Articles

Communicating Women’s Leadership in Higher Education: A Gendered Perspective on Visibility, Voice, and Recognized Authority

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Greater media visibility of women university leaders does not necessarily ensure equivalent recognition of their professional expertise, decision-making authority, or public voice. This conceptual article develops an integrative framework for examining how women’s leadership is communicated in higher education through a gender-sensitive lens. Drawing on an interpretive synthesis of scholarship on gendered organizations, role congruity, framing, feminist discourse analysis, and dialogic public relations, the article distinguishes three analytically separate phenomena: media visibility, representations of authority, and audiences’ recognition of authority. It proposes the Gendered Leadership Image-Communication Framework (GLICF), which connects five communicative stages with four dimensions for analyzing messages. Its central contribution is to articulate the visibility-authority gap: prominent representation does not necessarily convey a leader’s substantive agency or generate public recognition of her authority. Four theoretical propositions specify potentially testable relationships and their contextual qualifications. As a conceptual contribution rather than an empirical investigation, the framework should be treated as a research agenda whose assumptions require testing through content analysis, audience research, and experimental designs.

Cultural Practices against Women in Nigeria: The Media Frames and the Challenges

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This study set out to investigate the patterns of framing of cultural practices against women by the media in Nigeria; as well as the challenges of framing the practices in South East Nigeria. The major objectives were to determine the frequency of coverage, the framing patterns and the constraints to media coverage. The survey method was employed to study a sample of 276 journalists in South East Nigeria using the questionnaire as instrument for data collection to determine their opinions about the challenges of media coverage of the practices. Also, content analysis method was employed to study the frequency of coverage of the practices in select radio, television and newspaper contents; as well as to determine framing patterns. In the end, it was found that both radio and television stations gave adequate coverage to the practices while the newspapers’ level of coverage was low. It was also found that the patterns of framing ranges from condemnatory stance to revealing the consequences on the societal development and to clamouring for review, amendment and eradication of the practices. However, challenges of coverage were lack of enabling laws, family and religious link to practices, sacredness and secrecy of the practices, etc.  It is, therefore, recommended that the media, policy makers, NGOs, community leaders, etc should find ways of ameliorating the identified hitches so as to enable hitch-free coverage of cultural practices so that analysis would be pragmatic.