THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN GENDER AND MEDIA BASELINE STUDY This report is the regional overview of the Southern African Gender and Media Baseline Study (GMBS). It is complemented by 12 country reports that give additional detail about women and men in the editorial content of individual countries. The first such study in Southern Africa, the GMBS is also the most comprehensive regional study on gender and the media ever to be undertaken. Objectives Initiated by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) that seeks to foster a free, independent and diverse media in the region, as well as Gender Links, a Southern African NGO that promotes gender equality in and through the media, the study set out to: a) Provide baseline data for monitoring progress towards achieving gender balance in media coverage; b) Build capacity in the region for monitoring media content from a gender perspective; and c) Become a key advocacy tool in the campaign to ensure that the voices of women and men, in all their diversity, are equally represented and fairly portrayed in the media of the region. Global context Just before the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, 71 countries took part in the first global gender and media-monitoring project organized by Media Watch Canada. Five years later, before the New York Beijing Plus Five Conference, 70 countries took part in the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) 2000 called “Who Makes the News” that examined how men and women are reflected in the media on one chosen day. The GMBS drew substantially from these global efforts but differs from them in that in that it spanned a whole month, rather than just one day. The study includes both quantitative and qualitative findings. The latter is especially important in moving from a simple number crunching exercise to understanding 40