Empowering female reporters

Women's voices are vanishing from Pakistan's newsrooms. The latest Global Media Monitoring Project has revealed that, once heralded as the emerging voices of change, female reporters now constitute a mere 4% of news coverage in 2025, a precipitous drop from 16% in 2020. This decline is a persistent structural imbalance that continues to marginalise women from the spaces where national narratives are shaped.

For the most part, investigative journalism and high-stakes reporting remain overwhelmingly male domains. Women are seldom entrusted with these beats, and even when present, their contributions are often relegated to the periphery. Gains in social and legal reporting, while noteworthy, are insufficient to counterbalance their absence from the stories that define public discourse and influence national decision-making. Journalism that omits female perspectives inevitably produces an incomplete portrayal of society.

Issues such as gender-based violence and women's rights, or other matters affecting more than half the population, are frequently simplified or overlooked. When women's insights are excluded, news coverage loses both depth and credibility, depriving the public of comprehensive reporting. Unfortunately, structural obstacles perpetuate this imbalance.

Editorial hierarchies and entrenched newsroom cultures limit women's opportunities, ensuring that their presence remains minimal. Without deliberate intervention from the journalist fraternity, news and narratives will continue to reflect a narrow, male-dominated perspective. The truth is that female representation is unlikely to recover without intervention, and public discourse will remain skewed.

The remedy, however, is clear. News organisations must entrust women reporters with essential beats. More so, female journalists themselves must take up the courage to occupy the central space if journalism is to serve the nation faithfully and fully. Ultimately, women must be at the heart of the stories that define the nation, not on the sidelines.