In Zimbabwe’s newsrooms, women are increasingly entering the profession, reporting stories and building careers in journalism. Yet when the cameras are switched on, the microphones opened and the pages printed, their voices remain remarkably difficult to find.
The contradiction is laid bare by the 2026 Gender and Media Progress Study (GMPS), which monitored 145 stories from 21 Zimbabwean media outlets across television, radio, print and online platforms. Women accounted for just 22% of news sources, compared with 78% for men. While that is an improvement from 15% in 2003, it places Zimbabwe below the Southern African average of 29% and reveals how slowly the country is moving towards a media landscape in which women are heard as equal participants in public debate.
The numbers point to a problem that extends far beyond who gets quoted in a newspaper article or interviewed on television. They expose a deeper question about who is considered knowledgeable, authoritative and worthy of public attention and, ultimately, who gets to shape the national conversation.
For Zimbabwean women, the barriers begin long before a journalist reaches for a recorder.
The newsroom door is still narrower for women
The GMPS findings show that women accounted for only 25% of reporters monitored in Zimbabwe in 2026, compared with 75% for men. More troublingly, the figure represents a reversal rather than progress: women made up 34% of reporters in 2003, meaning their representation has fallen by nine percentage points over 23 years.
Across Southern Africa, the direction has been the opposite. The regional share of women reporters increased from 31% in 2003 to 42% in 2026, while the global figure also stood at 42%. Zimbabwe’s 25% therefore leaves the country significantly behind its regional and global counterparts.
The disparity becomes even more pronounced when ownership is considered.
Women represented 39% of reporters in public or state-owned media, but only 9% in private media. Men accounted for more than 90% of reporting positions in the private outlets monitored by the study.
That divide matters because ownership is not simply a question of who holds shares or controls a media company. Ownership determines who gets hired, who gets promoted, who controls budgets, which desks are considered important and whose editorial judgment ultimately shapes the news agenda.
A woman may enter journalism, but entry alone does not guarantee access to the rooms where decisions are made.
And for those attempting to build their own media organisations, another layer of inequality emerges: access to financing.
The GMPS does not quantify the amount of capital available to women media owners or compare financing received by male- and female-owned media businesses. It therefore cannot establish a statistical financing gap. But the sharp difference between women’s representation in public and private media, 39% versus 9% among reporters, points to the importance of examining how recruitment, ownership structures, investment and organisational resources affect women’s participation in the private media sector.
For women seeking to become publishers, editors, producers or owners rather than employees, financing can be a particularly significant barrier. Building a media organisation requires equipment, technology, newsroom staff, transport, digital infrastructure, advertising networks and working capital. Where women have less access to capital, business networks and investment opportunities, the ability to establish and sustain independent media ventures can also be constrained.
The result is a media industry where the question is not merely whether women are allowed into journalism, but whether they have the same opportunity to acquire the resources and authority needed to shape it.
Women are still expected to report the “women’s stories”
Perhaps nowhere is the gender divide more visible than in the subjects journalists are assigned to cover.
The GMPS found that women reporters were heavily concentrated in gender equality, health and sexual and reproductive health and rights stories. Women reported all gender equality stories monitored and more than three-quarters of health stories. They also accounted for most reporters covering SRHR, celebrity, arts and media, and science and technology.
But men dominated reporting on politics and government, climate change and sustainable development, business and the economy, and crime and violence. Men exclusively reported sports, disability, legal affairs, and war, conflict and peace stories in the monitored sample.
This creates a subtle but powerful form of professional segregation.
Women can be present in the newsroom while remaining absent from the beats where political power, economic policy, national security and public resources are debated.
It means a young female journalist may be encouraged to specialise in gender, health or social affairs while her male colleague is given the political, business or investigative portfolio. Over time, these assignments can influence who develops the contacts, confidence and institutional knowledge needed to become an editor or newsroom leader.
The gender gap therefore reproduces itself.
The fewer women who cover Parliament, business, finance, climate policy or security, the fewer women there are building reputations as experts in those areas. And the fewer women recognised as experts, the easier it becomes for journalists to continue calling men when those subjects make the headlines.
The missing woman is often the expert
The study provides perhaps the clearest evidence of this cycle when it examines the roles given to sources.
Women were most visible when they were asked to provide popular opinion or personal experiences. They accounted for 75% of popular opinion sources and 42% of personal experience sources.
But when the media needed authority, the numbers changed dramatically.
Women accounted for only 28% of experts and commentators, 18% of spokespersons and just 11% of subjects. Men dominated the source categories most closely associated with authority and representation.
This distinction is crucial.
Women are being heard, but they are more likely to be heard as people describing what happened to them than as people explaining why it happened.
A woman can therefore appear in a story about inflation as a consumer, but not as an economist. She can appear in a story about climate change as a farmer affected by drought, but not as a climate scientist. She can speak about sexual harassment as a survivor, but not necessarily as a legal expert or policy specialist.
The problem is not that personal experiences are unimportant. They are essential to journalism. The problem arises when women are consistently positioned as witnesses to events while men are positioned as authorities who explain them.
That distinction can quietly reinforce the idea that expertise belongs to men.
Politics remains overwhelmingly male territory
Zimbabwe’s news agenda is dominated by the very areas where women are least visible.
Politics and government accounted for 27% of the stories monitored, making it the largest category. Business and the economy and social issues each accounted for 14%, while climate change, crime and violence and health each accounted for 7%.
Yet women accounted for only 14% of sources in politics and government and just 9% in business and the economy.
In gender equality stories, women constituted 75% of sources. In SRHR, they accounted for 60%. But in sports and war, conflict and peace, the monitored stories contained no women sources at all.
The pattern is revealing.
