Rehema is pregnant with her third child and married to a journalist. She gave up her own promising career as a reporter because of “increasing risks, relentless stress” and low pay, she says.
While her situation may sound rather familiar to many female journalists, it was a bitter pill for Rehema to swallow because she is Tanzanian, and her place in the male-dominated newsroom had been hard-fought and won.
Rehema is one of an army of women keen to make their voices heard in East Africa’s rapidly expanding print and broadcast media. For most it is an uphill struggle. Tanzania’s deregulated media is widely regarded as one of the most free and vibrant media in Sub-Saharan Africa attracting journalists from all over the continent, but it remains a very tough environment for women.
An African Media Barometer and Media Institute of Southern Africa report on Tanzania in 2010 revealed journalists are plagued by job insecurity, editorial interference by media owners, and harsh, poor and risky conditions of service. So it can be no surprise to hear these difficulties are more pronounced for women. This means few are remaining in the job long enough to reach influential, senior positions where they can actively feed in to the national news agenda. Their voices are still missing from the discourse.
Vulnerable to sexual harassment
There are a number of barriers to entry into the media for African women; one of the most obvious issues in Tanzania is the disparity between levels of education for men and women nationally. A much smaller number of women speak English to a sufficient standard versus male counterparts.
One of the country’s most famous reporters Ananilea Nkya has been a leading advocate for women’s rights for more than 20 years, and is executive director of the Tanzania Media Women Association (TAMWA).
"The majority of young women have a poor level of education and you really need to have not just good English but also excellent written Kiswahili," she told the Doha Centre for Media Freedom. This is also a significant problem in press conferences, question and answer sessions and conferences which are often done in English in addition to Kiswahili.
Nkya adds: “The majority of these young women entering journalism are not well educated – few of them have a diploma. When it comes to finding employment this makes life particularly difficult and leaves them particularly vulnerable to risks such as sexual harassment.”
Although not widely discussed this risk is a very real one. Even those that manage to get their foot in the door face serious challenges to stick with the profession. According to several journalists interviewed, one of the difficulties day-to-day is sexual harassment from both sources and colleagues.
Nkya says: “We run a number of workshops to support women working in the media and through talking to some of them I have found that sexual harassment is a problem. You have girls who will say they feel that they cannot get stories published unless they sleep with editors - or this is what they’re told.”
TAMWA’s research revealed while this harassment often takes the form of a workplace bullying or sexual innuendo, it can involve more sinister threats from sources, which many women feel too scared to report to managers worrying they risk their job in doing so.
Sexual harassment is a serious concern across the region according to the "Glass Ceiling Regional Report: Women and Men in Southern African Media” produced by Southern African NGO Gender Links. It says media women in 14 countries complained about being treated as sexual objects in media houses and men showed little appreciation and understanding of what is meant by sexual harassment. Only 28 percent of media houses admitted there was any issue over sexual harassment in their workplaces.
Pervasive chauvinism is also a significant hurdle for women trying to pursue the most high-profile stories according to Elifuraha Samboto and Leah Jackson, Tanzanian journalists with Radio 5 and The Citizen newspaper respectively. They agreed that one consequence of these attitudes from male colleagues is women are still not given any opportunity to cover big economics stories, armed conflict or natural disasters although a couple are covering politics.
The journalists interviewed said it is unheard of to see a female broadcaster at a disaster scene covering famine, or a story like recent flooding in Dar-es-Salaam. This is because according to Samboto, there is still a perception that these tasks are too difficult or dangerous for female journalists. “This is in part African male culture. Because of the perception of risk these areas are just not considered suitable for women," Samboto explained.
There is also a more general trend that all those interviewed flagged: that women are constantly pigeon-holed in beats thought to relate most closely to women’s issues such as health, education and lifestyle features, rather than hard-hitting crime or government stories. This means they have little input in to the most prominent stories. This is in part due to their bosses’ allocation of assignments but also because, frustratingly, the women themselves are now electing the ‘safe’ option, lacking in confidence to tackle the big stories.
Verediana Herman a former journalist with The East African Newspaper, now a tutor at Arusha Journalism Training Centre which has a very high intake of female students says: “One of the challenges is that you find a woman not trusting herself, only opting to do the stories they are comfortable with. Some are perfectly capable and we try and push them to aim higher. We tell them they should get out there and meet people, that that will lead to the biggest stories, not sit at their computer.”
Maybe it should not be all that surprising that not many young women are now willing to put their head above the parapet for the most challenging stories, if they are not guaranteed their male editors’ support. In the last ten years a handful of Tanzanian women who ignored the status quo to persist in pursuing the biggest stories on government scandals, human rights violations and crime and some have endured harassment, physical attacks, rape and death threats.
This is something Nkya faced and another of the country’s most prominent reporters, former BBC Tanzania bureau chief, Vicky Ntetema. While covering persecution of albinos between 2007-2010 she won international acclaim but received death threats and was eventually forced into hiding.
Women missing from top jobs
Significant gender gaps still exist in working conditions; earnings and on who covers which news beats and these are all contributing to a dearth of female role models at the top of the profession. Tanzanian women are conspicuous in their absence from media boardrooms, and less than 30 percent of senior management roles are held by women versus more than 50 percent in a country such as Namibia.
While this makes for depressing reading there is without a doubt a growing appreciation in Tanzania that a critical mass of women in newsrooms makes a difference. The journalists interviewed felt women in the media, especially at senior level, can significantly change newsroom culture and impact positively on coverage.
Gender Links’ research shows women reporters are more likely to consult female sources and that they bring fresh perspectives to media creation, a view strongly endorsed by many male media managers. It says gender-aware newsrooms are also more likely to deliver balanced and responsive news coverage something Tanzania has to start striving for as a growing democracy.
Activist groups like TAMWA are now calling on Tanzanian media houses to rapidly develop and adopt policies in line with the 2015 gender parity target required by the Southern African Development Community Protocol on Gender and Development, which should go some way towards redressing the balance. Nkya says “While these female journalists need to be trained, once they are part of a media house they need to be supported. We need commitment from editors in the newsrooms but also more widely. Tanzania has a big challenge ahead.”
And as for Rehema, she is retraining in law and says with a laugh that she plans to “specialise in gender equality cases.”
Angela Henshall is a British journalist working primarily in Tanzania, specialising in subjects including international development, energy and natural resources news.
