Beijing’s legacy for gender and media

The Beijing Platform for Action, adopted unanimously by 189 Member States of the United Nations at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, had acknowledged the media as one of twelve ‘critical areas of concern’. At the time, the inclusion of a section on media and communication – Section J as it became known - seemed a historic breakthrough. In the early years of the international women’s movement, media issues had generally been regarded as secondary in importance to the cardinal problems of poverty, health and education for women. The media were barely been mentioned in the strategy documents of the first three UN conferences on women.

But by 1995 satellite communication and deregulation had transformed media systems around the world. No longer regarded as a preoccupation merely of the urban middle-classes, the media were understood in Section J as playing a fundamental role in the perpetuation of unequal gender relations at all levels of society.

The decade since 1995 brought immense technological transformation in the form of digitalisation and the Internet – new information and communication technologies that were barely discussed at the time of Beijing. Issues of ICT access, infrastructure and content, as well as the role of ICTs in the development of culture, and the impact of all these for women’s rights and gender equality opened up new questions and perspectives. When in 2000 a special session of the UN General Assembly conducted a five-year review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action, information and communication technologies were identified as one of the major new issues that needed to be addressed.

By 2005, with the World Summit on the Information Society providing a global context for debate on ICTs and development, it might have seemed appropriate to consider media and communications as ‘the big thing’ – or at least one of the big things – in the official ten-year review and appraisal of the Beijing Platform for Action. Yet, astonishingly, media-related issues hardly featured in the review proceedings. The whole area of media and communication seemed to have fallen off the agenda. Section J was largely ignored by the UN agencies involved in the review, as well as by many governments and even by important sections of civil society.

Example one. As part of the review and appraisal process the United Nations Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality (IANWGE) organised 11 online discussions on selected themes covered by the ‘critical areas of concern’ in the Beijing Platform for Action. Media and communication were not included.3

Example two. The review and appraisal questionnaire issued by the UN’s Division for the Advancement of Women drew replies from 134 governments. Of these only 76 responded to the section on media, and just 66 to the section on information and communication technologies. Only one other section of the questionnaire – on indigenous women – received fewer replies. The resulting analysis and conclusions are weak, with a mere three paragraphs on media and four on ICTs.4

Example three. The Women’s Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO) - an international NGO that advocates for women’s equality in global policy – carried out its own review and appraisal survey. With data from 150 countries, the resulting document Beijing Betrayed - ‘an advocacy tool to hold governments accountable for the commitments they have made to women’5 – provided nothing for media advocates. WEDO’s extensive questionnaire included not a single item on Section J, with the result that media and communication are completely overlooked in its lengthy and influential report.6

Beijing +10: A reality check

For media and gender activists, the Beijing +10 experience was a salutary reality check. In fact media and communication issues – Section J notwithstanding – continue to exist somewhat on the margins of the international women’s agenda. Indeed the inclusion in 1995 of media and communication as one of the ‘critical areas of concern’ occurred at a late stage in the Beijing preparatory process, largely as the result of intensive lobbying by civil society organisations, particularly in Asia and Latin America. Negotiations during the Beijing Conference itself led to the introduction of the phrase ‘consistent with freedom of expression’ throughout the final text of Section J – a reminder that this is one of the most highly contested areas within international debate.

Since Beijing, widespread adoption of the neo-liberal economic model and market-driven politics – in particular the deregulation of public goods and services – have undoubtedly contributed to a climate of resistance to actions that aim to redress gender imbalances in the sphere of media, information and communication.7

Another problem is that many gender activists themselves have a limited, instrumental view of the role of media in the context of a women’s rights agenda. Thirty years after the first World Conference on Women (Mexico City, 1975) characterised the mass media as a vehicle that must be ‘harnessed’ in the pursuit of women’s equality, contemporary conceptualisations of media and information systems frequently echo that approach. The Beijing Platform for Action itself falls into the trap in its introductory statement to Section J: ‘Everywhere the potential exists for the media to make a far greater contribution to the advancement of women.’8

It is as if the media exist ‘out there’ – in a space separate from unequal gender relations, rather than ‘inside’ the space in which gender inequality is actually created. The result is a failure to consider media and communication as an issue, and a sometimes naïve vision of the media as instruments for women’s empowerment. For instance, while it is commonplace to call for media campaigns that inform women about their rights, relatively few activists characterise media and communication as a women’s human right – in the sense of an entitlement to speak and to be heard, to have equal access to the means of communication and to the production of media content.

Grappling with such issues is of course daunting. But to ignore them is a failure to address some of the most deeply rooted sources of gender inequality. After decades of effort and only limited change, the conclusion of one review after another – including the Beijing +10 review and appraisal - is that attitudes and mind-sets are at the core of the problem. ‘Explicitly addressing persistent stereotypical attitudes and discriminatory practices is critical to the full implementation of the Platform for Action’,9 states the report of the Secretary General. So here is the paradox. If attitudes are to be explicitly addressed, the reluctance to explicitly address media, communication and information – as issues rather than merely as instruments - that was evident in the Beijing +10 process is a profound analytical error.

