Bernadette van Dijck

Bernadette van Dijck
Ever since 1991 the NOS Gender Portrayal Department has been concerned with the image of men and women projected in programmes on Dutch radio and television. After an initial phase largely taken up with research, the Department has more recently concentrated on the journalistic process by which images are formed and the influence that particular pragmatic decisions can and do have on gender portrayal. At the heart of the Department’s approach are awareness and change, and a key concept is ‘quality’: by focusing attention on gender portrayal you switch off the automatic pilot and an item becomes better journalism. But paying attention to gender portrayal is also important for managers and policymakers. Public service broadcasting in the Netherlands is obliged by law to broadcast programmes that reflect society, and varied gender portrayal is an essential part of this. However, it is still the viewers who have the last word: they expect public service broadcasting to offer programmes in which we can all recognize ourselves, man and woman, black and white, old and young.Actively stimulating more varied gender portrayal in programmes is a necessary element of public service broadcasting, the NOS Management Board recently concluded. For this reason, it has been decided that the Gender Portrayal Department should be given a permanent place within the structure of the organization. This is a brave decision, given that it means taking a critical watchdog on board. But it is also a unique decision, because it means that public service broadcasting is now taking the initiative to build bridges between programme-makers, audiences and media critics.TimeFor years research into gender portrayal has consistently revealed the same patterns. For every woman on screen we see two men. At the same time, men appear in roles with a higher status, e.g. as experts and authorities, while women appear principally in lower-status roles as e.g. victims and passers-by. Reporting on the changing roles of men and women in society often implicitly assumes that women are principally responsible for child-rearing and home-making while men are responsible for income and management. (Eie, 1998)At first sight, changing this picture would seem to be mainly a matter of time: as women become more and more emancipated and take an increasing share of paid employment, gender portrayal will change of its own accord. We have now reached the stage at which almost half of all journalists in the Netherlands are women, yet there is nothing to indicate that this has done anything to change the content of programmes or the image they project. Stereotyping is not so much a function of the sex of the programme-maker, it is deeply rooted in the routine of journalism. Any attempts to bring about change will have to concentrate mainly on changing that routine. The motives and arguments for change must be found in journalistic considerations.Journalistic choicesChanging journalistic routines begins with charting the journalistic production process. Programme-makers are constantly taking decisions, and they do so under great pressure of time. What subject is about to become news? What angle should we approach when we report on a particular subject? Who do I choose as the spokesperson? Where shall I put the camera? What questions shall I ask? What background pictures do I show? These decisions are often rational and individual, and in the perception of many journalists their view of the position of men and women in society plays no part in them whatever. Yet the sum of all these individual choices continues to show the stereotypical pattern that I described earlier.Let us look at an example. In the Dutch parliament a debate is in progress on a new bill designed to regulate the admission of refugees. The government proposes various measures, the opposition has alternative plans. This is all properly reflected in the report in the news. A politician from one of the progressive parties of government explains the basis of the bill. A politician from the conservative opposition party puts forward another proposal. The progressive party responds. The view of the refugee interest group is put in the voiceover. The statements made by the various parties are interspersed with archive footage of refugees at an asylum seekers’ reception centre.The spokespeople are all white middle-aged men. ‘That’s coincidence’, is the journalists’ initial response. ‘And anyway it doesn’t matter because the subject has nothing to do with men or women, it’s about the new legislation.’ From the point of view of gender portrayal, however, it is not a coincidence and it does make a difference who acts as spokesperson and who one is talking about. The choices made in the making of the programme serve to reaffirm and reassert an existing power structure.Screening genderWhen you confront programme-makers with this pattern, most of them are horrified and come up with all sorts of plausible explanations. ‘There was no female spokesperson, we only had a couple of hours to put the item together, we had no money for an interpreter. And besides: surely it’s all about the story, the subject, and not about who tells it?’ All these remarks are true and legitimate. And yet it is still important to ask whether things could have been done differently. What angle would you have had to choose in this case to let women or ethnic minorities express their views? How much time would you really have needed to make a better item? What would you have asked if you had had an interpreter? What kind of story would someone other than the politician have had to tell? And is that story important to the viewer, the citizen trying to form an opinion about the parliamentary debate?By asking these questions we appeal to the reporter’s journalistic responsibility and curiosity. The automatic pilot is switched off for a moment, the choice of a particular approach has to be rationalized. This makes it clear what consequences pragmatic decisions have for the meaning of the images you ultimately broadcast, and hence for the story you are telling. It is precisely in these observations that the germ of change lies.The audiovisual training toolkit Screening Gender collects together pieces of video footage that ask these questions. It was developed by five northern European public service broadcasting organizations, of which the NOS was one. (Screening Gender 2000) The patterns of gender portrayal identified by academic research are illustrated visually with the aid of recent television footage. Alternative examples, some of them news items produced specially for the toolkit, demonstrate what kind of gain in quality can be achieved by paying attention to gender portrayal. Programme-makers explain how they achieve more varied gender portrayal and what benefit they derive from it. In June 2000 the toolkit was distributed to training institutions affiliated to the European Broadcasting Union.