The Wole Soyinka Centre for Journalism (WSCIJ) has launched a report, which revealed the shocking gender disparity in newsrooms in Nigeria and demanding intentional bridging of these gaps.
The report, tagged, “Who leads the newsrooms and news? A report on women’s representation newsrooms and news leadership in Nigeria,” brings to the fore, the reality of the ongoing conversations across the globe on issues relating to gender disparity in the media industry.
The study revealed that women’s representations in media leadership are low across the four media genres.
“Women accounted for 25.7% of leadership positions, while men dominated with 74.3%. Print and online platforms exhibited the lowest representation of women at 4.6% and 5.5% respectively, while radio and television showed slightly better representation at 9.2% and 6.5% respectively.”
The report presents findings from a study that examined the extent of gender representation in newsrooms and news leadership roles across various Nigerian media organisations.
The study was carried out with funding support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, under the Report Women! News and Newsroom Engagement project as a tool of engagement with the staff and management of media houses.
“Geographically, the South-west and North-central had the most women in leadership positions, but they ranked lowest in percentage representation. The North-west and South-south led in gender-balanced leadership with 31.2% and 28.5% representation respectively.”
Similarly, in terms of news representation, the study discovered that women were inadequately represented. Only 24% of anchors and authors were women, with men making up 76%. Men also dominated as expert resource persons or guests, comprising 87.9%, while women constituted just 12.1%. Furthermore, only 7.1% of news focused on women, while 92.9% covered other angles.
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