Shocking Report Unveils Disturbing Facts about Women Media Professionals: IWMF Study
IWMF and INSI conducted a study about women media professionals bringing out shocking results about working conditions in terms of their safety and security.
Shocking Report Unveils Disturbing Facts about Women Media Professionals. Photo-IWMF
As much as talks about equality of women in the professional world carry and rage on with fervour, there’s one significant aspect that needs to be understood about the presence of women in the global professional domain – that of sexual harassment, violence, threats and bullying that occur against them in their professional habitat.
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And it is the institution of media, often regarded to be the fourth estate of a country’s system of existence – alongside its executive, judiciary and legislative powers – is one that features quite prominently as far as such detrimental treatment of women is concerned, across the globe. The IWMF (International Women’s Media Foundation) and INSI (International News Safety Institute) recently came up with a detailed analysis of the situation of women professionals working in the media domain.
Chart: Physical violence against women media professionals. Image courtesy-IWMF
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The numbers speak for themselves with staggering percentage counts of such shameful activities spread across:
- North America where about 28% women in the profession reported to have experienced such inappropriate advances towards them
- Asia and Asia-Pacific with about 27% women experiencing such inappropriate advances towards them
- Europe where about 19% women had experienced such inappropriate harassment and bullying treatment at their professional domain
Further elaborative statistic includes the following shocking trends as well indicating that there’s no particular area where women can afford to feel safe and secure within the brackets of their professional field.
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Chart: Physical violence against women media professionals – Job Roles. Image courtesy-IWMF
Within the field of media:
- Field reporters and journos are the ones who experience the maximum percentage of about 82% in terms of inappropriate social conduct and behaviour
- Women editors and producers follow suit in the analysis with nearly 23% and 13% female media professionals experiencing inappropriate social conduct in their professional domain respectively
- The least percentage of women professionals in the domain of media who experience harassment and intimidation are the workforce providing ancillary assistance and camera and sound technicians (about 5% and 4% respectively)
Even amongst these data distribution figures, the maximum number of women professionals who were the recipients of inappropriate conduct, were from the newspaper background followed by the website background. This report is also inclusive for those working as full-time employees and freelance professionals across all media platforms.
These percentage distributions are quite thought-provoking. Especially more so considering that the organisations’ responsibility towards ensuring that their women workforce’s safety and security was also quite limited with nearly 70% respondents to the analysis claiming that their organisation was ill-equipped in terms of offering adequate safeguarding and prevention measures to ensure a safe and hospitable working environment.
International Women’s Day may have been a cause of celebration all over the world, but these trends indicate – and quite emphatically at that – quite a polarising figure for women professionals across the world. It is more significant, despite not being obvious, that this is just one professional sector and not the entirety of the professional domains where women are a major part of the global workforce leaving a huge doubt about the rot that could be lying in all those professional domains.
We would love your hear your thoughts on the issue. Please let us know in the comments.
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