Our first issue of 2024 opens with a selection of articles that focus on work. In the first of these, Yingfei He, Yurong Yan and Guoliang Zhang discuss their interviews with Chinese women journalists, exploring their experiences in digital journalism and the construction of what has been called a ‘Pink Ghetto’ in the digital news field. While the interviews reveal increased opportunities for career development, they also highlight challenges such as the blurring of boundaries between work and family life, the pressure to move from journalism to editing or working with mobile and social media, and how working on digital platforms may expose them to harassment and violence. The article shows how participants employ different strategies for negotiating gender identity in relation to work and the particular challenges presented by digital technology.
Inbar Livnat, Michal Almog-Bar, Michal Soffer and Mimi Ajzenstadt focus on the work experiences of women in social service non-profit organizations in Israel, including those who work in social work and occupational therapy. As in the previous article, participants emphasized how blurred boundaries between home and work provided a challenge to women’s well-being. They also described how poor pay meant that they lived in ‘survival mode’, how they struggled against unmanageable and stressful workloads, and the difficulty and effort of setting work boundaries in order to maintain their mental health.
Elżbieta Katarzyna Kasprzak investigates the career patterns of Polish women and men, comparing professional and life satisfaction across three dimensions: stability, vertical mobility, and continuity. As she shows, the most frequently pursued career for both women and men is one with a conventional pattern, but women’s careers are characterized by less continuity, mobility, and stability than men’s.
Sophia Mueller, Eliana Dubosar and Kasey Windels examine how gender identity shapes women’s experiences in the advertising industry in the US and asks why, despite a growing number of women with degrees in advertising, women are exiting the industry. They highlight four key factors – the ‘boys club’ organization and atmosphere of the industry, the relegation of women to supporting roles and hostility towards women with children, the pressure to be attractive, and a growing weariness with the need to police their speech and tone, the longer they stay in the industry.
Our subsequent articles each examine aspects of violence against women around the world, considering the discourses and histories that underpin these and the conditions under which women fight back.
Two articles focus on Nigeria. Michael O. Ogunlana, Ifeoma B. Nwosu, Abiola Fafolahan, Bose F. Ogunsola, Toluwatomi M. Sodeke, Opeyemi Mercy Adegoke, Nse A. Odunaiya and Pragashnie Govender consider patterns of rape and femicide in Nigeria, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, as reported in a range of digital media platforms. Their findings underscore a disturbing increase in rape cases during lockdown, with 12.5% resulting in femicide. All the perpetrators were male and almost all the victims were female, more than half of these aged between 11 and 20 and a quarter under the age of 10. As the authors conclude, much remains to be done to tackle the incidence of rape and femicide in Nigeria.
Domale Keys discusses the Nigerian 2020 #ENDSARS movement which was sparked by escalating police brutality against young people, and which featured protests calling for the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Noting that Black women have often been rendered invisible in movements and discussions about police violence, Keys’ focuses on the history of women’s organizing activities and contextualizes the #ENDSARS movement in relation to decades of organizing against police violence. The article emphasizes the need to interrogate both the ‘vestiges of colonialism’ within Nigeria’s policing system and the gendered, racialized, and capitalist dimensions of police violence against Black women.
As Betty L. Wilson, Julisa Tindall, Denetra Walker and Angela M. Smith argue in their article ‘“Ain’t I a woman?”: a historical and contemporary analysis of state-sanctioned violence against Black Women in the United States’, the fact that Black women in the United States are disproportionately more likely to be killed by the police and to experience higher maternal mortality rates must be understood in the context of state-sanctioned violence. Exploring the dimensions of state-sanctioned violence in relation to policing, healthcare and media coverage, they emphasize the urgent need for further research to address and eliminate systemic violence against Black women.
Claire Edwards, Robert Bolton, Mariano Salazar, Carmen Vives-Cases and Nihaya Daoud address the rising significance of violence against women in the lives of young people, showing how qualitative empirical research in this area reveals the complexity of their attitudes to this issue. While this research demonstrates that young people are intolerant of violence in general, their beliefs about men’s strength, dominance and aggression and about norms of gender and heterosexuality often work to normalize and justify violence against women.
Shalini Nair discusses the Dignity March, a grassroots movement against sexual violence that coincided with the #MeToo campaign in India. Working with sexual violence survivors from mainly oppressed-caste communities in rural India, Nair shows how speak-out movements like these help to build communities of resistance. The article showcases the transformative potential of movements built on an understanding of intersectional, lived experience, at the level of the body, the community, the region and the nation.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.