AMMAN (JT) - AmmanNet and the World Association of Christian Communications (WACC) have created a searchable directory for Arab women experts in various development themes, which is now available online at www.ammannet.net/look/woman.
The Arabic/English directory comes as the fulfilment of a commitment made in Amman in 2006 for gender-balanced news media, according to a statement released by AmmanNet.
Journalists and reporters attribute their reliance on men to provide expert commentary on different themes to a lack of knowledge on where to find women able to discuss these themes at a professional level, the statement said.
Men constitute 83 per cent of the experts in the news and 86 per cent of spokespersons, according to research coordinated by WACC in 2005.
“In contrast, women appear in a personal capacity as eyewitnesses, giving personal views or as representatives of popular opinion. Women's opinions from their standpoints as professionals are silenced in the news in as much as the women are invisible as experts,” the statement said, adding that such reporting has implications at the individual, family and societal levels, constituting a structural barrier for women's progress as professionals and negating their contribution and participation in societal development.
The online directory of women experts is designed to mitigate these gaps by making available a reference tool for journalists and reporters committed to producing gender-equitable news content.
Daoud Kuttab, founder of AmmanNet who coordinated the project, expressed happiness that the directory has finally seen the light of day.
“We have been working on this project for years, making phone calls and contacting women experts throughout the Arab world,” Kuttab said, noting that the directory will be regularly updated.
“We hope the directory will become an indispensable tool for gender-conscious news practitioners and will contribute to gender-equality struggles in the region,” said Sarah Macharia, the programme manager for media and gender justice at WACC, a global network of communicators committed to communication for social change. The organisation’s key concerns are media diversity, equal and affordable access to communication and knowledge, media and gender justice, and the relationship between communication and power, according to the statement.
The directory follows a workshop in December 2006 to discuss the 2005 Global Media Monitoring Project, a participatory global research study on gender and media which found that expert opinion in the news is overwhelmingly male and women barely make the news as authorities and experts.
-- Jordan Times
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