Safety of Women Journalists in Nigerian News Media

In recent decades, women journalists' professional safety has attracted an enormous research attention globally and in Nigeria. Interestingly, often similar findings are likely generated by most of the studies highlighting stiff gender-based challenges. This chapter investigated the safety experiences of Nigerian women journalists to identifying the typology of gender-based discriminations and coping strategy affected women journalists used to manage to work in a male-dominated media industry. Employing a semi-structured interview approach, 37 participants (25 women journalists, 10 men journalists, and 2 human resource managers) were interviewed from 12 broadcast media organisations in Northern Nigeria. The data were analysed using thematic analysis and the findings showed that Nigerian women journalists experience different types of gendered unsafety including discrimination in newsgathering and production and sexual harassment; most of the affected women used risky coping strategies such as ignoring; most media organisations lacked policies and frameworks to handle such cases.

With the Newsroom at Home: Routines and Tensions of Women Journalists in Times of Covid-19

This article identifies the routines and working practices of women journalists from Colombia and Venezuela in the framework of the health emergency caused by covid-19 in the countries where they work. It is a quantitative research at a descriptive cross-sectional level in which an instrument made up of 26 questions organized into five categories of analysis was used. Categories include family–work relationship, working life, and health and well-being, and the questionnaire was applied to 110 professionals from Colombia and Venezuela. It was found that the compulsory confinement hastened the insertion of journalists in the use of information and communication technologies, applications, and software for content production. Although they were already working in digital media, they had to develop new skills in this field. For 47% of them, their working hours were extended for more than 3 hours a day, which for 79% represents family tensions, given that 38% have underage children or older adults under their care. However, during the confinement, their participation in the formation of public opinion was also expanded through their personal social networks, incorporating corruption issues and citizen complaints. Regarding their routines, it is concluded that the pandemic transformed access to information sources, newsrooms, and, therefore, the dynamics of news production, so we are faced with a new way of doing journalism that puts reporting and ethics into tension with information and communication technologies.

Media Framing of Women’s Football During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article examines British media coverage of women’s association football during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, to identify how the media framed the women’s game and how these frames could shape the public perceptions of it. Through a database search of British-based news coverage of women’s football, 100 news articles were identified in the first 6 months after the start of the pandemic. A thematic analysis was conducted, and five dominant frames were detected in the context of COVID-19: 1) financial precariousness of women’s football; 2) the commercial prioritisation of men’s football; 3) practical consideration of the sport (e.g., alterations to national and international competitions); 4) debating the future of women’s football and 5) concern for players (e.g., welfare, uncertain working conditions). These frames depart from the past trivialisation and sexualisation of women’s sport, demonstrate the increased visibility of women’s football, and shift the narrative towards the elite stratum of the game. Most of this reporting was by women journalists, while men were shown to write less than women about women’s football. This research advocates continued diversification of the sports journalism workforce to dissolve the hegemonic masculine culture that still largely dominates the industry.

Kurdish women and TV journalism in Iraqi Kurdistan: Experiences and strategies

Few studies on female TV journalists in the Middle East have been conducted. Neither have Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts been used to analyse women journalists’ experiences of their professional practice and their strategies for navigating a male-dominated media world in the Middle East. For this unique study, ten Kurdish women journalists that work for six different TV stations in Iraqi Kurdistan were interviewed. Informed by different forms of capital, the thematic analysis revealed four themes that capture the respondents’ experiences and strategies: coping with perceptions of pretty dolls and honorary men; coping with the threat of violence and a bad reputation; coping with the gendered distribution of news assignments; and tackling glass ceilings and unwritten rules. A particularly interesting result of the study was that while the strategies range from proclaiming any news hard news to openly defying orders from the managers, and to claiming that one’s ability to advance depends on having a strong personality, the focus is consistently on individualistic survival strategies. When masculinity and male norms still dominate the contents of symbolic capital, it may result in seemingly counterproductive practices such as the lack of a distinct ‘we’ feeling among women journalists. For women journalists, the cost of transforming their cultural and social capital into symbolic capital that is effective in the journalistic field is affected by both the journalistic field and the society at large, which creates contextually bound obstacles to women journalists in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Women Journalists and Social Media Activism: An Analysis of the Hashtags #DeixaElaTrabalhar and #LasPeriodistasParamos on Instagram

The social media collective actions through the hashtags #DeixaElaTrabalhar and #LasPeriodistasParamos raised problems that women journalists were suffering in both Brazil and Spain. While the representation of feminism has long been studied, less attention has been paid to comparative studies and the more personal representation. Focusing on a combination of visual and textual qualitative content analysis, we explore 90 Instagram posts from women journalists within the two hashtags and how they portray themselves in relation to their profession. At the time of writing, Instagram is one of the most popular social networks focused on the publication of audiovisual content. This makes it suitable for the study of online self-representation. The article identifies using the Documentary Image Analysis and the Critical Discourse Analysis the recurrent demands and denunciations regarding journalism gender-related issues and finds common visual vernaculars in #DeixaElaTrabalhar and #LasPeriodistasParamos posts. This study makes a comprehensive analysis of how women journalists construct their identity on Instagram images concerning the topics they talk about and the elements they use to insert themselves in the female journalists’ collectives and connects it with the theories on feminism and social media activism. The results reported here shed new light on how female journalists take control over their situation and find empowerment, feminism, non-violent protest, and professional/private life to be common points regarding the identity construction in relation to these online groups.

The Ideal Indian Woman: Defined by Hindu Nationalism and Culture

This paper discusses how the notion of “ideal femininity” is understood in the Indian context. I propose the term Sati Savitri aurat (woman) to describe this ideal image of an Indian woman. The paper argues that the modern Sati Savitri woman must embody three values that make her truly an ideal Indian woman in the eyes of society. Those values are modesty, marriageability and silence. The combination of these values makes an Indian woman socially respected and desirable. These themes reverberated when I asked my interview participants, 10 female journalists from diverse age groups, about the concept of an ideal Indian woman. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with these women journalists and their ideas about formulation of the concept of “ideal Indian woman” were recorded and analysed. In this paper, I categorise their responses into the three values (modesty, marriageability and silence) and thereby propose that the embodiment of all these values constitute the modern Sati Savitri, a prototype for middle-class Hindu women. By proposing this concept of Sati Savitri, a Hindu mythological idea, I argue that respectable norms for women’s sexuality are located within the discourse of Hindu nationalism and culture.

Women Journalist in the Middle of Taliban Power

This article reviews women journalists in the midst of Taliban rule which is being highly discussed in various worlds today. The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge about what is happening at this time. This paper is a descriptive analysis that aims to describe, inventory, and analyze the conditions being investigated in a systematic, factual and accurate manner, then from the results of the analysis a conclusion can be drawn. The results of the discussion show that after the Taliban succeeded in taking power on August 15, 2021Taliban will respect women's rights, but these rights must be within the limits of Islamic sharia law, women can study and work, women can join the government, Urqa is no longer required as well as women's rights are fulfilled. However, behind the Taliban's power, female journalists in Afghanistan have their own challenges because their rights as women in that country are limited. Since the transfer of power, women journalists in Afghanistan have been threatened, as has been reported in various media.