Gender-Say Gap in TV Organisations: A Comparative Study of Gender Differentials in Ghana and Nigeria News Channels

This study investigated gender-say gap in top TV organisations in Ghana and Nigeria to understand if there is a systematic silencing of the voices of any gender group through differentials in number of news anchors, boardroom staff and speaking times of guests, eye witnesses and vox pops. Six leading TV channels in Ghana and Nigeria were studied. The researcher content-analysed (a) websites of the channels, and (b) their news programmes. A 298-hour corpus of news programmes from the channels was coded using manual counting. It was found that there were more women presenters than men in the select TV stations; there was a significant male dominance in the management and leadership of the TV companies; there was a significant difference between the speaking time of men and women (t(10) = 12.96957, p = 0.001069); and while women occupy important editorial positions, final editorial power, governance and agenda-setting authority are often monopolized by men. While there is a significant number of woman TV presenters in the TV stations, their underrepresentation in boardrooms and in speaking time is underlining. Also, there are still institutional and discursive mechanisms that maintain mutedness and constrain women’s substantive influence even where they occupy visible positions.