and women in the 50-64 year category. In essence, women stand their best chance in the electronic (and especially TV presenter category) of the media, but have a limited “shelf life”. All this highlights the fact that the main factor for women’s success in the visual media is looks rather than ability. • Women are least well represented in the print media: Women constituted only 22 percent of those who wrote news stories. They are also under represented in the critical images/cartoons and opinion and commentary categories. • Women media practitioners predominate in the soft beats: There is not a single news category in which women media practitioners predominate. Their absence is especially marked in the economics, politics and sports, mining and agriculture beats. The only beats that come close to achieving gender parity are health and HIV/ AIDS, human rights, gender equality, gender violence, media and entertainment. • Women do tend to access more female sources: The positive correlation between women journalists and women sources suggests that having higher levels of women journalists in all beats of the media would increase the extent to which women are given greater voice in the media. • But the growing number of men writing and producing stories on gender issues is an important trend: The fact that there are numerically more male journalists writing and producing stories on gender equality and gender violence is a positive sign and should be built on through training. • There are still cases of blatant sexist reporting in the media: The qualitative reporting yielded examples of blatantly sexist reporting that portrays women as objects and temptresses. • But increasingly the challenge is one of subtle stereotypes that are conveyed in a variety of ways: These include the relative weight given to male and female sources; stories that go the opposite extreme and glorify women as well as stories that perpetuate the traditional roles of women and men. • The majority of stories suffer from “gender blindness”: Other than the “sins of commission” the main finding of the qualitative research is that stories suffer from the “sins of omission”- story opportunities that are lost through 46