Having opted to work the women's issues, rights, and status beat for a news writing class, I was stuck trying to defend the validity of the beat.
In newspapers around the Arab world, such as Al Ahram in Egypt and Al Khaleej in the United Arab Emirates, the women's page is very much alive and kicking. However, Canadian newspapers killed their women's section in the 1980s.
Is there a place for the women's beat in today's newspapers? Is the male-dominated newsroom culture determing what is newsworthy? How should an ideal, "new and improved" version of the beat look like?
Armed with a list of questions and a knot of confusion, I interviewed the Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham. She was the antithesis of the women's beat: Bramham writes passionately about women's issues, among other things, but insists against such a beat. She believes that relegating stories that affect women to the back of the newspaper meant creating an excluded space for women. It meant that women and their ideas were "ghettoized" and not included in the front page along with important news on politics and business. It was an artificial separation from the public spehere.
Her views were interesting but I continued to reflect on the type of women's issues stories found in Arabic newspapers. They were mainly thoughtful pieces about major issues that affected women. The strength of the women's page was that it asserted its presence: it was a thematic reminder that women's issues are not to be ignored or isolated to a few stories in the newspaper. It was a reminder of women's presence in society and a vent to air their views and concerns.
Perhaps Bramham and I had different thoughts on what constituted a "women's page" in the newspaper. Perhaps she was thinking of "soft" stories like cooking tips, household advice, and social events. I was thinking of stories on inspiring women who were legends of their time, the dilemmas of modern women, fatwas issued by women for women, and the latest on women's rights around the world.
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I am inclined to agree with Bramham. I think having an exclusive section for women reinforces the idea that they are a minority, which they are obviously not.
On a general note, when women try to assign some sort of “special significance” to themselves and their issues, they imply that they are a segment of society that must be treated differently in some way. When they are given special treatment, they are unhappy then too. If the entire debate is about blending into mainstream then I don’t think having an exclusive section does much for furthering that. Do we see a men’s section in newspapers? (And magazines are different – they are designed to address specific themes).
This is not to say that there can’t be a beat or a reporter assigned to cover women’s issues – certainly there a lot of them and important ones too, but integrating them within the newspaper, or within a larger beat like society for example, is, in my view, a better option. It just says we’re part of the broader society, half of it in fact.
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