“Padma, a journalist with Nava Telangana newspaper, spoke forcefully of how men treat feisty women journalists as the ‘enemy’. The harassment the women faced was not always directly sexual overtures, she said, but the kind of problems they encountered at work.” — from Sexual harassment in newsrooms still a challenge, a report of a session on sexual harassment in the 13th annual meeting of the Network of Women in Media, India, in Chennai, January 2018.

The enemy. That’s what it boils down to for several women who clearly push the envelope in the workplace, more overtly so for those who work in the non-English media and in smaller cities. A survey report conducted by Khabar Lahariya of 20 district-level women journalists from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar said that the harassment women faced was “seen as a part of the job; part of the way women journalists were viewed in towns and cities—mobile, forward, worldly-wise. It took the form of innuendo or direct sexual banter, assault, or in discriminatory practices, like dropping stories, or not giving space to women to share their stories and views in edit meetings.”

Sure, men crack jokes about being displaced by women in the workplace and about women working just to mark time before marriage and kids or getting plum assignments as rewards. But the humour, sexist as it is, also masks fear and hostility and, in extreme instances, blatant misogyny. It’s also systemic, manifesting not only in individual accounts of harassment but in the regulation of the space women were allowed to occupy in the workplace.

Misogyny also underlies the multiple and chilling accounts in the current uprising of the #MeToo campaign. Media editors, film directors, musicians, and comedians reeked of entitlement as they wielded power over subordinates and harassed, hounded and assaulted women who reported to them or worked with them. The women targeted have endured years of trauma and were often forced to leave their employment and, in some instances, their careers. The loss in terms of their creative contribution is incalculable.

The accounts—and they are still coming in even as this is being written—are an astounding chronicle of predatory behaviour. In some instances, this was part of gossip and whisper networks as the predators operated in the realm of the “private” in social and work environments. They got away with their behaviour for years, until this very “public” outing we are witnessing today.
There’s no getting away from the complicity of all those who were in the know and who watched silently. Senior women journalists—pioneers in their own way—have gone on record to say that they suspected the worst but didn’t have the “evidence” to act. Others prevaricated, saying that many of the accounts are not exactly “sexual harassment” or that there is worse abuse and violence against women in the hinterland which is being ignored.

The whataboutery simply whitewashes the debilitating effect of sexual harassment, no less just because it happens to women who do have access to caste or class privileges. Besides, this seems like another variant of the classic shooting of messengers, more ironic as it is about journalists and a media that is responsible for covering crimes against disadvantaged and marginalised sections of society.

For those of us who are disturbed and angry over the accounts that have tumbled out, other questions need to be asked: How did things get to such a pass? What is the environment that enables the harassment of women in the workplace? How does one ensure the continued employment of women in the media, with dignity and respect?

Women in the newsroom

Reading these accounts and listening to the stories of women journalists through the years, it is pretty clear that every woman who was part of the media world had to undertake a personal and professional battle to fight to prove oneself and secure respect and recognition.

The collective experience of women—whether the handful of women who worked in newsrooms in the 1960s and 1970s, or the larger number of women who entered the newsrooms of the 1980s and the 1990s—bear testimony to this struggle. Each generation forged ahead, whether it was women from English-language media in pre-liberalisation India or their decidedly worse-off counterparts in non-English media.

In the turbulent Eighties, when this writer became a journalist, the rise of a visible and assertive autonomous women’s’ movement and the myriad issues it took up spilt over into newsrooms too. For many of us, the struggle was two-fold, and we engaged in intense discussions both on the role of the media in covering women’s’ issues and on the status of women in the media. The critiques galore on the commodification and objectification of women in advertising, cinema and the news media also resulted in a range of protests in the newsroom.

In the 1980s, alert women journalists forced news desks to use non-sexist news language and demanded changes in copy that were headlined “Eves on the warpath” (multiple times) or reports referring to women “libbers”. We stubbornly used “Ms” instead of “Mrs”, only to have the men on the desk change it back when they edited the copy. They left other reports alone: in Mirror Image: The Media and the Women’s Question (Centre for Education and Documentation, Bombay, 1988), Vimal Balasubrahmanyan cites the instance of a report extolling the virtues of breastmilk and the “cute containers” it came in!

Women journalists also struggled to secure the right to be in the workplace as equals. We eschewed ghettoisation and demanded the right to report on other issues, flatly refusing to cover “soft” news. Travelling into remote and rural areas, women reporters in newspapers went on the field, covering crime, development, elections, communal conflicts, disasters, displacement wrought by environmental projects, violence, insurgency movements, etc. Slowly, most newspapers began to drop or reduce the cookery, home and parenting focus of the women’s’ pages in newspapers. Of course, all of these are packaged differently today but that’s another story.

Bolstered by our membership in journalists’ unions, we managed to put forth demands for basic amenities: toilets, transport for women on the night shift, maternity benefits, crèche facilities, etc. We dug out provisions in the Factories Act and the Shops and Establishment Act to argue that news was a “perishable” commodity and newspaper establishments were exempt from provisions banning women from night shifts and should be provided transport.

The response of media establishments was puzzled and unenthusiastic. The Times of India in then Bombay had a very basic restroom for women staffers on the night shift. The Indian Express, which was petitioned to provide a restroom or transport facilities for women journalists, responded by saying office space was too costly in Nariman Point (where it then owned an entire building) to devote a room for women! It took till 1992 and more letters to get Indian Express to provide transport for a reporter on the night shift, only up to the “island” city and that too, a vehicle which would also double up as the van that transported copies of the “dak” edition.

Behram Contractor, or “Busybee” as he was popularly known and the editor of the tabloid Afternoon Dispatch and Courier, published an advertisement for “male” sub-editors. When a delegation of women journalists led by Pamela Philipose met him to register our objections, he said “women give a lot of trouble” and “refuse to do the night shift”. But we prevailed upon him to give women a chance, besides pointing out that it was discriminatory. He withdrew his advertisement, two women applied, and both were appointed.

In The Times of India, Bombay, women journalists successfully petitioned to stop the column of a senior and highly respected art critic, Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, because of his sexist and harassing behaviour.

Post-1995, the explosion of broadcast media and, barely 10 years later, the spread of the Internet have altered the media completely. Much has been written on the way news itself became a casualty as post-liberalisation markets celebrated the dumbed down focus on “infotainment”, nurtured corrupt practices like paid news, and became more sensational and agenda-driven. In the frenzied partying spree that applauded brand building in the media and entertainment world, personal and professional boundaries were breached, and ethical principles were clearly a casualty.

The altered working conditions in newsrooms were the other casualty. While corporatisation appears to provide the trappings of a professional work environment, the reality is quite different. The collective organising of journalists, contractualised and unorganised, became more and more difficult. Scores have lost their jobs. Delayed salary payments, which are anyway below par, long working hours and subjective performance assessments are hardly a secret. The labelling of the more vocal women journalists with the undesirable “F-word” was a mocking warning to stay in line or get left out.

Sexual harassment is hugely enabled by the general deterioration of professional and ethical standards in the media. It could also be part of the backlash to the gains made in the previous decades, a reassertion of sexism and patriarchy in an industry that is still largely male-dominated. But the spontaneous and collective #MeToo sharing of accounts and testimonies and the groundswell of support for it brings us back to the solidarities and the struggles of past years. Change will come. The misogynists will be forced back.