The global average of women in media remains dismal at 25%, according to the 6th edition of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) released in 2021.
Only 24% of African online reporters are women, according to the Africa GMMP regional report from 2020, compared to 76% for male reporters. Per the 2020 monitoring report, Nigerian female news presenters accounted for 54% of the total, while male news presenters accounted for 46%. Female reporters made up 15% of the total, while male reporters made up 85%. Female news subjects and sources made up 14% of the total, while male announcers made up 86%.
Despite the many Nigerian women who have walked the media path, according to Angela Ulunma Agoawike, a Nigerian journalist and member of the judging panel of the South African-based Sanlam Award for Excellence in Financial Journalism, most are only mentioned in passing in media literature – the first woman to do this or that. The story is told mostly by men, and even academics who write about it, rely mostly on available material, which often glosses over women who have played important roles in the media.
It is still challenging to find documents about African women in the media, politics, or other fields. Despite substantial research into the impediments to Nigerian women’s representation in the media and the recommended solutions to handle them, it is critical to first appreciate the history of media in Africa and its significance for Nigeria.
The African media landscape
In a wide-ranging interview with Agoawike, she says the challenges of the media in Africa are many, closely related, and in fact, a function of the socio-cultural nature of the society in which the media exists.
“Africa’s history is passed down mostly via oral tradition, one that may not have room for real enduring documentation and archiving. The documentation was done in the heads of those that managed to retell their stories (the griots, they were called) and through literature written about such events. In this ethno-cultural way of doing things, women were not reckoned with and so the stories recollected were mostly of males,” she says.
Agoawike adds that the preservation of the story of the media in Nigeria really did not exist, except in the context of documenting the anti-colonial struggles and agitation of the struggle for independence.
“Women played secondary/subservient roles. They did not play active/frontline roles in Christianity or traditional societies. Not much about their activities was documented in the early ‘Christian’ newspapers like Iwe Iroyin. They were also not part of the struggle against the colonial rule or for independence. So, again, their stories were not told, except where they played exceptional roles like in Queen Amina of Zaria, Madam Tinubu of Lagos, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Omu Okwei, and Omu Nwagboka. So, in documenting such activities, the women were conspicuously missing.”
The small but important leaps forward
Putting her words to work, Agoawike heads Abuja-based Journalism and Development Seminars (JADESeminars), a civil society group that curates stories of women who have broken through the glass ceiling in print media. The organization was founded by journalists who regard the media as a catalyst for development. Its purpose is to provide a forum for journalists and development experts.
Several other non-profit organizations have over the years joined efforts to fight the exclusion and underrepresentation of Nigerian women in the media. For instance, the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), through the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), creates awareness about the poor visibility, exclusion, and marginalization of women in the news.
The GMMP’s goal is gender-balanced media, a discursive intervention that has the potential to help stem and even reverse gender-based bias in practice. However, a comparison of the results of the Nigeria GMMP result from 2010 shows minimal improvement in the gender indices in the Nigerian media.
AWiM interacts with a number of partners to realize its objective through capacity building and a variety of events and programs for women in media through its yearly conferences, which tour African countries. Through its annual conferences, which tour African countries, AWiM collaborates with a number of partners to achieve its goal of capacity building and a variety of activities and programs for women in media.
The way forward
Talent, objectivity, balance, and neutrality on their own have proven ineffective in challenging the socio-cultural factors that reinforce and perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes in Nigerian media institutions.
Agoawike, however, believes that digitizing the archives in the media of African women will allow for more attention to be paid to the activities of African women in the media, and so doing, make it easier for researchers to access information for incorporation into the wider body of materials available to/for researchers.
This story was supported by Code for Africa’s WanaData initiative and the World Association for Christian Communication
