As women in Pakistan's mushrooming electronic media break new barriers, surfacing reports of sexual harassment and unfair pay and profiles is becoming a matter of grave concern. At a recent conference in Lahore, speakers focused on designing measures to combat the situation.
Most members of the Pakistan Association of Television Journalists (ATJ) are under 35 years old, according to Faysal Aziz Khan, 33, the Karachi-based secretary general of the association and reporter for Geo TV.
New challenges for women in media/ Photo credit: Beena Sarwar/IPS ATJ only has some 50 females among its 700 or so members around the country, but nearly half of them are concentrated in the business capital of Karachi. Women are highly visible in the Pakistani media as anchors and talk show hosts on dozens of private radio and television channels in various regional languages, besides English and Urdu.
Women are paid less than their male colleagues for equal work and have to fight harder for the political or other high profile assignmentsMost identify sexual harassment as their biggest concern, according to Zebunnisa Burki, who has been coordinating South Asian Women in Media (SAWM) since the organisation was launched in April this year. National conferences have recently been held in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal.
Harassment and prejudices
"Practically every journalist who is here has a tale to tell," she told IPS at the SAWM- Pakistan conference in Lahore, on Oct. 10-11. "I think our complaints cell will be the most active part of our association."
"Oh dear," responded Khan when IPS asked him to comment. He said he would put it on the agenda of the next ATJ council meeting. There are two women on the 17-member council, including one who was at the Lahore conference.
The second biggest issue that the 50 or so delegates identified at the conference was gender discrimination: they said that women are paid less than their male colleagues for equal work and have to fight harder for the political or other high profile assignments.
"These challenges are quite different from the ones we dealt with when we entered the profession in the 1980s," veteran reporter Mariana Baabar of the daily The News told IPS. "These young women are amazingly confident and bold in taking on these issues. We had to fight our way up also, but most of our male colleagues actively supported and helped us."
"We never even considered that we might be getting paid less than men for the same work," she added. "Nor did we did face any kind of sexual harassment. But maybe the younger generation is more conscious of their rights than we were."
The relatively newer issue of sexual harassment is linked with the age-old problem of gender discrimination, commented Rubina Jamil who heads the 22-year old Punjab-based Working Women’s Organisation (WWO).
Raising voices
WWO is among the civil society organisations which got together a few years ago to form Aasha, the Alliance Against Sexual Harassment (www.aasha.org.pk) in collaboration with the International Labor Organisation (ILO) and Pakistan’s Ministry of Women Development.
"I am so glad they are doing this," a radio journalist in her early twenties told IPS. "I’ve been working since I was 17, and I am sick of producers offering to help me if I go out with them. I want my work to be taken on merit."
Aasha developed a code of conduct for the workplace and a procedure to deal with harassment and discrimination. Geo TV, the largest private television network in Pakistan is among the few media organisations Aasha lists as a ‘progressive employer’.
"It’s not necessary for every case to be a federal issue," commented a television producer who worked with Geo when Aasha started. "Often the tension arises because of the widespread gender segregation in our society - many of these youngsters don’t know how to interact with each other. This leads to misunderstandings that the code helps to clear up."
Another reason for growing sexual harassment may be that, with education, more people are crossing class barriers.
"Women coming into journalism earlier were relatively well-connected and self-confident. Many now come from lower-middle class backgrounds and have less confidence. Men find it easier to take advantage of or intimidate them," observed a senior journalist.
"Women must be trained to refuse unwanted advances clearly rather than trying to be nice about it and making excuses that can be taken at face value."
Aasha recommends that the person feeling harassed should keep notes about the time, date, place, and nature of the harassment.
"This helps establish a pattern and also provides the management with something to work with," said the former Geo producer. "When we had a case of unwanted SMS messages and e-mails going to one young woman, she followed these steps. We were able to resolve the matter internally without embarrassing the people involved or making it public."
''Let me tell you, the challenges that women face here are not that far off from media anywhere in the world," said Saima Mohsin, a senior anchor at the English language Dawn News channel who came to Pakistan a year and a half ago from London, where she has worked with Sky TV, ITV and BBC.
"It has taken years for women in the West to achieve what women in Pakistan have managed in a short time," she added. "Women are making a mark in the media industry here that has catapulted them into visibility everywhere. But are women taken seriously? Not without a fight."
But issues of representation, harassment and discrimination pale into irrelevance for women journalists working in conflict areas, like Farzana Ali of Aaj TV in Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) bordering Afghanistan.
"We have picked up the flesh of our own people with our own hands after a bomb blast," Ali, the petite mother of an eight-year old boy, told conference participants in a chilling reminder of the unprecedented challenges that journalists - male and female - face in an era of unmitigated violence.
source:southasia.oneworld.net
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