Engendering communication policy: key issues in the international women-and-media arena and obstacles to forging and enforcing policy

The first part of this article draws on empirical material from a recent series of global gender and communication policy reports which highlight the dearth of gender-equal media policy, and the sluggishness with which any existing policy is forged and/or enforced in most of the world. Consultations held by the London-based World Association for Christian Communication provided a significant volume of feedback during 1997-9, allowing for a comparison of regional material. This material emphasizes the particular difficulty of transposing western feminist agendas into other global contexts, as this article illustrates. The second part proposes that regional and national agenda differences between media activists and practitioners have complicated policy-making processes and, in some cases, stalled them entirely. In the rare events where policy of some sort is existent, factors such as media profitability have acted as obstacles to the enforcement of existing guidelines or codes of practice. The final section of this article looks briefly at successful policy making in Canada and groundbreaking reporting guidelines devised by Inter Press Service Africa.