I am not your honey!

What does being a woman working in media mean today, and how do expe­ri­ences differ in various count­ries? Hanna Nyzhnyk and Daryna Sterina look at gender-based discri­mi­na­tion of female jour­na­lists in their home count­ries, Ukraine and Germany.

„A woman should be fragile, sensi­tive and adapt to discri­mi­na­tion in order to elimi­nate tension in the working envi­ron­ment. However, I perso­nally never expe­ri­enced discri­mi­na­tion“, claims Nadiya Illyuk, head of YUN-Press, an agency for the educa­tion of young jour­na­lists in Ukraine. The 48-year old jour­na­list is not alone in her opinion of gender-based discri­mi­na­tion. In Ukraine, the media land­scape is full of stereo­types, which make it harder for female jour­na­lists to pursue their career. When it comes to the jour­na­li­stic profes­sion, women are not only under­re­pre­sented, but also have diffi­culty gaining access to hotly-debated poli­tical or economic topics. Women write less about the war in eastern Ukraine or on corrup­tion. And when they do – accor­ding to the Euro­pean Jour­na­lism Obser­va­tory, a rese­arch network of Euro­pean univer­si­ties – they have limited access to publi­ca­tion.

Accor­ding to UN Women – an orga­niza­tion of the United Nations – the most pres­ti­gious jobs in the public and private sectors stay in the hands of men. Women remain in femi­nine-labelled working fields like dome­stic work, educa­tion, health­care or admi­nis­tra­tion, and mostly in lower posi­tions. This discri­mi­na­tion can easily be expected in a country where even high-ranking poli­ti­cians humi­liate women in public, like the former adviser to Ukraine’s inte­rior minister Iliya Kiva. In an inter­view on a well-known online plat­form, he said of the former Chief of Ukrai­nian National Police, Khatia Deca­no­idze: ​„I admire her as a beau­tiful woman and probably a good mother. I just can’t stand a female supe­rior.“

Women in public face sexual harass­ment

Insults against females in male-domi­nated profes­sions are an ever­yday agenda. This was addressed by a group of jour­na­lists posting pictures – in which they wore shirts with the sentence ​„I am not your honey!“ – as a soli­da­rity state­ment for the jour­na­list Maryna Bara­ni­vska. The former Ukrai­nian presi­dent Petro Poros­henko called Bara­ni­vska honey in a live inter­view. And verbal insults do not end there. A study from the Ukrai­nian Insti­tute of Mass Infor­ma­tion showed that 60 percent of female jour­na­lists faced threats, physical attacks, and other types of violence due to their profes­sional acti­vity.

The Orga­niza­tion for Secu­rity and Coope­ra­tion in Europe (OSCE) reports that violence against jour­na­lists became gender-based in the whole OSCE region, which increases the self-censor­ship of jour­na­lists. This puts media plura­lity and freedom of speech in Europe at high-risk.

Hate speech hinders the diver­sity of media

The German Biele­felder Insti­tute for Conflict studies observed that 67 percent of jour­na­lists in Germany believe that hate speech towards them increases, while every second jour­na­list feels threa­tened by that. Around 25 percent have the impres­sion that this limits their ability to work. None­theless, the press freedom within the media land­scape of the Euro­pean Union is still compa­ra­tively high.

The German free­lance jour­na­list Feli­citas Montag has not faced any kind of threats or gender-based discri­mi­na­tion. The 30-year old explains that her working envi­ron­ment at the Berlin-based radio station FluxFM is safe. ​„FluxFM has a clear poli­tical agenda: no racism, no sexism, no homo­phobia. People message us only when they are disap­pointed about some topics which we discussed in the radio, but we never receive messages like: ​‚Hey, you are a bitch.‘ “ Yet she acknow­ledges that such problems exist. A female colle­ague who works for a German TV channel often receives sexual threats and insul­ting messages on social media.

Even if gender-based violence is an ever­yday threat to many women on the Euro­pean conti­nent, it did not succeed in silen­cing women. Unco­ve­ring harass­ment and sexual violence is beco­ming more common. In Western count­ries this is mostly appa­rent since the #MeToo-move­ment began, while in Eastern Euro­pean count­ries the younger gene­ra­tion takes their demands to the streets and revolts against the menta­lity of the Soviet-era more bravely than ever.