How the media sees, hears and projects women in public leadership came under scrutiny in Lagos as journalists, media leaders and gender experts engaged in a three-day reflection and dialogue on gender-sensitive reporting and the representation of women in public life.

The discussions challenged newsrooms to examine how editorial choices from who gets interviewed and whose voice becomes the headline to the issues considered newsworthy and how women are portrayed can influence public perceptions of women’s leadership, credibility and competence.

The Nigerian edition of Reporting on Leaders: See Her, Hear Her, Project Her, jointly organised by the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development (EJS Center) and the International Press Centre (IPC), brought together about 35 senior and beat-relevant media professionals, alongside representatives of the Nigeria Association of Women Journalists (NAWOJ), Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP) and gender experts.

Rather than asking the media to simply publish more stories about women, the dialogue examined a deeper question: what kind of visibility are women receiving, and does the coverage adequately reflect their leadership, competence, achievements and impact?

For Communication Officer, EJS Center, Noella Ngunyam, the conversation is critical because the media does more than report leadership; it helps shape who is recognised as a leader and whether that person is considered credible.

Reflecting on the legacy of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected woman president, Ngunyam said her leadership of Liberia after years of civil war demonstrated what women could achieve when given the opportunity to occupy the highest political office.

She said Sirleaf’s experience subsequently informed her commitment to mentoring and supporting more African women to pursue leadership through initiatives of the EJS Center.

Ngunyam, however, said the continent’s persistent gender gap in political leadership requires a closer examination of how women are represented in the media, particularly in countries where women remain significantly underrepresented in political institutions.

She stressed that gender-sensitive journalism should not mean giving women preferential treatment or shielding female leaders from scrutiny.

She urged journalists to reflect on the tendency to make women’s marital status, children, appearance and family lives part of the central narrative when covering their leadership, while their competence, policies and performance receive comparatively less attention.

The dialogue also examined the other side of the visibility equation: the responsibility of women leaders to make their work visible and accessible to the media.

Executive Director, IPC, Lanre Arogundade, said women should not be spotlighted merely because they are women, arguing that journalism must interrogate what they are doing in office, the impact of their work and whether they are fulfilling the responsibilities attached to their positions.

According to him, greater visibility must be earned through substantive work and accountability, while women leaders must also take responsibility for telling their stories and communicating their achievements.

Executive Director/CEO, Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ), Motunrayo Alake, called for a deliberate expansion of the pool of women available to journalists as experts and sources, noting that the absence of women from public conversations is sometimes attributed to a lack of access to qualified female voices.

The challenge, she said, is therefore not simply about putting women in the news, but ensuring that qualified women are consistently included in conversations where their expertise is relevant.

The media, she said, has significant agenda-setting power and can deliberately identify and introduce qualified women to the public, helping to broaden the pool of voices considered in political and public discourse.

As the three-day engagement progressed, participants moved from reflection to practical newsroom interventions through specialist sessions for broadcast, print and online/digital journalism. The sessions examined how the principles discussed could be translated into everyday reporting, while a cross-track dialogue brought together the different perspectives to identify common newsroom priorities.

The programme culminated in a “Commitments Room”, where participants identified what journalism should stop and start doing in its coverage of women public leaders, while exploring opportunities for collaboration across newsrooms and media platforms.

A 90-day accountability mechanism was established to sustain the commitments beyond the meeting, underscoring the central message of the dialogue: improving women’s representation in public leadership requires more than increasing the number of stories about women; it requires journalism that is rigorous, fair, substantive and conscious of how its choices shape public perceptions of leadership