Breaking through the lockout

Barging through wrong entrances is not usually my style, but wearing my American-style combat jacket, I did just that last Tuesday, when I attended a lively conference dealing with gender equality in broadcasting.

Brenda Murphy, who chairs the Broadcasting Authority's Gender Advisory Group, later told me that it might have been thought of as stage-managed, since the conference was all about 'letting women in' and I managed to get in through a locked door.

Organised by the BA's gender issues advisory group and the European Equal Opportunities Network - who were having their own meeting in Malta - the conference was very well attended by, predominantly, women.

Now I know you are all on tenterhooks to know the result of the election and those of us who want to be part of Europe are particularly tense, but this is perhaps the right time to push women's agenda forward.

We heard that, unfortunately, in times of change equal opportunities is put on the back burner. But the Commission for Persons with Disability have managed to keep their agenda up front, so how come women who are still striving to take their rightful place in society, and who form over half of the population and contribute to the economy - even though our rate of female employment is very low, those who run households, do odd part-time jobs and voluntary work are essential props to the economy - are relegated to the back burner?

Towards the end of last year, I wrote that things had stopped moving for women. Whereas we had a boost of trying to redress the balance when it came to decision-making posts in the mid-1990s - and we managed to get a few women in Parliament and on boards - with the new millennium apathy seems to have set in and it was about time we started making things happen again.

The number of women at the conference indicate that many of us are ready for another boost. And if one watches any of our local programmes, especially current affairs, the lack of female representation is glaring.

We have been through an intense electoral campaign on our broadcast media. Every time we switched on the telly we were faced with a male politician or a group of them being posed questions by another male.

It would be fair to say that women - with precious few exceptions - are the silent majority of Malta's population. A rare programme, on Smash TV, had women politicians and those aspiring to become MPs, but on the whole we got the usual sprinkling of token women in some, but by no means all.

That too few women are given a voice in broadcasting was the recurring theme at the conference. Vera Price - a gender consultant for Ireland's public broadcasting - took part in the Equal Opportunitites Network Conference at the Crowne Plaza and also took part in the local BA conference. She was also a fellow guest on an On Campus radio programme about the conference hosted by Claudette Pace and made the following interesting comment.

She said she came across one of these programmes with rows of men and hosted by a male; "even if I understood the language I would have switched to another programme because such a programme cannot be truly representative and would not relate to me as a woman".

I must say I have been doing pretty much the same, i.e. switching away from male-dominated programmes. I wonder how many women voters politicians have failed to influence because of this factor.

Although we get a lot of rhetoric from politicians, they are still underestimating women's potential and influence.

The importance of diversity in television programming was stressed by speakers from Sweden, Germany, Denmark and the UK. The keynote speaker, Margaret Gallagher - international media consultant, who has done research for the United Nations and the European Commission - said that programmes which do not reflect the diversity of its audience are too predictable and in the long run lose that audience which is not being catered for.

Diversity should be reflected in mainstream programmes to mirror the lives of all the audience.

"Although for years now we have talked about the need for a 'critical mass' of women working in the media, if there is to be any hope of change in media content, that change does not seem to be happening as quickly as we would like...

"The link between media content and the individuals who produce it is greatly attenuated by many factors - including institutional policies, organisational identities, professional values, commercial considerations and so on.

"So while it is certainly possible to see the mark made by individual women - for example, in expanding the range of topics on the media agenda, or in reformulating the traditional approach to topics - fundamental patterns of gender representation, in terms of inclusion and exclusion (whose voice is present, and whose absent), seem to remain relatively intact," said Ms Gallagher.

She gave interesting results from a global media monitoring project (2000) which studied women's participation in the news in about 70 countries across the world.

A quick snapshot revealed that out of 100 people in the world's news on a particular day, only 18 were women - slightly more on television than on radio or in newspapers.

Across the world the percentage of female newsmakers or interviewees ranged from a high of 25 per cent in North America to a low of 11 per cent in Africa.

Europe was somewhere in the middle, with 19 per cent of female news subjects and in Malta the figure was below the European average at 15 per cent.

