Author: Elisa Lees Muñoz

Elisa Lees Muñoz directs the International Women’s Media Foundation to achieve its mission of breaking barriers for women journalists. Before joining the IWMF 15 years ago, Elisa lead the Crimes of War Education Project, and before that monitored the human rights of scientists for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Women’s Voices Are Essential to Global Democracy. We Need Your Help Saving Them.

Journalists face attacks on every beat, at every level of their careers, online and off. Government authorities, criminal groups and even the public target journalists with one common goal: to silence their voices.

And it works. A third of women journalists the IWMF surveyed in 2018 said they’d considered leaving the profession due to online attacks and threats. When women and nonbinary journalists’ reporting gets squashed or they exit the field, the public loses out. The access, nuance and perspective these journalists bring to the table is vital to a more diverse, free press—without their stories, democracy suffers.

(This essay is part of the “Feminist Journalism is Essential to Democracy” project—Ms. magazine’s latest installment of Women & Democracy, presented in partnership with the International Women’s Media Foundation.)

To Get More News Coverage of Women, We Need More Women Making the News

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women journalists

Across the globe, women’s voices are not being included in coverage of the pandemic, even though they are the most vulnerable to its impacts.

It matters who decides what is news, whose voices we hear, and whose stories get told. When women are seen, and highlighted in a manner that accurately reflects their role in society, it changes public perceptions. To date, the people at the top of the news media have not reflected this, nor have media writers or critics adequately examined the problem within their own house.