Gender and communication policy: Struggling for space Margaret Gallagher 2011 Introduction In late 2009, a heated debate erupted in the pages of the Spanish national daily El País. The controversy centered on an article in the paper’s Opinion section by writer and university professor Enrique Lynch. The article, ‘Revanchismo de género’ (‘Gender revenge’), took as its starting point an Iberoamerican campaign to promote ‘zero tolerance’ towards violence against women. Critiquing the campaign and its accompanying slogan, Lynch denounced what he perceived as the Spanish government’s ‘implicitly feminist’ equality policy. By favoring women over men, he argued, this approach contributed to gender violence. In fact, he claimed, women themselves bear responsibility for male violence. First, ignorant and brutal men are raised by women - their mothers. Second, in popular music, women assert their ‘rights’ by taunting and discarding men mercilessly. Citing music videos by three female artists, Lynch concluded his article with the prediction that three new videos like these would result in a three-fold increase in the monthly murder rate of women. Following publication of Lynch’s article, El País received several hundred phone calls and letters of complaint. At issue was the question of whether the article – regarded by many as a justification of gender violence and thus a potential incitement to further violence against women - should have been published. By giving space to Lynch’s views, had the paper’s Opinion editor correctly balanced the principle of freedom of expression against the newspaper’s internal guidelines, the Code of Ethics of Spain’s professional journalism association FAPE, and the Council of Europe’s Resolution on the Ethics of Journalism (which encompasses not just news reporting but also the expression of opinion)? Indeed, was this article in contravention of Spain’s 2004 law on the prevention of gender violence, one of whose goals is to strengthen ‘preventive awareness’ through the media? The questions raised by the controversy in a general sense may seem familiar. They highlight dilemmas that arise from competing and sometimes conflicting aspects of media and communication policy. However, this particular debate – raising fundamental issues of gender power relations, mobilizing not just individual women but women’s associations among its protagonists, employing arguments informed by feminist theorizing and statistics on gender violence, and conducted in a political environment supportive of women’s rights – says much about the contemporary state of play regarding gender issues and media policy. In 1 Spain, such a debate could not have happened twenty, even ten years earlier.1 In many countries, such a debate would be still unimaginable. Historically, feminists have been slow to engage with the domain of media and communication policy. Although the earliest preoccupations of the women’s movement – equal access to media employment and decision-making, fair representation in media content – were clearly dependent on policy determinations, these issues were often presented as micro-level problems, stripped of their relationship to a broader policy context. Equally, policy frameworks have not readily accommodated gender concerns. Schooled in a traditionally ‘gender-blind’ worldview, not just policy-makers themselves, but other key actors in the arena of media and communication policy-making – politicians, business and media elites, academics and indeed civil society activists - have been slow to understand or accept that policy-making is seldom gender neutral, and that policy choices may impact differently on women and on men. The arguments in this chapter are inspired by feminist scholarship, one of whose principal goals is to make women’s experience visible. Central in much of this scholarship are the concepts of gender and gender difference, considered as pivotal in the analysis of structures of power, the organization of social and cultural institutions, and systems of ideological authority.2 One of the contributions of feminist theory and activism, particularly over the past 15 years, has been to interrogate the opaque nature of the concepts ‘people’ or ‘the public’ (traditionally and implicitly defined as white, male, elite) that informs much policy-making. By highlighting the many distinct, overlooked groupings - the most fundamental, from a feminist standpoint, being that of women (a grouping which itself is highly differentiated) – that actually inhabit the spaces affected by policy, feminist analysis seeks to identify significant policy gaps and expand policy frameworks. In essence, this approach aims at the development of ‘gender-sensitive’ policy – policy that acknowledges the distinct economic and social positions of women and men, the gender relations that both determine and result from such positions, and the gender-specific priorities that arise from these positions and relations. It is an ambitious goal, far from realization. Yet looking back at the evolution of media and communication and policy debates, we can trace the ways in which gender has moved gradually from the outermost periphery of consideration to a position which requires acknowledgement - even though it frequently fails to achieve acceptance. 2 This chapter will first examine the extent to which gender has intersected with media and communication at the global level since the 1970s, focusing on three milestones in international policy deliberations – the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), the Fourth World Conference on Women, and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). It will then analyze the difficulties in reconciling policies on gender equality and on media and communication, with reference to the concepts of gender mainstreaming and freedom of expression. Finally it will highlight the challenges posed by persistent policy gaps, the strategies used to circumvent resistance, and the obstacles that remain in securing a space for gender issues within media and communication policy frameworks. From NWICO to WSIS, via Beijing In the mid-1970s two major global issues –the status of women, and the status of communication and information – became focal points of international debate. The World Conference for International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City in 1975, launched the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women. From the outset, there was recognition of the link between women’s status and the role of information and communication. The World Plan of Action adopted at the Mexico City conference characterized women’s lack of control over, or even access to, communication channels as both a symptom and a cause of their disadvantaged status globally. Issues of control and access – at the level of the nation-state, and specifically with reference to the imbalanced flow of information between countries of the North and South – were also at the heart of the debate that initiated calls for a New World Information and Communication Order. The International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems (the MacBride Commission), established by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to respond to the issues raised by NWICO’s proponents, began its work in December 1977. The UN Decade for Women was two years old. No woman was nominated to serve on the 16-member Commission; but when one of the original members withdrew, he was replaced by Betty Zimmerman, at that time Director of Radio Canada International. At her instigation, a research paper on women and communication (one, out of the 100 or so prepared for the Commission) was requested in the spring of 1979. The Commission met for the last time in November of that year. This last- minute grafting is evident in the MacBride Report, only one of whose 82 recommendations covers women’s communication needs and rights. There is no discussion of the situation of 3 women in relation to transnationalization, advertising, infrastructures, professional communicators, the formation of public opinion – all of which would have repaid analysis in terms of gender differences and relations. Instead, the ‘issue’ of women is collapsed into two pages on ‘equal rights for women’, as if these rights were unrelated to the other matters covered in the report. Although rudimentary in its analysis of the topic, the MacBride Commission is an early example of the significance of gender in the composition of policy and other decision- making bodies. It was largely due to the efforts of Betty Zimmerman that the issue of women and communication received any attention at all. Other key international policy documents of the time were silent on the matter. For example the Mass Media Declaration, adopted by the 20th UNESCO General Conference in 1978, though explicit on the subject of youth, ignored women.3 In 1980, UNESCO’s 21st General Conference adopted Resolution 4/19 on NWICO which inter alia called for measures to follow up the MacBride Report. There is no mention of women in the Resolution. Yet by 1980, the United Nations and UNESCO had published three international studies on women and communication media. The UN system had sponsored or co-sponsored at least twelve regional and international meetings on the theme. Each meeting had published a written report. In many of these there is ample evidence that the issues driving the debate on global information imbalance and information flows - under- representation, misrepresentation, marginalization, pluralism,