Media Urged to Highlight Women's Health Expertise
As the event underscored, actively amplifying female health experts' voices in media coverage can bolster their leadership in a sector still facing gender imbalances.
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania - Journalists should embrace female health experts as vital sources who can "make headlines," not just turn to women as victims for emotional anecdotes, a Kenyan editor said at a session on improving media coverage of the sector, writes Innocencia Chimwemwe-Marie.
"Women are not just victims in story sources. Remember that there are experts in the health industry that can be approached and make headlines," Dorcas Odumbe, Gender & Education Editor at Kenya's Nation Media Group, told the highly attended session on the second day of the Women Leaders in Health Governance Conference in Dar es Salaam.
The session hosted by Lizz Ntonjira, director of communications and engagement at WomenHealth Lift, focused on breaking down barriers that deter women health leaders from opening up to media interviews.
Odumbe said journalists should be "embraced as information carriers" whose profession can advance "positive strides registered in the health sector and not advertising."
Ethical codes may prevent some health specialists from self-promotion, she noted, but giving female experts a platform is key.
"There's need to deliberately put cognizance to the fact that there's need to critically grasp programming windows that will reach the intended target (women)," Odumbe said, stressing the importance of respecting female sources' preparation time to achieve "a win-win situation."
The session concluded that "every story is a gender story," highlighting the need to mainstream gender perspectives in reporting.
Parallel sessions at the Tanzania conference included "The Power of Voice," "Gender and Climate Change," and "Policies That Work" - all with a rallying cry that "leadership is not a noun, it is a verb."
As the event underscored, actively amplifying female health experts' voices in media coverage can bolster their leadership in a sector still facing gender imbalances.