After Beijing: Fusing scholarship, advocacy and policy

‘(Media) institutions that are not changed cannot become agents of change … There are no quick fixes; no short cuts.’10 Changing attitudes implies changing the culture that supports these attitudes. In the case of media and communication institutions, this means a comprehensive, multi-dimensional approach that includes policy, monitoring, advocacy, dialogue and training. Individual measures, unless situated within an analytical framework that addresses policies, structures and processes, will merely tinker with the symptoms rather than tackling their causes. A complaints campaign may result in the removal of a sexist advertisement, without necessarily changing the organisational and cultural environment in which sexism flourishes. Technical training may equip women to use computers, without affecting the social and cultural norms that preserve male dominance in the field of ICTs.

One of the most important contributions of feminist media scholarship, particularly in the post-Beijing years, has been to demonstrate the deeply embedded nature of gender-based judgements and assumptions – assumptions that permeate not just the media, but all social, economic and political institutions. This means that women’s relationship to the media – whether in their ‘traditional’ or their ‘new’ forms – is not an isolated phenomenon that can be analysed in a compartmentalised way.11 For instance, women’s access to information and communications technologies is limited not just by technical infrastructure, connection costs, computer literacy or language skills – factors that affect both female and male populations (though not necessarily in the same ways).

In addition to all these, socially constructed gender roles and relationships themselves play an important part in determining women’s technical skills, financial resources, mobility, availability of time and so on. Contemporary feminist media analysis thus goes beyond a concern with, for example, the gendered division of labour in news organisations, to a consideration of how globalisation, media policy making, and the development of information technologies raise important gender questions.

It is certainly easier to address specific issues such as pornography, access to decision-making, the need for training so on, and a focus on these and other readily identifiable facets of gender inequality will certainly continue. But it is essential to break through the conceptual and perceptual barriers that separate ‘gender concerns’ and ‘wider concerns’ in the policy-making arena. This means demonstrating the legitimacy – indeed the centrality – of a gender perspective in broader debates about development, media structures and information systems. Naturally, that is much easier said than done. Neither the Millennium Development Goals nor the World Summit on the Information Society – two high-profile current global policy processes – has thus far been able to move beyond conventional accommodations with gender advocates.

Since their adoption in 2000, the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - or a ‘Major Distraction Gimmick’ according to respected feminist activist and academic Peggy Antrobus12 – have been roundly criticised for bundling the complexities of gender equality and women’s empowerment into a single goal, apparently to be achieved by eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education. As well as highlighting the conceptual and policy inadequacies of the MDG approach, various studies have stressed the importance of mainstreaming gender concerns into all of the MDGs. However, analyses of MDG national reports and of the work of the MDG Task Forces show that this is not happening. Indeed when they are mentioned at all, ‘women are still being seen in terms of their vulnerabilities, and cast in their traditional roles as mothers or victims rather than as actors in development.’13

The first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) concluded in Geneva in December 2003. Following a long struggle, led principally by the NGO Gender Strategies Working Group and the WSIS Gender Caucus, a basic commitment to women’s human rights, empowerment and participation in the information society was included in paragraph 12 of the WSIS Declaration of Principles. But a gender perspective is missing from the overall framework:

‘At one point, during the preparatory processes prior to the Summit, in July 2003, all references to women suddenly disappeared in the draft documents. With protests from gender advocates, these were restored. However, the fundamental principle of gender equality in the information society debate had by then been lost. The negotiations were subsequently to be conducted over a sentence here or a paragraph there on gender.’14

Post-Beijing challenges

Neither the MDGs nor the WSIS has built on the framework provided by the Beijing Platform for Action. The MDG framework is rudimentary and outdated. Women’s empowerment is to be pursued not because it is a human right, but because women’s equality will ‘produce favourable ripple effects’ for development.15 Yet the entire weight of the UN system has been thrown into publicising the MDGs. So here is the first challenge. How are gender advocates to benefit from the high-profile attention received by the MDGs as the new consensus framework for development discourse?

At a minimum the MDGs must be more deeply analysed and their links with the Beijing Platform clearly elaborated in the five year review of the MDGs to be held in September 2005.. To quote Peggy Antrobus, ‘the BPA is a … framework for addressing all the MDGs and … this means that when others they talk MDG, we must think BPA! We must substitute the Best Plan of Action (BPA) for the Most Distracting Gimmick (MDG)!’16

In the case of the WSIS, targeted interventions for gender equality – a strategy endorsed by Beijing – were not favoured in the final language of the Geneva Declaration. Moreover, when gender was addressed in the Summit documentation, it was limited to specific support actions for girls and women in the ‘traditional’ ways – through balanced and diverse portrayals, or education and training. Issues that have typified post-Beijing ICT gender analysis – such as the need for gender-sensitive infrastructure development – were not addressed. It seems that as long as gender advocates in the WSIS process confined themselves to ‘traditional women’s issues’ they had some chance of success – perhaps because these issues were considered to be on the fringes of the overall WSIS agenda.

