The Media Trust hosted a capacity building programme on “Integrating Gender Perspectives: Guidelines for Effective Policy Implementation for Media Professionals on 5 November in Port Louis. The session was led by EU Gender Expert Winfred Lichuma, who urged journalists to look beyond headcounts and ask why men and women occupy the roles they do in society, and how the stories they file either reinforce or challenge those roles.
Winfred Lichuma opened by separating two terms that are often used interchangeably. Sex, she explained, refers to the biological and physiological differences between females and males. Gender is something else: the roles, responsibilities, behaviours and expectations that a given society attaches to those differences. “When we talk about gender, it’s not sex, it is the labour division but around sex,” she told the participants.
Culture, not nature
At the heart of her message was the idea that gender is a social construct, shaped by culture and passed down through socialisation. She pointed to the quiet lessons many women receive from grandparents, parents and mothers about how to be a woman, and to the way a woman who steps outside those expectations can find herself judged as going against culture. Men, she noted, go through their own version of the same teaching.
She made the case that these roles are neither natural nor fixed. If people were born into a community with no inherited expectations, she suggested, nobody would have decided that certain tasks belong to men and others to women. The roles vary by culture, history and geography, which is why gender is not static. She also acknowledged that Mauritian society has evolved, and that it is now far more accepted for married men to share household responsibilities.
Stereotypes in the newsroom
The session then turned to stereotypes, which Lichuma defined as rigidly held, oversimplified beliefs that men and women, by virtue of their biology, possess distinct psychological traits. Reporters, she warned, can slip into them without meaning to.
She traced how the lines have shifted over time. There was a period with few women doctors and many women nurses, yet today women practice medicine and men work as nurses. Secretarial work and airline cabin crew were once seen as female preserves, and both have since opened up to men. “Women can learn and be good scientists. Men can learn and be good nurses as well,” she said.
The consequences, however, are not evenly spread. Stereotypes about men tend to make them look strong and masculine, she observed, while those about women are almost always negative: will she make it, can she cope, who will look after her children? Such assumptions, she warned, often lead to unfair discrimination and undermine the person who would otherwise have taken up the role.
Coping, changing and unlearning
Lichuma was equally clear that society adapts. She cited day-care centres and extended maternity provisions as examples of the coping mechanisms that have emerged to support working mothers, and said that people who cling to “my father did this, my grandfather did this” thinking risk being left behind by a society that is changing fast.
She applied the same optimism to the newsroom itself. A young generation of journalists is entering a field that was long male-dominated, and technology has removed some of the old barriers. Cameras that were once huge have given way to the smartphone, she said, adding that “we no longer should have barriers.”
She also cautioned against overlooking the other side of the story. While celebrating the progress of girls in education, including in science subjects, she asked why boys are dropping out of school and who is finding out where they are.
Her closing point was the one she returned to throughout the session: what is learned can be unlearned. For the journalists in the room, that makes every story an opportunity to show the public a more balanced picture of the women and men they serve.
