As the world marks International Women’s Day 2025 on March 8, with the theme “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.”, the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) reaffirms its commitment to gender-inclusive newsrooms as a pillar of accountability journalism. We call on media organisations to bridge gender gaps in leadership and news representation, ensuring a diverse and equitable media landscape.
Findings from WSCIJ’s ‘Who Leads the Newsrooms and the News?’ report highlight significant disparities. Across 111 surveyed media organisations, women hold 25.7% of leadership positions, while men dominate at 74.3%. The imbalance is even wider in print and online media, where female leadership representation is only 4.6% and 5.5%, respectively. This leadership gap influences whose stories are told and how they are framed. In addition to leadership, women remain underrepresented in news content. They feature in just 7.1% of news stories and make up 12.1% of expert sources, limiting their voices in policymaking, governance, and social change.
To address these imbalances, WSCIJ has actively engaged media houses through its House-to-House initiative, as part of the Report Women! Programme. We worked with the management and staff of Daily Trust, Premium Times, The Nation, News Agency of Nigeria, New Telegraph newspaper, Leadership, Voice of Nigeria (VON), TVC News, Vanguard, Guardian, and Channels Television, among others to engage on the need for newsrooms to deepen their accountability journalism mechanisms through parity between men and women in the leadership of newsrooms and news content.
Since its launch in 2014, the Report Women! Programme has trained 537 journalists across Nigeria and Ghana; produced 86 fellows under the Female Reporters Leadership Programme (FRLP), supported 138 newsroom leadership projects focused on women and girls, published 136 investigative stories on gender-related issues, recognised 17 outstanding female journalists, produced six documentaries and eight media monitoring reports and conducted five research reports on gender representation in the media.
One such research report, ‘Missing Data, Missing Justice,’, provides empirical evidence on how sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) cases are reported by the media tracing their progression through the justice system.
To further address the injustices, WSCIJ launched the ‘‘Report Women! Experts’ Source Guide’ as part of its 10th anniversary October 2024—a database of 500+ female experts across eight sectors – Agriculture, Business & Economy, Education, Health & Science, Law & Human Rights, Politics & Governance, Media and Security, ensuring journalists have access to diverse female perspectives. WSCIJ seeks to expand this database and encourage more female experts to participate.
International Women’s Day 2025 is a call to action for news media owners, publishers, managers, journalists, policymakers, civil society members and government to drive structural change towards accountability journalism through gender equality in both newsroom leadership and media representation. The media must move beyond tokenistic inclusion and adopt intentional, systemic strategies to promote gender-balanced hiring and leadership advancement in newsrooms, create safer, more inclusive workplaces that eliminate bias and harassment, increase the visibility of women in news coverage as experts and subjects and support training, mentorship, and leadership development for female journalists.
At the WSCIJ, we remain steadfast in our mission to champion accountability journalism which includes equity between men and women in the practice and content of journalism. It is time to accelerate actions that lead to newsrooms that reinforce systemic equalities for girls and women.
Signed,
Motunrayo Alaka
Executive Director/CEO, WSCIJ
