Women at the top: is there a need for more female editors-in-chief?

Posted by Emma Heald on December 3, 2009 at 12:40 PM

A group of female editors and media experts from India, Sri Lanka, Russia and South Africa discussed the issue of whether more women editors-in-chief would generate more readers at the 16th World Editors Forum.

Bachi Karkaria, formerly with the Times of India and now an analyst of urban and social change and a media trainer, says that as an editor, she is totally against forms of gender-centric ideas. Journalism has too much emphasis on what is women issues and male issues, she said. Women issues consisting of housekeeping, entertainment and other light subjects and male issues consisting of heavier stories.

"Glass ceilings are sometimes actually creations of men," she said.

Women get too defensive about their positions and are bending over backwards to say they should not be discriminated against, she said. People need to make choices based on what you want rather than what people think they should want.

Champika Liyanaarachchi, editor of Sri Lanka's largest daily newspaper, the Daily Mirror, echoed Karkaria's thoughts on gender-targeted writing. "As an editor, I am completely against the idea of compartmentalizing genders," she told the forum.

Liyanaarachchi, who is also a director of the Commonwealth Journalists Association (CJA) recalled an occasion when she had fought with the sports desk over multiple pictures of female tennis players, and she managed to reduce the number.

Maria Eismont, head of the Russian Independent Print Media program of the New Eurasia Foundation, believes that "journalists in Russia have lost the public love and lost the public trust." Could female editors change this, however? She pointed to several examples in which the actions of female editors really made a difference. One was a story of a 63-year-old woman who was beaten by a police chief and appealed to the Kurer newspaper in Berdsk which is edited by Galina Komornikova. The paper investigated the story and found it to be true, but the publisher blocked it because the police chief was his friend. Komornikova finally decided to publish it two months afterwards and she and the paper's staff left to form their own publication.

Ferial Haffajee is editor of South Africa's CityPress: until she started there she was editor-in-chief of the Mail & Guardian. She explained that before she was an editor, "I had worked for women editors and felt sorry for the way that they always had to deal with machismo and they were constantly apologising and insisting, 'I'm not a feminist'." Haffajee decided to resist this pressure and "when I started editing I edited right into my niche."

During her editorship of the Mail & Guardian, readership grew and the number of male and female readers equalised. Haffajee suggested that the increase in female readers was partly because she refused to patronise them with 'women's pages.'