Game of Blokes

On October 10, 2025, women journalists were excluded from a press conference held in New Delhi by Amir Khan Muttaqi, Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister, who was on a visit to India. Only male journalists were invited to the press conference at the Embassy of Afghanistan. After much outrage and condemnation from media professionals and civil society, the Minister held another press conference the next day. This time with some women journalists invited, too.

A meeting as exclusionary as this one is not without precedent. At another event in Doha in 2024, where the international community held talks with the Taliban government, no women from Afghanistan were present in the room with the Taliban officials, according to a BBC report.

According to a statement by Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, “Afghan women are also being gradually erased from journalism. The ‘Law on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,’ introduced by the Taliban in summer 2024, prohibits any representation of human figures and prevents women from speaking on the radio. Since 2021, more than 80% of women working in media have lost their jobs.’’

Afghanistan remains the only country in the world to deny girls secondary and high school education. The recent exclusion of women journalists from the Taliban press conference in Delhi has proved that it’s still not easy for women to be visible and have a voice in the media.

The Beijing Declaration (1995) called for women’s equal access to media and decision-making. Three decades later, progress has been uneven. The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP 2025) reports that women make up 41% of reporters in legacy media, up from 28% in 1995, with notable gains in Latin America, North America and the Caribbean. Yet, in Africa, fewer than three in ten reporters are women.

Online, women’s presence as reporters rose sharply from 25% in 2015 to 42% in 2020, but stagnated at 43% in 2025, and even fell in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.

Despite women comprising half the global population, they account for only 26% of those seen, heard or spoken about in news — a figure largely unchanged since 2010.

The Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) has condemned the exclusion of women from the Taliban press event. You can read it here: https://nwmindia.org/statements/nwmi-condemns-exclusion-of-women-journalists-from-the-taliban-press-meet-in-delhi/

InkSights is a monthly art series by NWMI member Anupama Bijur viewing current affairs through a gender and news lens.