Film fest seminar discusses challenges women face

By Pragya Singh

The International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT) held a roundtable seminar on the representation of gender, women and children in the media at the India International Centre on the sidelines of the 18^th Asian Women’s Film Festival.

The conference, held on March 16, was attended by the students of Bennett University. It held a host of conversations about the role the media plays in uplifting women.

“In the media, we don’t have enough voices of people who aren’t cisgender, upper-caste men,” Paromita Vohra, founder of Agents of Ishq, said.

Women in journalism face numerous challenges. Nupur Basu, a journalist for more than four decades, shared the story of a fellow journalist.

“A journalist, whose name I cannot reveal, was covering the Hathras rape case from the site. The police got hold of her recordings and threatened to book her,” Basu said.

She stressed on how the deteriorating state of women in journalism has led to the scant number of women in the industry with many opting to quit.

Women’s role was not the only thing that was addressed in the seminar. Maheen Mirza, cinematographer, Ekta Collectives, said, “People of the queer community are even behind the women when it comes to representation.”

She said that while women are under-represented “we have to start with first convincing people that we are humans and have feelings too”.

“For the queer community, it is a long, long journey to get the representation we need in the media”, she said.

The seminar was a host of narratives on where media is as a voice of the underrepresented and where it should be.


Bennett University’s Times School of Media is a key partner in the 18^th IAWRT Asian Film Festival. Its students are playing an important role as volunteers and rapporteurs.


(The writer is a Semester IV student of BA (Journalism and Mass Communication) programme.)