Male journalists ain’t chauvinistic

gender equality lobby are wont to make us all believe.
That is a passionate motivation of the debate on gender equality. A dispassionate interrogation of an inequality in the profession in point ought to invoke the sociology of the African traditional society to try to locate the root cause of fewer women in that so-called noble profession. Of course, such a recourse to a society that militated against the education of the girl child will try to confirm why journalism, not just in Zimbabwe but elsewhere in Africa as well, remains largely men’s domain.
But be that as it may, journalism is more than numbers that meet the eye. This pen submits that the profession is predicated more on its being an ability game with a natural disposition to it a staying capacity without which men and women may fall by the wayside even if after undergoing training as scribes.
Even for men, journalism was once treated as a “dangerous” profession that exposed practitioners to violence when covering strikes and, worse still, when reporting war situations. Still, men with the right aptitude and an unflinching intrepidity, the staying capacity, defied the odds of violence to enjoy the drama and glamour of keeping nations abreast of unfolding events around the world and the glamour of rubbing shoulders with important personages, not mention that of trotting around the globe and getting to know more about the cultures and political chemistry of different people an planet Earth.
Getting closer to home, more men ply their trade in journalism today than do their women counterparts due mainly to two critical factors in their favour, the first of which is that men broke a barrier of racism before and even after independence.
During colonialism, and in the years soon after blacks became independent of the rule by foreign cultures, journalism remained the preserve of whites who used the profession at the behest of racist minority regimes to keep blacks away from power and in the shadow of so-called “civilised people,” the whites.
However, blacks were not to be kept in the shade even by subtle racist manoeuvres by whites ruling the roost, and so some blacks intruded, as it were, into the “white men’s profession” until today when more men than women hold down top posts in various media houses. Their sheer numbers are also based on the fact that education for the boy child was viewed by traditional African society as a future investment for the care of parents in old age, whereas the same society saw education for the girl child as “enrichment” for her husband and her in-laws.
Now, however, both those schools of thought have become nearly as transient as both time and the extended family system representing the old African traditional society. To be sure, post modernity has seen the extended family system yellowing and falling away with its autumn and slowly but surely being replaced by an enduring spring of a reconstituted extended family system in which nuclear families of working parents and fewer children are manifest.
In the latter extended family system domestic workers play the role of surrogate parents and this frees the working mother from confinement to the kitchen so that she helps her husband by earning a handsome salary for the family working as a professional even late into the night, as nurses do in their large numbers, especially. That women opt out of journalism, and in favour of other professions, because their husbands want them at home early to prepare supper for them, or that in-laws are against journalist daughters-in-law because wives must not work late away from home, are both not strong points to justify gender inequality in newsrooms.
In fact, this pen suggests that such assertions are invalid excuses used by some to try to justify fewer numbers of female journalists.
Stephen Mpofu is former editor of the Chronicle.