When the subject is explicitly about women, journalists find women. When the subject is about power, money, politics, conflict or national decision-making, the women largely disappear.
That means gender inequality in the media is not simply about counting women. It is about understanding the hierarchy of subjects and authority.
A truly gender-sensitive media cannot treat women as a specialised constituency whose voices are required only when the story is about gender.
Women must also be present when Zimbabwe debates its economy, elections, public debt, climate policy, national security, infrastructure, technology, sport and foreign affairs.
The picture tells the same story
The gender imbalance is not confined to words.
Of the stories containing images of people, 62.3% featured only or mainly men and boys. Only 18.2% featured mainly women and girls, while 19.5% showed a mix or balance of genders.
Even when women do make it into the frame, the images often reproduce rather than challenge stereotypes.
Nearly half, 49.4%, of the images monitored conveyed blatant gender stereotypes, while another 22.1% conveyed subtle stereotypes. Only 28.6% challenged gender stereotypes.
This matters because journalism does not only tell audiences what to think about. It also communicates, through repeated images, who appears to belong in positions of authority.
A front page filled with photographs of male politicians, male business executives, male experts and male community leaders sends a message even when no journalist explicitly intends to make one.
Over time, visibility becomes normality.
A gender-blind newsroom can produce gender-blind journalism
The GMPS found that 62% of Zimbabwe’s monitored stories were gender blind. Only 28% were classified as gender aware, while 6% contained subtle stereotypes and 4% contained blatant stereotypes.
Gender-sensitive journalism is not simply about adding the word “woman” to a story.
It means asking who is affected differently by a policy or crisis, whose voice is missing, who has decision-making power and whether women and men experience the same event in the same way.
Consider a story about Zimbabwe’s economic crisis. A gender-blind report might focus on government policy, business leaders and economists. A gender-sensitive report would also ask how rising costs affect women who run households, informal businesses or care for children and elderly relatives.
A climate story might report rainfall figures and agricultural losses. A gender-sensitive story would examine whether women farmers have the same access to land, finance, irrigation, inputs, markets and decision-making power as men.
The issue is therefore not simply representation. It is journalism’s ability to recognise how power operates differently across society.
The risks women journalists face outside the newsroom
For women who do make it into journalism, the workplace itself can present another set of risks.
The Zimbabwe GMPS report notes that sexual harassment in the media sector remains underreported despite evidence that it is widespread. It cites WAN-IFRA’s Women in News programme, which found that 53% of women working in Zimbabwean newsrooms had experienced sexual harassment, higher than the regional average. Radio recorded the highest prevalence, followed by print and television.
The report also cites Gender and Media Connect documentation of 436 incidents involving cyber harassment, hate speech, misinformation, doxing and image-based abuse, affecting 63% of women journalists.
These pressures can have consequences beyond individual wellbeing.
A woman journalist who fears harassment, online abuse or professional retaliation may be less willing to pursue certain stories, challenge powerful sources or establish a visible public profile.
For journalists whose work increasingly depends on digital platforms, online abuse can become an occupational hazard.
The gender gap therefore operates on several fronts simultaneously: who enters the profession, who receives opportunities, who gets promoted, who controls resources, who gets assigned influential beats, who becomes an expert source and who feels safe enough to remain visible.
The slow progress is still progress — but it is not enough
Zimbabwe has not stood still.
Women accounted for 15% of news sources in 2003 and 22% in 2026. Their visibility has therefore increased by seven percentage points over more than two decades. But the country remains behind the Southern African average of 29%.
The greater concern is what has happened to women reporters.
Their share declined from 34% in 2003 to 25% in 2026, at a time when the Southern African average rose from 31% to 42%.
That reversal suggests that simply waiting for generational change will not solve the problem.
Media organisations need deliberate interventions: transparent recruitment and promotion systems, stronger protection against harassment, investment in women’s professional development, opportunities for women to work on traditionally male-dominated beats, and systematic tracking of who is being quoted and photographed.
The GMPS itself recommends increasing women’s sources across politics, business, climate change and governance; expanding the use of women experts and commentators; promoting equal participation in reporting, presenting and anchoring; strengthening gender-responsive training; and requiring media houses to monitor and publicly report gender representation in both content and staffing.
But the conversation must also move beyond newsrooms.
If women are to become publishers, media entrepreneurs and owners, questions of access to finance, technology, markets, professional networks and investment must become part of the gender-and-media debate.
Otherwise, women may continue to be treated as participants in an industry whose deepest structures remain outside their control.
Whose news, whose views?
The title of the Zimbabwe report — Whose News, Whose Views — captures the challenge confronting the country’s media industry.
A media system cannot claim to fully represent society when women account for only 22% of its sources. It cannot claim to be inclusive when women make up just 25% of reporters and only 9% of reporters in the private media sample. It cannot claim to offer a complete picture of Zimbabwe when women are overwhelmingly absent from stories about business, politics, sport, conflict and other areas of public power.
The challenge is not to replace men’s voices with women’s voices.
It is to ensure that the public sphere does not continue to treat one gender as the default voice of authority.
Zimbabwe’s women are already politicians, economists, scientists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, farmers, academics, athletes, engineers, activists, journalists and community leaders. Their absence from the news is therefore not evidence of a shortage of women with something to say.
It is evidence of a system that too often decides who is worth listening to.
The next stage of progress must therefore be about more than getting women into newsrooms. It must be about giving them the resources to stay, the freedom to lead, the financing to build, the protection to work safely and the editorial power to determine what becomes news.
Until that happens, the gender gap in Zimbabwean media will remain more than a statistic.
It will remain a reflection of whose voices society chooses to hear, and whose it continues to leave outside the frame.
