Društvene i Humanističke Studije (Nov 2018)
Socio-economic Status Of Women Journalists From South Serbia
Abstract
In the paper the authors are analyzing the socio-economic status of women journalists from the south of Serbia. Their monthly salary is far below the Republic average, and the analysis showed an important link between the amount of monthly income and the level of satisfaction of respondents - 92.1% of respondents showed dissatisfaction with their monthly compensation. If they were offered another job that is not journalism, 35.4% of respondents answered that they would accept it gladly, while 20.8% of respondents said that they would accept this offer any for economic reasons. Labor and legal status in which the largest number of women journalists are is an employment for an unlimited period of time,while a slightly lower number of respondents is employed for a certain period of time. The percent of unemployed is 18.8%. The research did not show a significant statistical link between the labor and legal status and the level of security of the respondents, due to the fact that 26.66% of the respondents who are employed for an indefinite period, and have the most stable type of employment status, feel “unsecure”. Apart from economic vulnerability, dissatisfaction with the financial situation, feelings of insecurity and uncertainty, readiness to change the profession, the position of journalists in the south of Serbia is further degraded by dominant gender policies. Research shows that 37.5% of respondents were exposed to sexist attacks by interlocutors during their work. In addition to the high percentage of women journalists who have suffered sexism, 14.6% of reporters are not sure whether they have ever been exposed to sexist attacks by interlocutors. In the case of perception of gender-based violence against other journalists, there is also a high percentage of journalists (20.8%) who express uncertainty. In addition, two-thirds of the women reporters (66.7%) explicitly claim to be aware of at least one case of this kind of violence. Findings also show that although 75% of journalists from the south of Serbia think that journalists can influence the change of the position of women in the society, an equal number of them think that they do not influence the deconstruction of the gender stereotypes sufficiently. As a method for collecting data, authors used survey, while quantitative and qualitative analysis is used as an operational method.
