In the News
Woman Journalist in Somalia Receives Death Threats
Bisharo Waeys, a television journalist in Somalia, escaped attempts on her life on May 4. Waeys was driving to her home in Bossasso when she came under fire from several armed men but escaped by accelerating quickly and driving away. The next day, she received two text messages threatening to kill her if she did not stop her program. Waeys is the only woman working openly as a journalist in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland in northeastern Somalia.
Read about Waeys on Reporters Without Borders' Web site.
Gender Analysis Released by the MIW Radio Group
The Mentoring and Inspiring Women in Radio Group has released a 2007 Gender Analysis study. According to the study, out of more than 10,000 radio stations, only about 15 percent have women general managers. For full details, click the link below to read the report.
Read the PDF of the MIW Report.
Former Lifetime Award Winner Reports for Newsweek
Peta Thornycroft, the recipient of a 2007 IWMF Lifetime Achievement Award, wrote an article for Newsweek magazine about the situation in Zimbabwe. "We forgot to remember that Mugabe's democratic urges are never more than brief spasms," she wrote.
Read Thornycroft's piece in Newsweek.
Tips & Guides: Conducting a Front-Page Study
Use this media monitoring guide as a first step to track coverage of women in newspapers. While it is important to assess how women are portrayed, as well as how often, every monitoring study begins with a quantitative count of how often women are mentioned.
This step-by-step guide to conducting a survey of your newspaper's front page - or any section front - will help you determine how often women and men are quoted, photographed and referred to as sources.
- Select a one-month period of papers to analyze. Get copies of the final edition for each day.
- Buy two highlighters or markers - one blue and one pink.
- Use blue and pink to mark male and female bylines, photographs and references. Highlight proper names only, don't mark pronouns.
- Count the total number of bylines. Count the total number of female bylines. Then determine the percentage of bylines that were female. For example, 3 female bylines divided by 7 total bylines tells you that 43 percent of the bylines for the day were female.
- Count the total proper names, or references. Count the number of female proper names. Then determine the percentage of proper names that were female. For example, 5 female proper names divided by 25 total proper names tells you that 20 percent of the total references for the day were female.
- Count the number of times men and women are pictured. Count as one every time a male or female appears, even if it is in a group photo. Divide the number of times females appear by the total number of times females are represented in the photographs.
Here are a few examples:- One group shot on a page that pictures both men and women counts as two total photos. If that group shot were the only picture on the page, that would mean women were in 50 percent of the photos for that day.
- If there were two pictures, one group including a male and a female, and one with only a female, the female representation that day would be 66 percent of the coverage (2 photos of women divided by 3 total photos).
- To compile the monthly results, add the daily percentages for each category. Divide the percentage totals by the number of days you monitored the paper. This will give you the average daily percentage of female bylines, female representation in photographic coverage and references to females.
Guidelines written by Mindi Keirnan for "About and By Women: A Study of Photos, Bylines and Sources of the Front Pages for 20 U.S. Newspapers," a joint project by Media Watch: Women and Men (later Women, Men and Media) and the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Human Resources Committee, April 1990. Reprinted in Media Report to Women, Vol. 30, No. 1, Winter 2002. Reprinted here with permission.