Locating Gender Perspectives in COVID-19 Reportage in India: An Analysis of Print Media (March - September 2020)

Locating Gender Perspectives in COVID-19 Reportage in India was brought out in March 2021 by the Mumbai-based organisation Population First, the United Nations Population Fund, the Royal Norwegian Embassy in New Delhi, and the Network of Women in the Media, India (a nation-wide collective of women doing work in and related to the media). The publication’s authors are Mumbai-based independent journalist and researcher Sameera Khan, and Dr. Sweta Singh, assistant professor at the University School of Mass Communication in New Delhi’s Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University.The report discusses the representation of women and marginalised genders in the coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown in print media. It contains the results of a study of articles from 12 mainstream newspapers published in seven languages: Assamese, Bengali, English, Hindi, Malayalam, Manipuri and Marathi. The research team monitored these newspapers on similar dates for seven days each month between March and September 2020.The study found the concerns and voices of women, transgender persons and others from marginalised genders, to be missing in the pandemic coverage across newspaper publications and regions. While the media acknowledged women as professionals in stories on healthcare and essential workers, few reports on education and policy included perspectives from different genders. The report says that “…women and trans people were absent as protagonists, sources, and experts, sometimes even in stories that directly impacted them.”The 100-page publication has seven main chapters: Introduction (chapter 1); Key objective of the Media Study (chapter 2); Scope and Sample: March - September 2020 (chapter 3); Main Findings of the Media Study (chapter 4); Month-wise summaries & analyses (chapter 5); Recommendations (chapter 6) and Acknowledgements (chapter 7). It also contains data tables and appendices.