TAIPEI: Stories ring hollow if they are not written from a gender perspective, and it is a misconception that issues concerning women are uninteresting and unpopular, says Star Media Group (SMG) chief content officer Esther Ng (pic).
Ng said data shows that readers care about issues such as why women are not in the workforce despite having attained a high level of education, why they dropped out of the economy particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, and how much their intangible contributions are worth.
She was speaking during the “Returns on Equity: The Untapped Potential of Gender Journalism” Editor’s Summit held in conjunction with the three-day WAN-Ifra World News Media Congress in Taiwan on Friday.
In support of the 2022 International Women’s Day global collective against discrimination and gender bias, The Star, as chair of the World Editors Forum (WEF) (Asia Chapter), and in collaboration with its regional media partners, embarked on a year-long women empowerment initiative to highlight stories that celebrate and promote equality.
To put a value on the important yet often intangible work that women were doing at home, a digital poll was conducted, with a majority of the 648 respondents calling for tasks like cleaning, cooking, caregiving, babysitting and doing laundry to be valued monetarily.
Presenting the findings, Ng said women do a lot of invisible labour, particularly in South-East Asia.
“The KPI (key performance indicator) for taking care of households falls mainly on women.
“So you come home from the office and you still have a lot of work that needs to be done – yet, the value of this is ignored,” she said, adding that the gender equality and the equity agenda have always been a pillar at The Star.
“I’d like to think that our stories contributed to the recent changes in policy and law, particularly in protection against sexual harassment and stalking, and in ensuring financial security and welfare of women.”
She said while The Star’s content department has a dedicated women’s section, there needs to be a mindset change that women issues are only relevant to females.
“We have to drive home the point that issues concerning women are felt at every level of society.
“The media must educate itself to write stories through a gender lens and we have to do this in every section, across all topics.
“That is our biggest challenge,” said Ng, who was recently elected to the International Press Institute (IPI) as its maiden Malaysian board member at the IPI World Congress 2023 in Vienna, Austria.
Ng, who is also the WEF (Asian chapter) chairman, is the first Asian woman editor to sit on the board of WEF, which has its headquarters in Paris, France.
She also sits on the board of the Asia News Network, an alliance of 24 prime media houses in the region.
The “Returns on Equity: The Untapped Potential of Gender Journalism” Editor’s Summit panel also included CNN global gender inequality project “As Equals” managing editor Eliza Anyangwe, Delhi-based award-winning journalist Ankita Anand who specialises in gender, labour, climate, environment, land, corruption, human rights and indigenous communities and Megan Clement, editor of Impact, a French-English bilingual newsletter covering feminist movements and women’s rights worldwide.
Gender journalism, said Anyangwe, is about in-depth reporting on how economic, geopolitical and sociopolitical systems affect communities.
“It’s not just stories about the first girl to do this or that. It’s about making journalism more investigative, regulatory and explanatory to understand society and what is happening to the world’s population.
“If you take any other serious issue newsrooms care about, such as the economy, politics, climate change or international relations, and if you apply a gender lens, it helps you report that story very differently.
“Take climate change for example – if you don’t think about how climate change disproportionately impacts women and girls then you are not reporting on that issue in a comprehensive and meaningful way,” she said, adding that there is a whole gamut of storytelling that we are not doing because it is largely considered uninteresting or unimportant.
Meanwhile, Anand said gender journalism brings what societies consider taboo into the open, and this in turn makes such issues manageable.
“Gender journalism is impactful. I have personally seen how it allows society to reflect and to address issues that would otherwise not be discussed,” she said.
Research, said Clement, has shown that there is a strong business case for doing gender journalism.
“Audiences want to see themselves reflected in our reports. Inclusivity and diversity is good business.
“By not doing gender journalism properly, we are ignoring low-hanging fruit and leaving money on the table,” she said, adding that the most watched broadcast in the United Kingdom last year was England winning the Women’s Euro 2022.
“There is an audience for gender journalism and it is clearly monetisable,” she said.
The session was moderated by The Straits Times’ Indochina bureau chief Tan Hui Yee.
The WAN-Ifra World News Media Congress 2023 ended on June 30.
