January 8, 2020 was the day that Nazneen Lucky’s dreams turned to ashes. That was the day that the staff reporter at a private TV station in Bangladesh lost her job.
She was then pregnant with her first child, and the news stunned her. “I have been working in the organization for eight years,” says Lucky. “Suddenly, the administration officer said, ‘we don’t need your services anymore.’ When I asked her why, she replied that the organization was incurring financial losses.”
Lucky felt like her employer had pulled the rug out from under her just when she needed a job the most. She says, “No media house is hiring new staff during the pandemic.” She says her husband, who is also a journalist at a print media organization, “[cannot] support our family — which now includes our baby boy — on his income alone.”
Lucky is just one of the 107 female journalists who have been fired in Bangladesh during the coronavirus crisis. Fifty of them don’t know the reasons behind their termination; 33 journalists allege that they were forced to file their resignations, and 24 say they were sent on unpaid leaves for an indefinite period.
Unpaid leaves
Maria Salam has been working in managerial posts for different mass media outlets for the past 16 years. She and four female colleagues were forced to take unpaid leaves indefinitely. “Female journalists work just as hard as their male counterparts and also risk their lives during the pandemic,” says Salam. “However, the retrenchment policies of the media houses have disproportionately affected the female workers as they are the first ones being dismissed.”
Salama believes that female journalists working in rural areas have a harder time than those employed in the capital. Several media houses have stopped the salaries and allowances of the female journalists working outside Dhaka.
“The reason that the companies give is that women are economically dependent on the men in the family,” she says. “None [of them] cares [about] the fact that a part of the family runs on the finances provided by the working women.”
From November 2019 to December 2020, 57 female journalists were retrenched in Bangladesh, based on data from the London-based human rights organization Article 19 and the Facebook volunteer group “Our Media, Our Rights.” According to the latter, from January 2021 till the present, 50 female journalists were laid off.
Even before the pandemic, women journalists in Bangladesh were a minority. Out of the total of 6,718 journalists who are members of the National Press Club, Dhaka Journalist Union, Dhaka Reporters Unity, and Bangladesh Women Journalists Center, only 1,026 are women.
A woman of courage
In April 2013, Nadia Sharmin was nearly killed on the streets of Dhaka just because she was a female journalist doing her job. Sharmin, who was then a staff reporter at Ekushey Television, was covering a rally organized by fundamentalists who wanted to ban “men and women mixing in public,” according to remarks delivered at the International Women of Courage ceremony in 2015. The hostile crowd beat and kicked her and left her severely injured.
Sharmin’s employer refused to cover her medical expenses. Instead, she says, “they forced me to quit my job [by not giving me my salary] for eight months.”
Undaunted, Sharmin is back on her feet. She is a staff reporter at Ekattor Media. In 2015, Sharmin received an International Woman of Courage award from the U.S. State Department for her “bravery in the face of condemnation, threats, and physical violence.”
Many obstacles
Naismun Ara Haque Minu, president of the Bangladesh Women Journalists’ Centre, lists the many obstacles that women journalists face in a male-dominated industry: “Girls are rarely seen at the policy-making stage. Sometimes, women are sexually abused by their male colleagues. The women’s salaries are lower than the men’s pay. Some organizations do not want to give women six months of maternity leave; others do not employ female journalists. Women are not provided a service vehicle when they are on night duty.”
A 2017 study published by the Press Institute of Bangladesh captured how satisfied professional journalists are with their jobs. According to the study, 18% of respondents thought that there is concern about the safety of women in the workplace; 50% said that women are neglected in the workplace; 50% reported disrespectful behavior from male colleagues; 17% said that they had been sexually harassed in the workplace at various times, and a tenth of women journalists said they do not get maternity leave in their workplaces.
Lucky narrates how she herself met discrimination head-on in the workplace. “I was given a three-month family planning media fellowship in 2019,” she says. She wrote articles to comply with the requirements of the fellowship.
However, a male editor — who was apparently jealous of Lucky’s fellowship — refused to publish her work, which would have made her a strong candidate for promotion. She says, “When I went to protest about all this, the news editor demoted me to desk reporter.” Lucky fought back and managed to get her stories published.
When it comes to compensation, women journalists have generally been at a disadvantage. “In normal times, women journalists in the country are discriminated against in terms of salary and allowances,” says Faruq Faisel, regional director of the Bangladesh and South Asia regional office of Article 19.
“According to our research, during the pandemic, the discrimination increased to 100%. During the crisis, 96% of the female media workers are going through economic problems.” He says that media owners took advantage of the pandemic to reduce the salaries of female media workers and to send many of them on unpaid leaves.
Shakil Ahmed, head of news at Ekattor TV news channel, laments that 70% of the employees laid off from TV networks are women. He rates the level of professionalism in the management of the TV industry at “zero.” He says, “Channel owners are not held accountable for violating workers’ rights. According to labor law, they have to give at least three months’ notice to the employee as well as the reason for the employee’s dismissal. But most organizations do not follow this rule.”
Much-needed reforms
According to Faisel, Article 19 has since August 2020 piloted a program to provide financial assistance to the retrenched women journalists in Bangladesh. Fifteen women journalists were given the opportunity to work temporarily with the Article 19 team at the Dhaka office. He says, “Our goal is to bring 45 more women journalists under the program in 2021 with the support of the Asia Foundation project.”
Faisel is aware that the program is merely a band-aid solution. “The unjust dismissal of journalists must be stopped,” he says. “The government has to take the initiative in this regard.”
The government should also step up to stop the sexual harassment faced by women journalists, says Minu. “The High Court of Bangladesh issued a directive in 2009 for every institution to establish ‘sexual harassment complaint committees,’ composed of a majority of female members to investigate and take action on complaints,” she says. Twelve years later, “none of the media houses in Bangladesh have such a committee.”
Women journalists in Bangladesh are waiting for the day when their lack of job security and the discrimination against them are but distant memories. ●
Farhana Haque Nila is a Dhaka-based senior reporter with News Now Bangla. She writes about human rights violations, politics, and culture. She also works as a Freedom of Expression Monitoring Officer at Bangladesh and South Asia Article 19.