Women are underrepresented in the media space of Kyrgyzstan, mentioned less often, interviewed less often, and their marital status and age are mentioned more often.
CABAR.asia has analysed the visibility of women on news websites in the fourth quarter of 2021. This period was chosen because parliamentary election took place in Kyrgyzstan on November 28, 2021, and the media actively covered the political agenda of the country.
According to the study results, women were less covered in the news than men. Out of 17 thousand publications, only 657 covered women, and 1,838 covered men.
According to the National Statistical Committee, in the beginning of 2022, in the population of Kyrgyzstan there were slightly more women, 3.399 million, than men, 3.043 million.
If we look at the publications about women and men in various categories, the number of publications about men prevail everywhere in absolute terms. Even in social topics, which are stereotypically referred to “women’s”, women are mentioned less often.
According to editor-in-chief of Kloop.kg and media expert Anna Kapushenko, this situation has been caused by two factors. First, all media produce news content that deals with politics, sports, and other spheres, where women are poorly represented.
The second factor, according to her, is the attitude of editors, who determine the editorial policy. Therefore, despite the fact that the majority of journalists in Kyrgyzstan are women, they are little mentioned in media materials.
“I see that the main editorial staff of many media outlets is aged 35+ and it is very difficult for them to let the young ones who know gender aspects well in. Therefore, the ideas of the editorial staff do not tend to change because of the older staff,” said Kapushenko.
Besides, she said, often materials about women are filled with misogyny and victim blaming, while patriarchal attitudes prevent women from creating and promoting content about women.
Misogyny is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women, girls. Victim blaming is blaming the victim of a crime or violence for what has happened to her.
According to CABAR.asia analysis, sections “Accidents” and “Society” contain two times fewer news reports about women than about men, “Politics” – almost 7 times fewer, and “Economy” more than 8 times fewer.
The situation is slightly different in terms of proportions. 83 per cent of publications about women fall on crime reports and social issues. Men are mentioned in accidents, social issues and politics almost equally. Economy section accounts for 6.4 per cent of publications about men, and 2.2 per cent about women.
See also: How to Tell about Women’s Rights and Why
According to Anna Kapushenko, the low proportion of publications about women in politics and economy sections is mainly due to their underrepresentation in these spheres.
“We should know how the politics is done. Most often, women get into it for a reason, and legislators are not ordinary people. One cannot become a deputy without money. It is even twice harder if you don’t have money and you are a woman. Those quotas that we have are not observed now. Women are less likely to get into politics,” she said.
Meanwhile, according to her, the media do not think about interviewing female deputies, broadcasting their voices and showing how cool they are.
“The media, just like other actors in the society, start hating the very Mrs. Narmatova, who proposes some foolish initiative. Therefore, it appears that women who get into politics do much harm. [...] However, everyone ignores the fact that there are much more men in the parliament and it is quite natural that every act by a woman would stand out. No one analyses how much harm men do, that they vote for terrible laws, etc.,” she said.
Women also “speak” less in the media than men do. Although, in percentage terms, the “voices” of representatives of both genders grab headlines equally, in quantitative terms, the difference is significant.
Of all publications, whose main characters were women, their quotes in headlines were used only in 39 materials. Among publications dedicated to men, there were 111 materials with quotes of men.
But at the same time, when the media write about women, they tend to identify them by their marital status and age. Of all publications in the fourth quarter of 2021, 0.74 per cent specified whether the woman was married or not. For men, this indicator is 0.24 per cent.
The age of women and men in headlines is mentioned almost equally. Almost all such publications fall under the crime section.
Gender representation of women’s professions is no different, either. Speaking of women, the media use mainly well-known feminitives that refer to traditionally women’s specialities – teacher, cleaning lady, babysitter, etc.
Of 617 feminitives, female chiefs and female deputies were mentioned 2 times each, director – once, with no mentions of female programmers, economists or experts.
Disputes about how grammatically correct is the use of feminitives are still ongoing. Nevertheless, they can add clarity to the text, when, for example, the heroine of your story has the surname without female ending and holds office that is generally associated with “males”.
“Previously, it was very difficult for women to hold some high office, they have been historically assigned the roles of cleaning ladies, housekeepers. And these feminitives did not and do not confuse anyone. Now, the woman can be a female lawyer, editor, deputy or president. Unfortunately, these words irritate many people,” Kapushenko said.
For more details on feminitives, please see Provoking the Audience or Changing the World: Why Media Should Use Feminine Gender Marking
The media expert also said that the media should think about the visual representation of women in their materials. In the Kyrgyz media space, they are mainly represented in vulnerable roles – news about violence, migrants, etc. It does not mean that difficulties should be ignored, but it should be shown that those are systemic problems and they should be covered in an appropriate way.
See also: Gender-Sensitive Journalism. How to Cover Violence in Media
She said that the media should stop portraying the images of a weak woman. On the example of Kloop.kg, she said that they develop the strategy to increase representation of women not only in the violence issue.
“We want to show success stories, about women in professions, which are traditionally deemed as male ones, and about women who have managed to overcome some serious obstacles in life. In other words, we are trying now to focus more on positive stories, where women are represented as female winners. And it is quite complicated because it is rather difficult to find heroines,” she said.
Main photo generated by OpenAI DALL-E.