A Multimodal Discursive Analyses of Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality in the Communication of Four Non-Governmental Organisations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47672/ajls.2910Keywords:
Multimodal, Discursive Representation, Development Ngos, Social Actor Representation, Empowerment, Gender EqualityAbstract
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse multimodal (visual and written) contents of annual reports of four[1] NGOs (PLAN International, UN Women, UNICEF and WHO) to determine if their discourse empowers women/girls and ensures gender balance following the fifth Strategic Development Goal (SDG5). None of its nine indicators considers language and the way stakeholders frame women and their issues. This is despite the importance of language and framing emphasised in the Gender Responsive Guide for Communication of such umbrella organisations as UNDP.
Methodology: Multimodal qualitative data was purposively collected from 12 annual reports (2016 to 2018) of the above four NGOs and were analysed within Van Dijk’s (1993, 2001) Critical Discourse Analysis, and Paltridge’s (2012) Multimodal Discourse Analysis and Van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2008) Social Actor Representation three parameters: inclusion/exclusion, activation/passivisation, and nomination/categorisation.
Findings: The findings suggest that the studied NGOs visually (pictures) empower women inclusively (85.8%) in their reports. While UN Women demonstrated complete activation (100%), WHO (8%) and UNICEF (0%) passivized women. UNICEF, UN Women and WHO, largely categorised (weaken) women to the advantage of men who were nominalised (empowered). These findings indicate that, while the discourses of the four NGOs empowered women within women’s groups, underlying gender biases persisted when women were juxtaposed with men, thereby limiting progress towards true gender equality following SDG5. The gender sensitive organisations studied, therefore inadvertently reproduced gender hierarchies in the framing of women’s empowerment/gender equality.
Recommendation: Therefore, SDG5 stakeholders will need to be more conscious of, and uphold equal visibility in text and images of public related material in reporting women’s issues as recommended by policy documents on responsive gender communication.
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