30 • coverage (salience) of gender equality issues Since its inception in 2003, the findings from Southern Africa’s largest and longest-running research on gender equality in the news – the Gender and Media Progress Study (GMPS) – show a consistent under-representation of women’s voices in the news media. The GMPS 2020 (7) reveals that across the region women constituted 21% of the voices heard, read about or seen in print, television and radio news, going up by merely one percentage point from 20% in 2015 to 21% in 2020. According to the GMPS report, across all topics, (8) women’s voices dominate only in news about gender equality (52%), which supports the notion that (9) women are particularly underrepresented in the ‘most prestigious’ category of news reporting: politics and government. These findings indicate that women in Southern Africa are disproportionately and unfairly represented in editorial content of the media (10) , even though gender equality is intrinsic to a pluralistic and diverse media (11). Gender representation in Covid-19 media content: A ‘Monitoring trends in the Regional Media’s coverage of the Covid-19 Pandemic’ — which covered nine countries in the region namely Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe – showed that there was low representation of women’s voices in all media platforms monitored (12). This finding confirms similar conclusions arrived at in a 2020 Southern Africa focused (13) report on the effects of Covid-19 on freedom of expression. The report revealed that women (in countries like Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe) are not getting heard in the media (14), along with other marginalised groups such as those living with disabilities, children, indigenous persons, poor persons and workers in unprotected work. The absence of women’s perspectives in Covid19-related news coverage means that women have limited influence over the framing of the crisis in the news and consequently, limited influence over policy-making directions (15). When women are denied equal representation in media content, their ability to enjoy and exercise freedom of expression is constrained, which places them at (16) ever-greater risk of being further marginalised amid the most significant global health crisis of our lifetimes. In Southern Africa, it can be surmised that the gender equality dimension has been lacking from news coverage during the Covid-19 pandemic (17) , mainly because there is no gender parity in news sourcing and hence no equal gender representation in media content. In a year where the Covid-19 pandemic dominated the region’s news, the suppression of women’s voices was (18) exacerbated by journalists’ tendency in a time of crisis to refer back to ‘established sources’ who are significantly more likely to be men. In Southern Africa, governments were the main sources of information because they were responsible for testing their citizens for Covid-19 and countries such as Botswana and Zambia placed restrictions on use of sources outside government resulting in very few experts speaking about the virus (19) — further marginalising women’s voices. GENDER REPRESENTATION IN THE MEDIA WORKFORCE The lack of gender parity in news sourcing within Southern Africa mirrors the lack of gender representation in the region’s media workforce as none of the countries in the region have attained equal proportion of women in decisionmaking positions. This reality underscores the fact that women in Southern Africa are disproportionately underrepresented in the institutional structures (20) within the media industry which maintains journalism as a male-dominated industry (as attested by country reports from Tanzania, Eswatini, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi, amongst others). Sexism and patriarchal attitudes persist and new threats and impediments are also raised; wage gaps between men and women in the news media have widened and worrying trends with regard to online harassment of female journalists and “cyber misogyny” have emerged through social media (21). The low status of women within the media entrenches gender inequality and disadvantages female journalists in a number of ways. • Unequal opportunities in work allocation: Editors, who are mostly male, have the tendency to assign ‘soft news’ like entertainment and lifestyle to female journalists and ‘hard news’ such as politics, economics, and sports to male journalists (22).