A two-day workshop on Arab women in the media turned into a forum urging greater recognition of their rights, reports Salonaz Sami "In today's world, following long years of struggle and laborious work, women still need to fight for their rights, for greater recognition and to correct distorted images," said Wadouda Badran, head of the Arab Women's Organisation (AWO), during the opening session of "Women and Media", a two-day workshop which opened on 28 May, organised by the Federation of Arab Journalists (FAJ) in coordination with the AWO. The workshop centred around two papers: the first, by Maggie El-Halawani, head of the Journalism and Mass Communication Department at Cairo University, "A view of how the Arab media can support women's issues"; the second, by Kuwaiti writer Fatemah Hussein, "On women's concerns and problems in the media and press". El-Halawani's arguments focussed on the negative way in which women are portrayed in the Arab media, and on the tendency to marginalise their concerns, both in terms of space and treatment. Women's issues, whether on television, radio or in the press, are accorded far less coverage than other topics of "less weight compared with the concerns of society's other half". She argued for a more nuanced approach to women's issues that contextualises them in terms of social background. The issues facing women in villages are, after all, different from those facing urban dwellers, a simple fact that tends to be overlooked. She also suggested "an information bank be established" with the aim of allowing Arab women to cross-reference the manifold problems they face, and outlined ways in which women might use their professional experiences to further their causes. If El-Halawani's paper outlined the perimetres of the problem, Hussein tackled the same dilemmas from the centre. The problems, Hussein argued, originate in the way women are raised. Women, she said, are effectively imprisoned within a family discourse that constructs femininity as a synonym of frailty. One result of this, she said, is that from an early age it is grilled into girls that they are incapable of matching the performance of boys. Women are rarely encouraged to argue or stand their ground. "In any family conflict," she noted, "women are usually urged to allow male relatives to handle the situation." This mindset, she continued, "constitutes a formidable obstacle in the path of women who need not only fight the misconceptions of others but also the systematic undermining of their own sense of self, their fears and worries". One obvious result of this process is the monopoly of key positions enjoyed by men "even in cases when women are more qualified to shoulder the responsibilities of the job". She warned that even in Arab countries that have legislation guaranteeing equal opportunities, the simple fact that the law is implemented by men "who restrict our rights because they see them as threatening their own" drains such legislation of meaning. In the Arab world, said Hussein, men are raised to believe they occupy a more privileged position than women and should enjoy a free hand when it comes to controlling the lives of their female relatives. "Women have earned their rights by virtue of hard work and should therefore be entitled to an equal say in the development of their societies," said journalism professor Hanan Youssef. Youssef criticised the "double standards" employed by Arab men in evaluating the professional performance of women. "While men in the Arab world admire and acknowledge foreign career women, an Arab woman who adopts the same approach would be marginalised as being masculine," she said. She urged Arab societies to "move away from denial and acknowledge women's hard work, to embrace it rather than deny it, in order to reach a situation in which men and women can work side by side". In the closing session Salah Hafez, secretary-general of the FAJ, said that while "there is no magic wand that can transform misconceptions overnight" it is now a moral duty to work alongside women to help them secure their rights.
