Understanding the importance of gendered language, gendered perspectives and the need for voices with Sameera Khan, senior journalist and co-writer of Why Loiter, the book that became a movement. Oh, and she was once co-editor, Byline (SCM Sophia 1989-1990). Interviewed by Jashvitha Dhagey and Umama Momin.

 

The study by Population First and United Nations Population Funds (UNFPA) and Royal Norwegian Embassy in India in collaboration with the Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) was conducted amidst a pandemic and like every other thing, it was conducted online. A vast team of people from all over the country was brought together to analyse newspapers spread across seven languages, English, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Manipuri, Assamese and Malayalam. The project was led by Sameera Khan and Dr. Sweta Singh, a media communications professor at a university in Delhi.  

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The challenge wasn’t the online experience, says Khan. “It's pushing people that I found very hard. Particularly pushing people at the time of the pandemic, when one doesn’t know people's local realities. I kept saying, ‘Tell me if there’s an illness in your family, if you’re caregiving, even as you’re doing this.’ Some were working and doing this part-time and some were doing this full time but some also had caregiving responsibilities. It is very difficult for me to be kind to people when there’s a deadline looming, a deadline for which I feel personally responsible.  But I think you should be kind to people even when there's no pandemic,” she says and breaks into a smile. It was not an easy task. Some researchers fell ill with CoVID, some were looking after CoVID patients. Some researchers had lost their jobs.  “I’m hoping that working on his project will add to their resumes,” she says and adds that since it was a funded project, the contributors all got paid for their work. 

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The researchers who had been personally trained by Dr Sweta Singh and Sameera Khan, were all women journalists. “The fact that they came from the media made the work easier in terms of knowing what to look for while reading the news copies of the print publications. These women knew the whys and the hows of the reports they were analysing. Especially because they themselves had done this kind of reporting.”

 

Only 4.8 per cent of the 6,110 pandemic and lockdown-related news stories monitored by the study had anything of significance with regard to women and/or gender issues. But Khan thinks the team was “not surprised. In fact, when they started analyzing, they would call me up and cry and say, ‘I can't find gender. Then, what is the point of this survey if you can't find gender?’ And I kept saying, ‘What is absent is also a data finding.’ So they kept saying that they wanted to find gender. That is the study and I'd say, ‘But the absence of gender is also a story.’While the presence of gender is a story, absence is too.” 

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The sample collected by Khan and Singh’s team happens to be even larger than the sample collected by the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) every five years. While the GMMP monitors one given day every 5 years, this particular study monitored one week each month over seven months! Khan reveals that they have lots of data that still has to be processed. “Some stuff is not directly connected to what our objective was but it's interesting, nevertheless.”

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The team expected the numbers to be low but they didn’t imagine they would be so abysmally low.  On this, Khan says, “March-April were the early months of the lockdown and it's possible that they didn’t pay attention, but I couldn’t understand why they still couldn’t get enough gender stories in June, July and August when everything had settled down and the main lockdown was over. And at some point I even told the team to look at random pages aside from the pages we were monitoring, in case we find anything.” 

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She adds, “A lot of people said that when they read the paper, they didn’t see gender at all. The stories were very few and far between, even in places where it was possible to do it,  given the emphasis on the pandemic.”

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Their study, says Khan, matches other studies internationally. She cites the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s study which came out in September 2020, “That study surveyed women being covered by the media. And when the pandemic happened, they just changed their focus. They commissioned a separate, parallel study of the CoVID coverage. The study found that  there were actually more gender stories in pre-CoVID coverage than during the pandemic. How does that happen?”

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Khan points out that most reporters get quotes from people who are easily reachable. “Who are the more accessible sources? They’re men. In India, women don’t get to occupy spaces the way men do, and so they become ‘too far to reach’, especially when you’re on deadline.” 

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This, she says, is the default mode of approaching things. “You end up interviewing men, you interview officials and most of the officials happen to be men. If a woman happens to be there, you'll interview her but otherwise, you're not going out looking for her. I think in everyday coverage when there is no pandemic or crisis, people who have got the right training will look for women sources, they will try to see the gender angle. But in crisis mode, your default mode is to talk to whoever's available and usually it is men who are available to talk. Once you’re got your quote, you’re done and dusted. You’re not going to stop and ask: What’s missing? And the answer is: Half of humanity.”

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Or, she adds, more than half. “Be clear that not only do you have to interview the other half of humanity which is 50%  women but also the intersectionality within that. It’s not enough to talk to a woman, any woman, or a woman of privilege. You have to find the lower caste woman, the woman from a minority, you have to find them and persuade them to talk. But when you do, your story becomes much richer, much more vibrant. Why are there not enough Muslim, Dalit, Adivasi, or disabled women interviewed? Even senior citizens and children are left out. There are so many categories, but an attempt has to be made.”

