Our newsrooms need to change

A female friend of mine did complain about sexual harassment by her boss. He simply cut her out of all meetings and diminished her role, until she had no choice but to quit. Representation Pic/Getty Images

I was left with an overwhelming urge to apologise to all the women I know over the past couple of weeks. The skeletons that kept tumbling out of closets surprised me at first, and quickly shook me with the enormity of what was being discussed. These revelations happened largely on social media platforms, but even without the corroboration that a published news report requires, the sheer number of complaints left me feeling like a naïve rookie in a newsroom, simply because I had no idea how awful things really were.

I can't comment on the film industry, or advertising, politics or every other arena in which men have been named and shamed, because I can't claim familiarity with them. What I can look at is journalism, where I have spent a little over two decades, oblivious to what so many of my female friends and colleagues have been dealing with while simply trying to do their jobs. I have spent the past week thinking about editors I have worked with, wondering if they were decent human beings, and if they behaved differently with me because I happened to be male.

There were always signs, obviously. The editor of a news portal who would single out a female journalist for interesting assignments because she was supposed to be his girlfriend. He routinely pestered every female colleague with questions about their personal lives, especially their love lives, and asked the wife of a journalist who had recently passed away if she would consider a relationship with him. I heard those stories, and brushed them aside, leaving that organisation in disgust because professionalism didn't matter as much as sucking up to the boss did. It's why the portal in question has only faded with time, losing its reputation and traffic to new entrants, surviving solely on the largesse of money left over from its last major round of funding.

I remember the locker room talk that was rampant at a newspaper I spent a year at. There were women all around, but they didn't seem to mind, which is what I, a 20-year-old sub-editor, assumed at the time. Maybe their promotions or the assignments they were given depended upon them playing that role. I wasn't there long enough to find out, and many of the women I worked with back then are no longer journalists. I now wonder why they chose to quit the profession.

My experiences were all limited to urban India, specifically Bombay. I ought to have known better than to assume all journalists were the same, that we would all respect boundaries and understand what consent meant because we were the watchmen. In the light of these recent revelations, I can't help but wonder about the thousands of women who have chosen to stay silent, far from the glare of news cameras and trending topics, because their livelihoods depend upon their complicity.

A female friend of mine did complain about sexual harassment by her boss. She spoke to the female head of HR at her media company, who heard her out and did nothing. The man accused of harassment simply cut her out of all meetings and diminished her role, until she had no choice but to quit. He, on the other hand, was promoted and is now part of the senior management team at the same company. That story came to mind too.

More people will speak up, and should, because newsrooms need to change. A lot of men need to ask themselves questions about their behaviour. I have asked myself a few things too, wondering if I could have done or said things differently. Did I hurt my female colleagues by commenting on what they wore? Did I say things I thought were funny but weren't? Did I take their feelings into account at all?

A panellist on a BBC show last week referred to the UK as one of the least racist countries on Earth. He was promptly called out for that wildly inaccurate statement by a black man and a hijab-clad woman, both of whom pointed out that he simply wasn't in a position to talk about racism because his experience of the UK as a white man would always be different from their own dealings with the country on a daily basis. I feel the same way about journalism in the wake of these allegations. For someone whose job requires one's eyes and ears to be open at all hours, how could I be so blind?

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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