Fact or farce? Female journalists’ perceptions of gender relations and under-representation in the Nigerian media

The focus of this work is on gender relations and representations in the media in Nigeria. While there are studies establishing a lower number of female journalists across the globe and press under-representation of women, there seems to be much less evidence that establishes whether there is a relationship between the lower number of female journalists and press under-representation of women. We applied the research tradition of the newsroom ethnography method to investigate female journalists’ perceptions of gender relation issues in the media. Personal and group interview techniques were used for this study of 30 female journalists in Nigeria. The findings revealed that the factors responsible for the low number of female journalists in Nigeria are that journalism requires and demands effort and commitment for success to be achieved (and this could make some women feel they cannot combine the pressure with their domestic responsibilities as women), corruption in the media (the brown envelope syndrome), cultural factors and the fact that women do not want publicity. It was also revealed that a reason for under-representation of women was largely because there were more male newsmakers in society. It was recommended that women should aspire to positions of authority to become newsmakers and that every necessary effort should be made to ensure equality in gender representation in the media and society in general since this is essential for meaningful development, especially in the developing world.