This is the weekly Amplify newsletter, where you can be inspired and challenged by the voices, opinions and insights of women at The Globe and Mail, and our contributor community. This week’s newsletter was written by Rachel Pulfer, the executive director of Journalists for Human Rights.
Rachel Ombaka is a Kenyan journalist – she was a broadcaster, until her boss and his sexual demands got in the way. “I complained to HR. I said the men sit too close to us, they brush up against us,” she explained to Journalists for Human Rights’ chief correspondent Lisa LaFlamme last month. “And if you had to ask for funding to go out and do a story, the boss would say, oh, you need funding? For that … you’re going to have to meet me at the hotel.” Ombaka has since left the broadcaster to write for an online news site.
Journalists for Human Rights, the organization I run, worked with media partners across Kenya, supported by Global Affairs Canada, to develop a sexual harassment and abuse policy safeguarding women employed in newsrooms. The policy has since been implemented at the leading national broadcaster, KBC, allowing more women to work as reporters, free from harassment, thus ensuring the voices and perspectives of half the population are meaningfully included. (More on this to come in a special documentary from Lisa LaFlamme to air later in March.)
Discrimination against women journalists isn’t exclusively the purview of those in the Global South. While the #MeToo movement in North America and Europe helped usher in both awareness and new policies to protect female journalists against the kinds of overt, in-person sexual harassment Ombaka dealt with, the challenges that those women face have moved into other dimensions.
Across Canada and around the world, female journalists, and in particular racialized journalists, are experiencing an epidemic of escalating attacks online. Filipino-American Nobel laureate Maria Ressa tells me she receives up to 90 attacks online per hour. Global News’ Supriya Dwivedi quit journalism after receiving one death threat too many. And the trifecta of The Hill’s Erica Ifill, Global News’ Rachel Gilmore and The Toronto Star’s Saba Eitizaz experienced so many attacks last year, the entire journalism sector lined up to call for better protections for women in media. Not to mention the evergreen threat of ageism, combined with sexism, most dramatically expressed in CTV News’s “business decision” to let the multiple-award-winning Lisa LaFlamme go last summer.
This is what it is like to be a woman in journalism in 2023.
When I started at Journalists for Human Rights in 2010, I was coming off a 10-year career in magazine journalism. At Canadian Business, I was the only woman in management. I recall making the business argument that we should put more women on the cover, because women made up potentially half our audience, only to be told that the one time the magazine put a woman on the cover, it was the worst-selling issue – ever. In any other context, a group making a policy decision based on a case study of one would be laughed out of the room. In this case, it kept women off the cover for years.
Since then, what I’ve learned is that not only is it important that women take on public journalistic roles, it is essential to the peaceful, inclusive and equitable development of the societies in which they work.
Working in Liberia, I saw how women in leadership roles in media changed the focus of coverage. Our female staff and media partners investigated what was happening to former child soldiers as they struggled to reintegrate into school and society. The result? Reports showing country-wide corruption in the education system. Shortly afterward, funding started flowing to schools across Liberia, and the education minister was fired. More recently, JHR’s focus throughout the pandemic on supporting female journalists in both Kenya and Tunisia put a spotlight on the epidemic of domestic violence and teen pregnancy, which had accompanied serial lockdowns. Both countries have since stepped up to fund shelters for women fleeing domestic violence.
What I’ve learned is that the more women there are in media, the more media is encouraged to include their perspectives in reporting, and the more we see positive change.
This comes in the way women and their contributions are perceived and integrated, and in the way women’s issues come to be seen as everyone’s issues, where everyone benefits from the solution. (Think of child care, which in Canada went from a women’s problem to everyone’s problem in the space of a generation, ultimately meriting a publicly funded solution.)
Unfortunately, the experiences of journalists from Ombaka to Ressa show the extent to which their right to report is under attack. This is one reason Journalists for Human Rights supports a campaign calling on the Trudeau government to reinforce its investments in its feminist international assistance policy in 2023. If as a society, we choose a public media environment in which women’s voices and perspectives are largely absent, it isn’t just women who lose out. It’s all of us.
What else we’re thinking about
In February, I travelled to Mexico City to learn firsthand the challenges reporters face in a place that saw 11 journalists die last year alone. While there, I met with Adriana Urrea, the female union head at Notimex, the largest press agency. Notimex has been on strike for three years, a conflict sparked, says Urrea, when current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador appointed a new boss to the agency, Sanjuana Martinez. Martinez opened negotiations on the collective agreement with the previous union head, who promptly quit. She then fired almost 11 per cent of the work force. Lopez Obrador called for a resolution in January, and Urrea is hopeful one will be found soon. That said, I couldn’t help thinking how extraordinarily convenient it has been for him to have the largest press agency in the country, essentially sidelined, for so much of his mandate.
Marianne
Marianne Kushmaniuk for The Globe and Mail
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