As preparations for the second phase of WSIS (Tunis, November 2005) gather pace, the challenge is to enter into the core of that agenda and to engage with the ‘central’ WSIS issues of internet governance, free and open software, surveillance, privacy, intellectual property rights, and financing mechanisms. Among those taking a lead in this are the WSIS Gender Caucus and the APC Women’s Networking Support Programme, whose gender and ICT policy website is a timely innovation and a major resource.17

These new issues may seem far-removed from the ‘women and media’ concerns of Section J in the Beijing Platform for Action. But the questions they raise for gender activists are fundamentally the same as they have always been. Those questions still revolve around the most basic issues of power and control, definitions and values, access and exclusion. It is salutary to be reminded that, even though the global political and communication environments have changed dramatically since Beijing, patterns of gender inequality still await transformation. n

Notes

1. The Beijing Plus 10 Cyber Dialogues were global online discussions, covering seven themes. They were organised by a team of African women journalists, co-ordinated by Gender Links (South Africa). See: Beijing Plus Ten cyber dialogues. Report. April 2005. http://genderlinks.org.za/bejing/docs/b-cd-full-report.pdf (accessed 19 June 2005

2. See ‘Looking for the “J” spot’ by Maria Suarez Toro, Gem News @ Beijing Plus 10, 9 March 2005, p. 4. http://genderlinks.org.za/bejing/newspapers.asp (accessed 19 June 2005)

3. IANWGE. Summary of the Online Discussions Held in Preparation for the 10 Year Review and Appraisal of the Implementation of the Platform for Action in the 49th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, New York: IANWGE March 2005. www.un.org/womenwatch/ianwge/docs/online-discussions-rpt-10-yr-review.pdf (accessed 19 June 2005)

4. Review of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of the special session of the General Assembly entitled ‘Women 2000: gender equality, development and peace for the twenty-first century’. Report of the Secretary-General (E/CN.6/2005/2); paras 426-428 and 621-624 . Available at www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/Review/english/news.htm (‘official documents’ section: accessed 19 June 2005)

5. Women’s Environmental and Development Organisation. Beijing Betrayed: Women Worldwide Report that Governments Have Failed to Turn the Platform into Action. New York: WEDO, 2005, p. 7. www.wedo.org/library.aspx?ResourceID=31 (accessed 19 June 2005)

6. The WEDO framework was a monumental lost opportunity for consideration of media and communication. For instance the contribution of the European Women’s Lobby to the WEDO document was adapted from a longer EWL report covering all of the Beijing critical areas of concern. In its detailed review of the implementation of Section J, the EWL concluded that ‘women and media is one of the objectives that is most neglected by the European Union’. See European Women’s Lobby, Beijing+10. 1995-2005: Review of the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action by the European Union. Brussels: EWL, November 2004, p. 72

7. Even in 2000, during the five-year Beijing review and appraisal, the US delegation stipulated in its Reservation statement that nothing in the outcome documents could be considered binding on the media. See Anita Gurumurthy Gender and ICTs: Overview Report. Sussex: Institute for Development Studies/Bridge, September 2004, p. 40 www.bridge.ids.ac.uk/reports_gend_CEP.html#ICTs (accessed 19 June 2005)

8. United Nations. Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. New York, 1995, para. 234. www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/plat1.htm (accessed 19 June 2005).

9. Review of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of the special session of the General Assembly entitled “Women 2000: gender equality, development and peace for the twenty-first century”. Report of the Secretary-General (E/CN.6/2005/2), para. 81

10. Editorial: ‘Ignoring the media a big mistake’. Gem News @ Beijing Plus 10, 9 March 2005, p. 8. http://genderlinks.org.za/bejing/newspapers.asp (accessed 19 June 2005)

11. See Margaret Gallagher ‘Feminist Media Perspectives’, pp. 19-39 in Blackwell Companion to Media Studies, edited by Angharad N. Valdivia. Oxford, Blackwell, 2003

12. See ‘Presentation to Working Group on the MDGs & Gender Equality’ by Peggy Antrobus, DAWN Caribbean. UNDP Caribbean Regional Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Conference, Barbados, 7-9 July 2003. http://www.dawn.org.fj/regional/docs/peggymdgpaper.doc (accessed 19 June 2005)

13. See UNDP. Millenium Development Goals. National Reports. A Look Through a Gender Lens. New York: UNDP, May 2003, p. 22. www.undp.org/gender/docs/mdgs-genderlens.pdf (accessed 19 June 2005). For analysis of work of the MDG Task Forces see Genevieve Renard Painter Gender, the Millenium Development Goals, and Human Rights in the context of the 2005 review processes. Report for the UK Gender and Development Network, October 2004. http://www.siyanda.org/docs/painter_cedawmdgs.doc (accessed 19 June 2005)

14. Anita Gurumurthy op. cit., p. 15.

15. Painter, op. cit., p. 7

16. Antrobus, op. cit., p. 13

17. For the work of the WSIS Gender Caucus see www.genderwsis.org. The APC WNSP gender and ICT policy is at www.genderit.org (both accessed 19 June 2005)

Margaret Gallagher is an independent researcher and consultant specialising in gender and media. She has carried out research, development and evaluation projects for the United Nations and its agencies, the European Commission, international development agencies and broadcasting organisations.