Publications
Partners
South Africa may occupy a leading position in terms of women's representation in newsrooms and news leadership compared to some countries but when considering the issue of race, a different picture emerges, writes Luba Kassova.
Back in 2019, when I first started researching the representation of women in news in South Africa (alongside five other countries - India, Kenya, Nigeria, the UK, and the US), I remember being struck by how progressive the South African Constitution had become after the fall of apartheid.
The report I authored in 2020 revealed that the Constitution’s guarantee of gender and racial equality and its prohibition of any form of discrimination had resulted in South Africa occupying a leading position in terms of women's representation in newsrooms and news leadership compared to the other researched countries.
My newly released sequel report From Outrage to Opportunity: How to Include the Missing Perspectives of Women of All Colours in News Leadership and Coverage confirms that this leading position extends to women's representation in top editorial positions and as contributors in news coverage. Something to rejoice about, isn't it?
Under-represented
This new report, however, has overlaid a new dimension onto gender – that of race – which paints a different picture.
Although, as a whole, South Africa boasts the joint highest proportion of women who are editors-in-chief (37%) and women's representation as top editors in the highest-profile news specialisms of politics (45%) and economics (50%) exceeds their representation in other researched countries, adding the race dimension has revealed an underlying, unreported discrimination experienced by women of colour in news leadership.
READ | William Bird and Avani Singh: Protecting women journalists essential for democracy, media freedom
Women of colour are grossly under-represented in these top jobs, meaning that white women are over-represented.
Our research – the first of this type ever conducted - uncovered that the proportion of women of colour in top editorial jobs stands at just 25% across all researched news specialisms, much lower than their proportion in the working population (46%).
At one in five, their proportion as editors-in-chief and economics/business editors is lowest, but even as political and health editors, where women of colour are better represented, they still hold fewer than one in three roles.
The extraordinary invisibility of women of colour in South Africa
While researching the representation of women of all colours in news leadership in multi-racial societies i.e. South Africa, the UK and the US - we unearthed a deeper problem that makes the discrimination against women of colour that much more pernicious.
They are largely invisible when it comes to data reporting at organisational level because minimal effort is made to measure how gender intersects with race.
In South Africa, we found that the data for women of colour is at best patchy. A 2019 survey of South African journalists reported the proportion of women journalists as 49% but did not report the proportion of journalists who were women of colour.
READ | OPINION: Voiceless in the news: Women left out in the media
Our investigation uncovered that the problem also extends beyond news. For example, the extensive Demographic and Health survey published in 2016, which, among other things, examines the significant problem of domestic violence in South Africa, has broken down the findings by many categories, including gender, but not by race or by intersecting gender with race.
By not recording the experiences of women of colour, the nature and extent of the challenges they face in society or in news remain largely hidden.
As a woman, I have felt invisible, dismissed and have been talked over. However, nothing could prepare me for what I heard when interviewing women of colour from South Africa, the UK and the US. As they shared their experiences of being gaslighted and shut down, the loneliness and exhaustion they regularly felt, some for more than a decade, it dawned on me that as a white woman, I could never fully understand these taxing experiences that women of colour had been going through.
I realised that the problem extended beyond being numerically marginalised and encompassed cultural exclusion. In that moment I realised viscerally how important it is for the news industry to uncover the hidden perspectives of women of colour and to work through these barriers to inclusion they experience.
Sidelining, lack of support
Our research revealed that, aside from the colour of their skin, systematic sidelining and lack of support to progress their careers are key barriers to the inclusion of women of colour. The lack of support was linked to the fact that, belonging to neither all boys' clubs nor women’s clubs, women of colour simply fall through the social cracks. There is no doubt that cultural exclusion goes unnoticed by those in over-represented groups.
From Outrage to Opportunity offers a plethora of solutions for improving the visibility of women of colour in news leadership and new coverage. Central among them is awareness of the importance of measuring women's experiences and representation broken down by race; and the demand that governmental and other societal structures also measure and track the experiences of all women, including those of women of colour.
For in multi-racial societies like South Africa, the UK and the US, they have it harder than other groups. And they cannot and should not be expected to resolve the problem of their own exclusion or under-representation.
They need champions within newsrooms, news leadership and society: men and women of all colours who will work alongside each other to bring discrimination to the fore and resolve it in line with the promise of the most liberal Constitution in the world.
- Luba Kassova is the director at AKAS.
Disclaimer: News24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24.
