The Association of Media Women in Kenya (AMWIK) has sounded the alarm over the persistent lack of safe and supportive workplaces for women journalists in the country.
Its Executive Director, Queenter Mbori, said this failure continues to push skilled women out of media, despite their large presence in the workforce.
Speaking during an interview on Radio Generation, Mbori highlighted that the media industry, like the wider society, remains largely patriarchal and tends to exclude women from leadership roles and key decision-making positions.
“Apart from the fact that it’s a patriarchal society, other than the fact that media mirrors society the media environment does not offer an enabling environment that can ensure that women grow career-wise,” she said on Thursday.
Reflecting on her own experience, Mbori recounted working at a local media house for over a decade, where she witnessed firsthand the lack of basic facilities for women.
She explained that even with hundreds of female employees, the organization did not provide a nursing room until a manager going through maternity highlighted the need.
“I was at the media house for about 12 years. But over the years, we did not even have a basic facility such as a nursing room, and this is an institution that had hundreds of women as employees. It actually took one of the managers going through maternity for the organization to realize that we needed a nursing room,” Mbori explained.
By the time she left, the company had set up a functional nursing room, a modest but important step toward supporting women in the workplace.
“By the time I was leaving, at least there was a functional nursing room,” she added.
Mbori emphasized that the larger problem lies in the absence of strong gender-focused policies and leadership commitment to equality.
“When I talk about policies, in Kenya, for example, we have affirmative action laws. When we know there’s a problem, there’s a good way to tackle it,” she said.
“For me, I always believe that when something is on paper, when something is in policy, it’s easy to implement. But most media organizations do not have policies that align women toward media management,” Mbori added.
Going further, AMWIK boss also raised concerns about the prevalence of sexual harassment in newsrooms, noting that most perpetrators are male supervisors.
The lack of visibility and accountability discourages women from reporting incidents and, in many cases, from continuing in the profession.
“Sexual harassment is not given visibility because the perpetrators are often supervisors and most of them are male,” Mbori said.
“So talking about it or reporting it creates an environment where women journalists opt out of the industry.”
Highlighting the disparity between the number of women entering the field and those who remain, Mbori noted that although women dominate journalism training programs, only a few reach senior positions.
“There are statistics that show that by the time women are graduating from media training institutions, the numbers are extremely high, something like four out of five are women. But over time, those numbers diminish because of all these issues we are talking about,” she explained.
She called on media houses to move beyond promises and implement concrete measures that make newsrooms safer and more supportive, stressing that real gender equality requires structural change.
