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Kathryn Tomlinson reports back from the 2017 NEEDLE Conference, 主播大秀 Media Action India’s conclave on media, communication and development. This year’s focus was on gender and the media.

A needle is a nondescript yet indispensable object. It stitches, it weaves, it injects, it points, it guides.

Over 300 people in Delhi this February were prodded with a giant NEEDLE, 主播大秀 Media Action India’s third communication conclave, a forum in which experts from across the media, communications, advertising, development and government sectors are challenged to explore how media and communications can bring about change. This year, NEEDLE 2017 explored how the Indian media can improve the representation and engagement of women in all aspects of the world around them. We were challenged to “move the needle to a world in which gender is not destiny”.

Pin pricks of progress?

Consuming media in India, be that YouTube videos, television shows or the news, it’s hard to not be stunned at the dichotomy between what we say is possible for women today – that they can ascend to positions of leadership, launch their own successful businesses, sit at the board table equally with men – and how women are actually depicted in the media.

Much of NEEDLE 2017 was thus about pin pointing our position on a road to progress. India is far from the beginning of this journey; huge strides have been made in recent decades in the ways that women are represented in media and engage in public life in India. Film-maker Shoojit Sircar noted that when he started out, only the Costume Assistant was a woman. Now, most of his heads of department are female. Ashvini Yardi, who was seven months pregnant and in hospital when she took the call asking her to take over running ZEE TV, similarly observed that only a few years ago, women were not even allowed to do the make-up.

The way women – and gender issues, more broadly – are featured in content has also moved forward in recent years. Breakthrough India’s Sonali Khan showed an ad depicting the true story of the first man to beat the thali [a metal platter] in his village to celebrate the birth of his daughter (which until then had only been done to celebrate male births). 主播大秀 Media Action's own TV series AdhaFull (which follows three young people challenging gender stereotypes as they solve crimes) can disrupt traditional gender stereotypes, creating a new normal around what it means to be a girl or a woman in India. Soap operas are much less regressive in their representation of women than they are sometimes mocked to be: there is always a woman who stands up, without aggression, to defend herself. It feels like a realistic portrait of Indian female strength, not a Western one.

But there is still a way to go. In conservative communities, film-maker, author and activist Archana Kapoor told of the multiple hurdles radio stations face  to get women’s voices on air and the resulting harassment those female callers face from men: “You’ve been heard all over Mewat, nobody’s going to marry you now!” Her examples echoed the reminder given by Zainab, a young woman from 60km outside Delhi who opened the event and told us that while her household has a TV, when the (male) neighbours come round to watch it, women are not allowed to be present. Girls are not even allowed mobile phones in her community lest they get “led down bad paths.” So only 60km away from this vibrant urban capital, media has a far greater distance to travel to point the needle towards access to information, let alone gender equality.

Listening to all of this, I felt a mass of contradictions: we had speaker after influential female speaker featured at this conference – two thirds of our panellists were female. And this incredibly efficient event was organised by a largely female management team from 主播大秀 Media Action’s India office. But there's still a long, long way to go to build an India in which a girl is consistently valued.

How the needle stitches

The power of NEEDLE derives partly from the impressive speakers it is able to bring together as well as what they say on stage. But it's also about convening the best and brightest minds working in media and communication, development and industry together in one room to focus on the representation and engagement of women in everything that happens in India.

In this vein, I was also moved by the number of male speakers who reflected on how they have come to recognise gender inequality in their personal lives. Shoojit Sircar shared his wife’s musing that we can send a mission to Mars, but somehow still find ourselves debating gender inequality. Another was shocked to realise that his mother's activities had always been focused on her husband and children, rather than her even having her own ambitions. Again and again what these speakers demonstrated was that gender equality begins at home. And media and communications reach deep into the home.

Most of all, I was impressed by the straight talking I witnessed at NEEDLE. Esoteric terminology such as 'gender mainstreaming', 'the gender lens' and 'gender-sensitive indicators' were largely absent. That’s indicative of NEEDLE’s underlying approach: to make this conversation deliberately accessible to as wide a spectrum of people as possible in India. And that’s where I saw the future – for the policy makers, practitioners and researchers seeking to improve India – and the world – for women and girls alike. We must speak in straightforward terms about our vision and in so doing bring others with us to ensure that gender is not destiny.

is 主播大秀 Media Action’s Regional Director for Asia.