Blog
Educating Media Professionals
Educating media professionals with a gender and critical media literacy perspective: how to battle gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the media workplace.
Authors: Jad Melki and May Farah (2014)
Abstract
While journalism and journalism schools were long the almost exclusive domain of male professionals, over the past few decades the latter has increasingly become dominated by female students, but not, as would be anticipated, the former. What explains the reversal in gender proportions as we move from university classrooms into the workplace and up the corporate ladder? This chapter outlines obstacles and the prevalent discriminatory climate in the new media industry, and demonstrates how a combination of institutionalized gender discrimination, entrenched sexual harassment, rooted cultural sexism and the lack of laws, policies and enforcement mechanisms that protect and empower women to stay and advance in their careers all lead to reproducing this gender inequality and discriminatory climate that keeps many women out of the media workforce, discourages their advancement to higher positions, pushes women’s issues out of the public sphere and normalizes stereotypical media portrayal of women and men using as its case study Lebanon, where surveys, observations and in-depth interviews with journalists and media managers have been conducted to address this matter.