Yesterday I met with Tasneem Ahmar, Executive Director and Founder of Uks, a research, resource and Publications Center on Women and Media. Uks is our generous sponsor in Pakistan. Tasneem has been for 20 years monitoring negative portrayal and lack of equal representation in media of women. Think of how many times during the Olympics and during this stupid campaign that the US media has completely cocked it up. Literally.
She and her staff would look at all the papers available and rate the portrayal of women in each story as either being a positive portrayal or a negative one. Archival photos related at the meeting showed newspaper articles circled with a plus or minus, twenty years worth. She related an example of an Urdu language paper that told the story of the rape of a bricklayer's wife by a neighbor. The headline read something to the effect of; Bricklayer's wife gets plastered'. After finding such examples she would call the editor of the paper and explain to them that that was poor writing. Another example is of the way newspapers handled stories about abandoned babies. The headline would blame the mother by default without ever knowing who actually left the child.
Her work led to the adoption of better style sheets in news rooms all over the country and beyond. She offered trainings in newsrooms. The trainings covered gender sensitivity and how to adopt positive discrimination techniques and affirmative action practices when writing headlines and features. She has worked with pretty much every widely known human rights group. OXFAM, USAID, National Endowment for Democracy (they got something right).
In addition to this work she has been training women to go out into the field in tribal areas and record missives of the lives of women in rural areas. These recordings are in Urdu so they wouldn't be very insightful but I am sure some wizard of audio production could make a two language production of some of the recordings. Tasneem's organization has lots of materials in English and you can find out more right here.
To hear her speak please listen.