The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Media urged to be gender-sensitive

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 13, 2005

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Media urged to be gender-sensitive

By Our Staff Reporter

Jnani Sankaran, documentary maker and director, at the interactive session with mediapersons at the Tirupati Press Club on Tuesday.

TIRUPATI, APRIL 12. Do men ever deliberately ill-treat women? Or talk bad of them? Or at least wilfully hurt their sentiments? The answer is a big "No" in most cases, but the reality is that women are ill-treated, the society talks bad of them and their sentiments do get hurt more often than not.

Why then is this big gap between our intentions and the reality? "Because, the gender bias is embedded in our minds, though we don't really try to distinguish between the sexes and discriminate," explains Jnani Sankaran, a Chennai-based documentary maker and film director.

Interacting with media persons on `Reporting of Women's Issues in the Media,' a programme organised by an NGO, Women's Initiatives (WINS), on Tuesday, he said the human mind assigns for itself certain dominant characters for the two genders. "For example, we always tend to think of a nurse and a teacher as a female, while a general manager and a pilot are considered male, though there is no reasoning for this and as such character definition is purely subjective. It all depends on the outlook of the society."

Gender bias

Does the media have a role in "perpetuating" the idea. Yes, comes the answer. However, the self-proclaimed feminist blamed the family system for expecting the media to reflect or subscribe to its set of beliefs and banishing those crossing the imaginary "ethical line" to venture out into areas considered blasphemous, instead of taking a balanced and objective view.

"Gender bias starts at primary school, when the textbooks shows the father reading a newspaper, while the mother is shown as cooking in the kitchen. If showing father as cooking food is too much to expect, why not the mother is shown as reading the daily?," was his poser.

Film screened

The documentary film, `Pains, Pleasure and Prostitution', directed by Sankaran was screened. The meet took up the cause of sex workers, their rights, alleged criminalisation by police and stigmatisation by the society. The film was shot on the plight of sex workers in and around Tirupati, with inputs from WINS, which is engaged in their collectivisation, de-stigmatisation and allied areas. Maintaining that the law was also discriminative, Mr. Sankaran pondered why men are allowed to get away with simple punishment and the sex workers jailed for a month, when both the parties are involved in the so-called crime. "After all, it's only a demand-supply relation."

He urged the media to be gender-sensitive and conscious of the women's sentiments before putting the pen on paper. The WINS president, D.M. Premavathi, and the secretary, R. Meera, also spoke.

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