Mentorship key to gender parity in newsrooms

When the Thomson Foundation requested that I come on board as one of the mentors in the inaugural Bettina Fund-Women in Leadership programme aimed at empowering media in Kenya, I was a little anxious because I was not sure of what to say to a pair of brilliant mentees with high expectations. I was also excited that finally, we had a structured mentorship programme to support women journalists.

The media industry in Kenya – East Africa, really – is heavily male-dominated at the top. While young women make up most of the journalism and communication graduates, it is ironic that the higher you go in the media, the fewer women you are likely to encounter.

Think of it as a pyramid; at the base, you have hundreds of young, brilliant and talented women journalists entering the newsrooms in droves as interns and entry-level reporters, but as you go up, you are left with only a handful of women as top editors and executives and not one female CEO in sight.

While this trend is not unique to the media, the lack of diversity and inclusion in the media should be a cause for worry for not just media practitioners, but also other stakeholders including audiences who will feel the impact of this skewedness in the content they consume.

A lot has been done to support female journalists in this country. Let us give credit where it is due. Now more than ever, we are witnessing the rise of women in the newsroom as editors, executives and board members making significant contributions at different levels of decision-making. 

Gender balance in newsrooms

We have seen the intentional support and promotion of women in Kenyan newsrooms. However, we are still outnumbered by the men, and herein lies the problem. Now that women have a foot in the door and at least one seat reserved at the high table, our aim should be to ensure that women occupy up at least 50 per cent of leadership roles to achieve total gender balance in our newsrooms and boardrooms. 

Training and education is not the issue in this case. Ask any journalism professor and they tell you that some of their best students are young women. The problem is retention of these bright women in the media and – very important – interesting them in leadership roles in news media organisations.

A surefire way to achieve is this to create a robust and structured mentorship programme that links mentors with young women entering the media to create a pipeline of competent and confident future newsroom and corporate leaders who will bring their diverse talents and perspectives to address the industry’s most pressing challenges.

To end this, I will quote Obama’s speech on his 2015 Kenya visit: “...the evidence shows that communities that give their daughters the same opportunities as their sons, they are more peaceful, they are more prosperous, they develop faster, they are more likely to succeed. That's true in America. That's true here in Kenya. It doesn’t matter.” 

The writer is the Director, Innovation Centre, at Aga Khan University; [email protected]