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The answer, Khan believes, lies in training. “Newsrooms need to set up training programmes for every group of journalists, not just the juniors; the middle level and senior editors have to be pulled in too. You see, you need to be reminded that the picture is changing. You have to keep abreast of things.” 

 

Khan offers examples from her own experience of training. “I often conduct training on how to cover gender violence. Before going in, we look at what the paper has been doing and we come across examples of regressive language. Why would you do that? Can’t there be a tag on your computer system that warns you that you are using a word you should avoid when you’re doing a rape or assault story? Why can’t we have a shared list of experts in every field of gender ready? People who work in gender and development, gender and health, gender and violence, you can have it all on your computer and you can reach out when you need them. On our phones, we can have a list of experts under each gender heading or gender intersection and caste experts available so we won’t have to run around to find them.”

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Learning to use language representative of gender is part of a larger picture of understanding people and where they come from. She emphasises, “Constantly be aware that other people's realities are not necessarily the same. They don't have to match your reality. Be curious and choose to understand what these different realities are. Be aware of your privilege.” 

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Privilege and prejudice are both invisible to the person who has them. Khan says that it is one’s job to investigate that prejudice. She says, “Be sceptical about everything, even the knowledge you have about yourself and interrogate it.” Questioning one’s self and introspection goes a long way in helping other voices to come to the front. 

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She adds that one should be aware of what a varied country we are dealing with “If this is what the population of India is, I should try to represent them as best as I can. This is not just for human justice or gender justice issues, it is also because you will actually tell better stories. So it should be a matter of pride to do that.” 

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But what of a story like pregnancy, a story about women, a story that affects women, a story told without a female voice? “Women are absent as protagonists, sources or voices in stories that pertain to them. Even the places where it could be so easily applied to them. Even though stories sometimes directly impact them, they are not interviewed. For example, look at a story on pregnant women trying to give birth during the pandemic. The woman was rarely quoted. Instead, it was often just the husband who was cited as a source and written as a voice. And they're all giving their opinion on what happened to this woman and that woman or other women like her. There could be a whole ward of pregnant women sitting there, but wouldn’t be interviewed. This is such a noticeable thing and also the way it is an individual narrative.” 

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With a hint of annoyance in her voice, she says, “I’m fed up of these individual narratives. I feel it is lazy journalism. I think for breaking a story, it’s fine. You’re chasing the story at that point of time, but at some point, you have to see all these scattered little pieces and join the dots.” 

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Apart from that, Khan focuses on how upsetting it is that women are often ignored in work stories. All migrants and all economic migrants are shown to be men. They're the only ones who migrate. They are the only ones who do work. And if they happen to have some girl or woman standing with them, that is the wife and daughter, bas, finish. They are not economic agents by themselves. They don't do anything. 

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“It's almost like if someone from Mars came and looked at the paper we were looking at, they’d think women didn't live on this planet or there were very few women on this planet or in this country because they're not quoted or mentioned, their stories are not mentioned.”

 

According to Sameera Khan, there is only one solution to this under-representation: “Go back to the basics of journalism. Do ground reporting. Go talk to people, sit with them. Listen to them. Understand their perspective, gain knowledge of what is really happening with the people. Interviews with regular people are the best because they don't even know that they have an interesting story. But they're telling you such interesting things about their life.” Variety is the spice of life, it especially holds true for a journalist looking to add different angles and perspectives to their story. For budding journalists, it is important that they understand how vital voices are. 

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Sameera says that editors should be reminding journalists to look out for a variety of voices. “If one goes to a village, don’t go to only the upper caste people. Make sure to talk to lower caste people, maybe some women; try to look for diverse people wherever it's possible. At least one must keep this in mind and make an attempt. If one keeps making attempts, possibly out of five attempts, two should be successful. We will get those voices. It's not impossible.” concludes Sameera. 

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Khan finds it is astonishing that she wrote a hundred-page paper but she might never hold it in her hands. She comes from the era of print publications and says that she feels a sense of loss when she was told she won’t hold her work in her hands. 

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But going digital is not such a bad idea, according to the former co-editor of Byline, the annual magazine of SCM Sophia for the year 1988-89. Digital presents itself with a vast variety of options that can be integrated to enhance a story by using elements beyond words. While multimedia elements are the main reason why going digital is a good idea for Khan, she elaborates further by saying that it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the content produced. Has the job of producing that content been done with integrity, justice and values intact? 

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While talking of producing content that matters, Sameera reminisces her time as the co-editor of Byline along with Kaumudi Marathe,  “It was a crazy experience. Basically, Kaumudi and I handled it, everybody else you know contributed but eventually editing, proofing, going to the printers, everything, it was a great learning opportunity. I learned a lot from that.” There is a fondness that flashes across her face as she remembers her days at SCM. 

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“I'm very proud of Byline, even now, many years later.”