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WiPSU Media Monitoring Report (July - September 2007)
Women in Politics Support Unit (WiPSU)
November 19, 2007

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Introduction

Women's participation in elections has largely been covered at the level of voting and campaigning for men. Very few women have been able to break the glass ceiling and make it into positions of decision-making. Currently, there are only 48 women MPs (i.e. 22%) in the Zimbabwean Parliament, a far cry from the minimum of 50% as set by the SADC Declaration on Gender and Development. Whilst the barriers to women's participation are many and varied, the most fundamental one lie around the media's inability to make women newsworthy.

Often times women are viewed, as passive recipients of information and can not speak for themselves in the media. Without a means of communication, women are not participating in governance; instead their male counterparts who have the greatest outreach as they are covered and given voices in the media are making the political decision

We all experience the power of the mass media over our decisions due to its massive outreach. Yet we know that no democracy can survive where a few men have such immense political power relative to others. (Donna Allen and Danna Densmore, 1997). It is very disturbing to note that often times, when a woman's voice makes its way into the news, she is most likely to be a beauty contestant, sex worker or homemaker. These three occupations are the only categories where women's views dominate.

There cannot be a real democracy if the voices and issues of 52% of the country's population are ignored or sidelined. This media analysis will assist in determining whether or not women's voices and issues are articulated to the public as matters of importance. It can also be used as a basis for assessing what could be done to ensure that women's voices and issues are regarded as important.

In order to conduct a systematic analysis of how women are covered in the media, taking into consideration the fact that the ownership of the media, wherever you go, remains a patriarchal area, WiPSU initiated an internal data capturing process where a daily monitoring of newspapers would be conducted and any article on women Parliamentarians and councilors would be collected.

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