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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.
Perhaps even more untenable is a claim by apologists for fewer women than men in journalism that male journalists hound away female scribes from the newsroom and into public relations for instance, by their negative attitudes.
What appears, on the contrary, to be the reasons for fewer women journalists than their male counterparts, are, as directly indicated above, a wrong choice of the profession and a weaker numerical strength.
A natural disposition to journalism appears to be the key factor here. To try to equalise the numbers, more concerted efforts should be made by getting more women interested in the profession and this could be done by professional journalists themselves giving talks in schools to encourage more girls going into journalism.
Out of greater numbers of women choosing journalism as a life career will certainly emerge those that have both the natural talent and the endurance which are an embodiment of journalism.
That calibre is to be accounted for the larger number of men in journalism today even though many of them dropped out of the profession that they had wrongly chosen.
For instance, at a university where this communicologist and sociologist once taught briefly, students who had wanted to read for a degree in commerce were shunted away into journalism because vacancies in commerce had all been taken up.
Among the students affected were girls and it was unthinkable to expect such a misplacement of talents to yield competent journalists, least of all people with any interests in that profession.
The environment in the newsroom should also be made conducive to a competitive spirit of journalism with both men and women sent out to cover the same assignments, however exacting this might be.
Giving women “female assignments” or less difficult assignments, creates boredom for them and might cause their flight to, say, public relations work in other industries.
The saying that “journalism is the right profession for the right person” probably sums up the thesis of this discourse.
What this suggests is that women endowed with a journalistic bent should have as a motivational channel a desire not only far parity with men but one to rise to the highest echelons of the profession, as should other women in their own chosen careers.
Self-motivated in that way, they will migrate from a complex of inferiority to men — itself a psychological limitation — to soar higher to rendezvous with and take control of their cherished dream.
That way, only the sky will be the ceiling to how much higher they can go.
Online Reporter