Scholarly insights into media representations of women and gender issues in Africa to commemorate International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day on March 8th presents an opportunity to reflect on the progress made in the struggle for gender equality and examine the media's pivotal role in this journey in raising awareness, shaping perception and amplifying voices. We bring you this curated collection of scholarly articles from African Journalism Studies, highlighting the media's influence in transforming societal views and influencing policy. The first article in this collection by H. Leslie Steeves and Irene Awino (2015) argues that “journalism plays a major agenda-setting and information dissemination role on the continent.” In this article, titled “Gender divides and African journalism practice,” they highlighted the contested nature of the term ‘journalism,’ the intersectional nature of gender in Africa and the need for increased scholarly attention toward the interplay of gender and journalism on the continent. Nearly a decade after their call in 2015, what contributions has African Journalism Studies made to this critical field, and what future directions do we suggest for research and practice in gender and journalism on the continent? Between 2015 to 2023, African Journalism Studies published 316 papers with ‘women’ and 276 with ‘gender’ in the keywords. This underscores the significant attention and focus this topic has received in the journal. The range of articles selected for this collection shows that the focus has been diverse and spanned the continent. AJS has focused on mobile phones and digital platforms, magazines, and mainstream print media coverage, with a range of textual, qualitative, and quantitative approaches. However, in AJS and elsewhere, existing work has focused on cis-gendered women, and we invite papers that explore coverage of non-binary and transgendered individuals, as well as the broader spectrum of gender identities and expressions, to enrich our understanding of gender dynamics in media representation and journalistic practices. The rising prominence and popularity of visually oriented platforms and their intersection with journalism also calls for more research in this area. We invite future submissions that address these gaps.