Deriving Satisfaction from Participation

I had two roles at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. On the one hand, I was Deputy Editor-in-Chief of World Women, an English-language newspaper published daily during the conference. On the other hand, as a council member of Beijing Women Journalists Association, I was involved in hosting a workshop of the NGO Forum on Women with the theme 'women and media.'

I became involved in preparations for the conference in 1993, when I went to Vienna, to attend a preparatory meeting. During that meeting, I realized that the conference would offer representatives from the NGOs opportunities to give suggestions (that would) hopefully affect their governments' decision-making on issues related to women's development.

After I returned from Vienna, I shared my experience with colleagues in the association and began planning the workshop. I thought about conducting a survey modeling after what a US institution had done for years.

My colleagues and I selected 10 influential Chinese newspapers distributed nationwide. For a period of time, we recorded the women's presentation on the front page of each newspaper, images of women in the front page photos, and the proportion of reports written by women on the front page. We shared our findings at the workshop.

I was excited when I gave a speech at the plenary session of the forum. 'Media used to be a male-dominated (field) in China. Today, there are so many women journalists in China, and we feel (we are) equal to our male colleagues. But this doesn't mean that we have no problems here,' I said in my speech.

Quoting the findings from our survey, I noted that reports involving women amounted to less than 4 percent of the front-page coverage in the 10 newspapers. I called for greater coverage of women's and gender-equality-related issues in Chinese media. At the same time, I said I hoped to see media in Western countries provide unbiased coverage about China's efforts to promote equality, peace and development.

For the majority of women journalists who attended the conference in Beijing 20 years ago, including me, our satisfaction (about our careers) was derived from the experiences we had during our participation at the conference. 

(Women of China)