Turkish Media Professionals trained on gender-responsive media coverage

On 15-16 October in Istanbul, UN Women Türkiye conducted gender-responsive media coverage workshop in collaboration with the editorial team of Milliyet Newspaper and GQ Magazine. Gender-responsive media trainings covered concepts on gender equality, creating a gender-responsive language, gender bias, stereotyping as well as portrayal of women politicians and gender perspective in traditional and online media platforms.

Provided by Professor Nezih Orhon, a total of 37 participants attended workshops to set sights on the areas of inequality, the roles of media professionals, gender responsive and transformative studies, and the culture industry. They were trained under the topics of sexist lenses in entertainment-film-music-sports media, analyzing media workers and the roles attributed to the media and women.

Discussions were on how news contents can be handled from a gender equality perspective and how this representation influences and sparks a change on the behaviors of wider audience. Discussions were made about how every content in the media is handled by media professionals can affect the wide audience. While the importance of the harmony between the news images used in magazines, newspapers and internet channels with the texts prepared by the editors was discussed. The importance of staying away from the aim of providing high access to the news source through the female body was also emphasized.

UN Women Türkiye has been working with Media Compact Türkiye, Milliyet Newspaper and GQ Magazine to ensure achieving gender equality in the Turkish media since 2020. Thanks to the capacity development trainings provided for media professionals, the partnership on gender-responsive media coverage is expected to contribute to a media environment free from gender bias and discriminative language. Within this partnership and following this workshop, monitoring the improvement of gender equality in the media will be possible.

With an emphasize on the huge role of media to achieve gender equality, Pınar Aktaş, News Research Manager of Milliyet Newspaper stated that: “One of our commitments as Milliyet is to reinforce the understanding of gender equality through regular trainings covering employees in all departments to avoid sexist language, evaluate and supervise these actions. In this sense, I’m glad to see that today's workshop provided additional know-how for the professional development of our journalists, editors, and reporters. Through this kind of workshops, they become more alert and responsible when preparing news pieces.” Milliyet Newspaper is also among the committers of the Generation Equality Forum led by UN Women.  

GQ Türkiye Editor-in-Chief Derya Gürsel said, “For decades, male identity and masculinity have been represented differently in different countries. GQ magazine is one of the differential mediums both for this representation to be on the side of equality and for ensuring and legitimizing gender equality in the media. The workshop reminded us once again that as the GQ Türkiye magazine team, we can make big changes with certain level of awareness.”

Currently, UN Women Türkiye develops a gender-responsive online media tool for media professionals for them to implement gender-responsive practices and guide other media outlets to follow this path. As part of this effort, biannual follow-up meetings to share and examine the best gender-responsive reporting practices will be organized in collaboration with Milliyet and GQ.

The workshops were designed under the “Advancing Gender Equality and Women’s Leadership in Political and Business Life” project funded by Sweden through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and implemented by UN Women Türkiye.