Women were least likely to be found in stories about politics and business (12 per cent to 17 per cent), and more likely to make the news in terms of arts and entertainment issues (35 per cent) and in education and health stories (29 per cent).

The project also showed a "shocking absence of female voices" in stories that concerned women in very specific ways. Stories that covered plans to establish a family court in Jamaica, the high abortion rate among teenagers in Scotland, women's rights to seek divorce in Egypt, maternity plans in Northern Ireland, the punishment of women for marital infedility in Turkey - were just some of the cases in which no women's point of view was presented.

The next thing Ms Gallagher had to say rang bells with many of us who have been lobbying for women's voices to be heard. "Of course, some of the people involved in preparing those news items would certainly respond in the usual ways - there was no time to find a woman, no woman could be persuaded to speak, no suitable female expert could be found and so on.

Despite a "Women in Society" directory of women with expertise in different areas, female experts in various fields are not called upon by programme makers here.

This point was made at the conference by Dr Janet Mifsud, senior lecturer in the department of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Malta.

According to Ms Gallagher, this tendency to ignore women, or at best to talk 'about' rather than to, or through women, is deeply rooted in normative cultural practices throughout the media.

Strengthening women employees' positions and ensuring women's voices carry weight within the profession is essential to change the situation but "we need to work at the level of media policy, ethics and accountability".

Another important point raised by Katrina von Flotow of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) was that legislation in Germany stipulates that public broadcasting stations should have an equal opportunities manager.

She invited a colleague who holds the latter position to speak of her role. Gudrun (I am afraid I did not catch her surname and she was not listed in the programme) told us that it is stipulated that the holder of the post had to be female and that she forms part of all (including the top jobs) interviewing panels, which means she gets to see all applications. She not only could intervene and object to an appointment, but if overruled she can appeal and the job cannot be filled until the appeal is heard.

All vacant jobs have to be advertised and the selection panel is obliged to select a female applicant if her qualifications are comparable to the male applicant.

Not surprisingly, this provoked a young man in the audience to say he felt this was discriminatory towards men. One can sympathise with the young men who are having to face this kind of challenge for the first time.

Men are so conditioned to be the automatic choice for jobs that they cannot concieve that woment have been effectively discriminated against all along the line. All that is being done now is an attempt to redress this imbalance.

According to Swedish research, men also talk for longer than women and again they are not conscious of the fact. Peter Fogelmarck who spoke about an equal pay for equal jobs project he is involved in said that a study revealed that although after both men and women were asked whether they both had the same length of time to speak in a programme and they said they felt they had, the facts showed that the men had dominated and took more programme time than the women.

What is interesting, and worrying, in this study is that it is not only the men who are under the misconception that they are fair towards women, but that even the women harboured the same misconception to their disadvantage

Closing the conference Ms Murphy stressed that legislation is important but enforcement was essential. She urged critical reflection and lauded the value of equal opportunities networks.

The BA is to be congratulated on this initiative, now let's hope we keep the ball rolling and the Commission for the Advancement of Women push for legislation to include the appointment of equal opportunities managers to redress the balance and start letting the women in

Not funny

The latest security airline scare involving an Air Malta plane departing from Gatwick showed us two Maltese characteristics which, although endearing in a general context, are dangerous in others.

The first is that some elderly people carried luggage for a stranger on board the plane, and the second is that a young man thought it funny to say he had a hand grenade when he set off the security alarm.

It is endearing that people are trusting, and some elderly people tend to be more so, but it is incomprehensible that in this day and age after all the hijacks and the worst air disaster on September 11 and a war on in Iraq people can still accept to carry strangers' luggage on to planes.

As for the 'joke', it seems inconcievable that anyone can think it funny to tell security guards at an airport that they are carrying a grenade. The plane was delayed by three hours but the outcome could have been a lot worse.

We should not give up on our kind and helpful nature, but we need to know when it is kinder and more helpful to say no. As for the jokers, they need to grow up. Don't lose your sense of fun but learn to know when something just is not funny.