September 2019 will mark a year since the flood of revelations of sexual harassment in the Indian entertainment and media industry. At a meeting organised by the Network of Women in Media, Bangalore and the Gamana Women’s Collective at the Press Club of Bangalore on August 12, 2019.
NWMI’s 2018 Fellow Ambika Raja was in college when she was in an accident which left her with paraplegia. That didn’t stop her from studying journalism and becoming a reporter in Kerala where she works with the New Indian Express. She speaks on her plans for the future
Srinagar-based independent journalist Marouf Gazi, 26, has been conferred the Third NWMI Fellowship (2019), instituted to support women journalists working in various kinds of challenging situations.
This year, the NWMI received 28 excellent applications from Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand. The applicants belonged to various minorities, marginalized communities like Adivasis and Dalits, and also represented a range of media forms – print, online, television, radio and community media. Most of the applicants live and work in remote areas and in very challenging political and economic situations. All of them highlighted the difficulties of pursuing journalism as a career due to gender and other barriers.
Although women constitute around half of the human population, their voices and opinions are not proportionately heard in the public sphere. Television news channels in India regularly feature panel discussions with spokespersons and experts to analyse and debate current events and issues, but women are invariably under-represented in these forums.
NWMI volunteers monitored TV news channels for women’s representation, for one month, covering 28 channels in 12 languages. The report on the Study on the Representation of Women in Indian TV News Channels was released on February 1, 2019.