Creating Spaces for Women Communicators

 The event was funded by WACC Women’s Programme and was the second in the WACC series of workshops on the use of media monitoring for advocacy and media education, following the success of the first workshop held in Cape Town, South Africa.
Awareness of the need for such a network came from the organisers’ participation in two activities: the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) 2000 organised by WACC Women’s Programme and a workshop on ‘The Image of Women in the Media’ supported by WACC and organised by CEDEPCA in 2001.

These two events  demonstrated the need to create a network in order to strengthen the work of women communicators and to create a space that links communicators through a gender perspective. Whilst a network of women journalists already exists in Guatemala, the majority of its members have university qualifications and work in the written press, mainly in the capital city and other urban centres. It was therefore vital to promote the creation of a different kind of network – one that takes account of community communicators who have different backgrounds, experiences and different lives.

25 women communicators from nine regions of Guatemala participated in the meeting, which began with an analysis of women in the news. After listing the positive and negative stereotypes of women held in Guatemalan society, the participants examined the national news sections of the three largest dailies for articles in which women appeared and the way in which they were represented – an examination that exposed the limited number, stereotyped portrayal and scant reference to women in the written media.

After a presentation on the history of women and language. The participants discussed how they themselves contribute to making women invisible through language by using terms such as ‘us’ in the masculine form even when referring to a group of women. Informed by this and two other presentations, the women participants worked together to formulate some ideas on how to introduce a gender perspective and non-biased language into their programmes and training spaces at work to ensure that women and other social actors who have traditionally been excluded by the media become more visible.

To conclude the event, a public forum on ‘the Image of Women in the Media’ was held. Despite the presence of an active women’s movement in Guatemala, this issue has never been a focus for activity or discussion, which made the forum a vital first step in bringing the issue to the fore.

The forum began with a presentation of the results of GMMP 2000 by Dennis Smith, from the WACC Regional Committee for Latin America. He presented the shocking statistics on women’s participation in the media as a challenge to communication organisations to create specific communication strategies to improve the images of women in the mass media.

Following a presentation by CERIGUA, an alternative press agency, of their continuous monitoring of the almost non-existent radio and written media coverage of civil society actors in Guatemala, Journalist Evelyn Black from the project DOSES presented a recently completed study on the image of women in the media. Although she recognised the efforts of some feminists in producing alternative images of women, she concluded by saying that the media and particularly the written and TV media continue to resist calls to give space or credence to feminist perspectives and a focus on gender. Andres Zepeda, from the same project, then talked on the rationale behind advertising strategies, stating that while an advertising ethic does exist, it is driven by the logic of profit, which ultimately makes advertising nothing more than a ‘religion of commodification’.

As the forum came to a close, all participants affirmed that the newly formed Network of Women on Air will provide a vital space from which to work together to address these issues. Whilst International Women’s Day this year saw work on gender and media issues as one of the many challenges still facing women communicators in Guatemala, the creation of the network may next year see such work celebrated as one of their achievements.
From the Spanish by Maya Cu and Patricia Galicia.