Locating Gender Perspectives in COVID-19 Reportage in India: An Analysis of Print Media (March - September 2020)

A comparison between English and Bengali publications showed that the latter carried more Covid-19 and lockdown stories with a focus on women and gender issues. Roughly seven per cent of the 1,149 Bengali stories sampled focused on women and gender issues, while only 2.5 per cent of the 1,652 articles from English-language publications did so.

Indian-language publications showed a stronger understanding of pandemic and lockdown realities in the districts of the states where they were published, while English-language publications had a better grasp of the situation in the urban centres where they were published.

Most Indian-language dailies focused on the plight of people from their region who were stuck in other parts of India or the world. The Guwahati-based newspaper Asomiya Pratidin’s front page story on May 11, 2020, was of an Assamese nurse suffering from Covid-19 at a quarantine centre in Mumbai. Malayalam-language newspapers emphasised stories relating to Malayali nurses working across the country. On April 8, the Kottayam-based newspaper Malayala Manorama carried a story on the bad experiences of a Malayali nurse working at a Delhi hospital.

Most publications sampled quoted fewer women than men in their coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite there being many women experts in the fields of healthcare and epidemiology, only some were regularly quoted as authoritative sources.

Women citizens were quoted as unofficial sources in the print publications under consideration, but in low numbers. Indian-language print publications quoted fewer women citizens in their stories on the pandemic and lockdown as compared to English newspapers.

The voices of trans-persons remained largely absent in the coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown. The study found only two articles concerning trans-persons in the samples examined. Both were connected to policy initiatives by the Kerala government and carried by the Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi.

Other groups whose voices remained absent in the pandemic coverage included those of women with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ persons and Dalit and Adivasi women.

Stories on issues faced by women, such as accessing childbirth facilities during the lockdown, were mainly focused on individual narratives. A further probe into maternal or child healthcare as policy issues remained absent.

Media reportage across languages tended to identify and stigmatise women as carriers of the Covid-19 infection. For instance, Bollywood singer Kanika Kapoor who disregarded quarantine rules in March 2020 was hounded by the media, while similar actions by male celebrities were not sensationalised in the same manner. In April 2020, Muslim men were similarly stigmatised in the coverage of the Tablighi Jamaat (a Muslim missionary movement) congregation, where many who attended tested positive for Covid-19.

Women’s voices remained missing in the biggest story of the lockdown months, that of the exodus of migrant workers from cities and their difficult journeys home. Most articles on this identified women as family members of male workers, but not as migrant workers themselves.

Although women’s work and livelihoods were heavily impacted by the lockdown in both formal and informal sectors, this was barely covered by the media. The stories on job cuts and wage losses mainly portrayed men as those impacted.

Challenges faced in accessing education digitally featured prominently in the news, but the glaring inequality between boys and girls in accessing online classes remained absent.

Focus and Factoids by Kanak Rajadhyaksha.

PARI Library's health archive project is part of an initiative supported by the Azim Premji University to develop a free-access repository of health-related reports relevant to rural India.