Pretoria - Women’s voices have largely been lost in news reporting of Covid-19 in South Africa, as in other countries.
This is a key finding of a study commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which researched the content of 2 million Covid-19 reports from the most visited online news providers in each of six countries between March 1 and mid-April in terms of their gender equality.
The researchers distilled information from South Africa, the US, UK, Kenya, Nigeria and India to understand the gender make-up of protagonists and experts featured in these reports, offering some insights and suggestions for how newsrooms can adjust their coverage.
The findings for South Africa were not unique, said report author Luba Kassova, and were consistent with studies on how news is framed in general.
Kassova, who is the co-director of Addy Kassova Audience Strategy, was presenting her findings on “The Missing Perspective of Women in Covid-19 News” on a webinar hosted in Pretoria yesterday by GIZ/UN Women, Government Communication and Information System with the National Press Club.
The study looked at indicators of gender equality in reporting in terms of women as protagonists and as sources of news expertise, and the coverage of gender equality issues in general in Covid-19 reporting.
Kassova said that in South Africa – unlike the US and UK where Covid-19 response teams were almost exclusively male – there was a more gender-balanced political structure. There was also gender parity in newsrooms and yet women’s share of quoted voices in coronavirus news stories was 4.5 times smaller than that of men, even higher figures than in the UK and US.
Despite the risks faced and dramatic impact the pandemic had had on women in particular, their voices were seldom heard in news reporting and when they were it was more often as victims or sources of anecdotal evidence, rather than as authorities.
The report found that women’s scientific and political expertise was undervalued and underused in Covid-19 news coverage, and the public remained biased in favour of patriarchal values and social norms.
For example, women make up 88% of all care workers but are quoted less than one quarter of the time in news about Covid-19. Overall, women were central to only one tenth of stories about Covid.
Kassova recommended ways in which bias could be redressed, such as raising awareness in newsrooms, seeking out women experts, developing story treatment on the impact of Covid-19 on women, and by a focus on the lenses through which stories are framed.
This is the first of two reports to be commissioned by the Gates Foundation. The second,to be released in December, will look into the causes of under-representation of women in the news.
Pretoria News