WANTED: A Gender & Communication Policy for the Caribbean

Approximately 30 persons, mainly media practitioners, from English, Spanish and French/Creole-speaking countries, Canada and USA came together for a three-day conference on Gender and Communication Policy, from November 19-21, 1998, in Kingston, Jamaica.

Participants representing women’s organizations, educational institutions and NGOs also attended the meeting, which was hosted by Women’s Media Watch of Jamaica in collaboration with the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC).

Discussion at the conference focused on a number of issues including:

• communication policy in the Caribbean
• gender in the media in Puerto Rico
• impact of violence on the Haitian media
• coverage of violence against women in Trinidad and Tobago
• media policy – Chairperson, Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica/the experience and codes of the Canadian equivalent
• gender and employment practices in the media
• women on the web
• globalization/ new technologies.

Highlights of the discussion:

  The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has introduced regulatory mechanisms, which have been adopted by other countries in the region, including Puerto Rico.

  The Dominican Republic has offered training workshops to journalists and has succeeded in improving the language used for reporting domestic violence in the print media

  In Canada, women have produced a printed guide to non-sexist language

 The International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) has tried to get women’s voices reproduced in the media through workshops and agreements with groups of women journalists.
IWMF also supports individual and collective training for the empowerment of women media workers.

The Kingston Declaration, which came out of the meeting, called for gender sensitivity in communication policy and for codes of practice and/or self-regulation in media organizations to ensure gender sensitivity in the portrayal of women.

The Declaration also pointed to the need to promote in the media, images that are representative of the diversity of women and gender relations in all areas of social life. It calls for media managers to ensure that women are equitably represented at decision-making levels and that a code of gender ethics should be instituted, including a sexual harassment policy.

The Golden Pig Award
The granting of “The Golden Pig Award” for publicity, mocking Hollywood’s Oscars, was one of the strategies used in the late 1980s by Puerto Rican feminists to launch a campaign against the portrayal of women in the media.

Ana Rivera, a Puerto Rican lawyer, told participants at the 4th Regional Conference on Gender and Communication, in Kingston, Jamaica, about the significant impact of the “anti prize-giving ceremonies.”

As a direct result of the ceremonies, the country’s House of Representatives approved a resolution for the creation of a voluntary commercial broadcasting code.

Although the proposal was not followed up properly by the industry in 1994, all commercial TV stations did agree to subscribe to a standard, voluntary classification of programs.