturation, the mass media reflect, according to various studies of television, press and film, the great difficulties experienced by women in any attempt to step outside the highly traditional framework within which they have been culturally set. According to several analyses of the Japanese press, there is a definite tendency in news reporting to provoke hostility towards women who transgress traditional boundaries and approval of those who remain within them. Studies of television confirm this picture, reporting that the medium presents an extremely narrow range of female images. At the same time, recent research
detects some very slow response to changing social currents in the most recent programmes, with some limited admission of the possibility of roles for women outside the strictly traditional sphere of home and family
At the other end of the economic and political spectrum, an altogether different picture emerges of the women and media relationship in China. Media portrayals of women in China probably represent the most extreme example of how, in a historically brief time-span, the mass media can make a major contribution to a revolutionary reversal of women's selfimage and of social definitions of women's roles. Clearly, the importance of government intervention in this process is paramount, the success - or otherwise - of media in promoting acceptance of change being directly related to the adequacy of political conceptualization of women's problems and their solution. For instance, Chinese women have expressed concern that by portraying heroines only in leadership roles — showing no hint of the competing demands which real women in such positions actually face - the media have ignored the specific difficulties inherited by women from their historical past or through their reproductive roles. So even when exceptionally positive images of women are offered, problems remain
In between these two extremes studies of media in countries such as India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Pakistan reveal similar tendencies in their portrayal of women as those noted elsewhere: the stereotyped roles of housewife, mother and consumer of advertised goods, an emphasis on youth and physical attractiveness, a stress on passivity and self-sacrifice, and the recurring good-bad motif allied with double standards of morality are all cited recurrently in research in these countries.
Eastern Europe: Contradictions and Traditions
As in China most evidence points to the fact that the media of the socialist countries of Eastern Europe portray women in an overall positive way, stressing their contribution to economic and social development. Again as in China, however. the same dilemma for women — the conflicting demands of their economic and family roles - exists and is, according to some Polish and Russian research, actually exacerbated by the media. These apparently perpetuate the traditional belief that the father's role relates very little to child-bearing, by depicting women as mothers but not men as fathers. Moreover, there is some evidence that media directed at children and young people retain images which embody traditional distinctions between women's and men's emotional make-up, intellectual capacities and motivations. The somewhat depressing implication here is that it is notoriously difficult, even in those media controlled by governments with a strong commitment to social change, to uproot the deeply-ingrained beliefs and assumptions which underlie dominant images of women in the media.
