The Female Factor: In Philippine Newsrooms, the Women Rule

The watershed came in the last few years of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled for nearly two decades and was toppled in a popular revolt in 1986. When Mr. Marcos imposed martial law in 1972, many of the mostly male editors and reporters who were critical of him were imprisoned or went underground to join the resistance. The men who remained in the newsrooms were often co-opted by the government or operated clandestinely to put out opposition publications.

Into the breach came the women, who up to then had been largely sidelined in feature supplements or less consequential jobs. For the first time, they took over key positions in news organizations. In several instances, they directly challenged the government with reports and commentaries that contributed to the groundswell of opposition against Mr. Marcos.

Today, these women and the ones they hired and promoted dominate the country’s largest broadcast networks, its most influential newspapers and magazines, and investigative journalism nonprofit organizations.

“You cannot explain the rise of the women journalists without talking about martial law,” said Inday Espina-Varona, a journalist since the Marcos era who now runs the citizen-journalism program of ABS-CBN, the country’s largest broadcast network. “When the men were struggling back into journalism, the women were already there.”

The Marcos dictatorship had a “radicalizing effect” on many women in the Philippines, especially journalists, Belinda A. Aquino, a historian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, wrote in the 1994 book “Women and Politics Worldwide.”

Lourdes Molina-Fernandez, managing editor of the Web site Interaksyon and the former editor in chief of Business Mirror, a Manila paper, said: “That period a few years right before Marcos fell — that was the time when women gained ascendancy in the newsroom because of the sheer preponderance of women writing very critical articles against the dictatorship.” She herself was fresh out of college at the height of the dictatorship and worked for anti-Marcos and leftist publications.

To be sure, women in the Philippines had advanced faster than their counterparts elsewhere in Southeast Asia, one reason perhaps that the U.N. Global Gender Gap Report last year called the Philippines a model for the region. Women were represented in the Senate before World War II, for instance, and many schools were run by women.

But somehow this was not reflected in newsrooms during these periods, said Luis V. Teodoro, a professor at the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. While there had certainly been some female journalists, the Filipino newsroom was dominated by men well into the Marcos years, he said.

The women who have since taken over advanced under the most arduous circumstances, when censorship was widespread and journalists were routinely arrested and tortured, a trial by fire that may have contributed to the assertiveness of the women-led news organizations to this day.

“It took a woman to test the limits of press censorship under Marcos,” said Ms. Aquino, the historian (and no relation to President Benigno S. Aquino III).

That woman was Maria Ceres Doyo, a human rights advocate who in 1980 wrote an article about a tribal chieftain, Macli-ing Dulag, who led his people in resisting a dam project and was killed by the military.

“Nobody was writing about it, so I wrote it, took my own pictures and sent it to the editor of Panorama, whom I did not know,” Ms. Doyo said. In hindsight, she said, “Maybe I was half stupid or half brave.”

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The Female Factor: Subtle Shift at the Gypsy Bride Market

Meet the tinkers of Thrace, semi-nomadic Roma who in the early 21st century are among the few in Europe hewing to ancient ways. A woman may govern Germany and men in Sweden may care for infants. But in this corner of southeastern Europe, that thinking is quite foreign, with — so far — limited impact.

Technically, the young women at this traditional St. Todor’s Day “market” were not for sale. But it is at this fair, held each year on the first Saturday of Orthodox Christian Lent, that the Kalaidzhi (as the estimated 18,000 Thracian tinkers are known) conduct the complex negotiations on a bride price that traditionally lead to marriage.

The identity of this semi-nomadic Roma group is based on the ancient craft of its menfolk: producing and repairing pots, pans and caldrons. For centuries, these smiths have scattered in ones or twos in Bulgarian villages to practice this craft, and they get together rarely for events like the St. Todor’s fair.

This is therefore one of the few opportunities for teenagers to meet other Kalaidzhi — and potential spouses. Dating is not really an option when teenage boys and girls are forbidden to meet without an adult. Marriage outside the group is equally taboo.

Leaning against his car, surveying the scene, Hristos Georgiev, 18, was pleased to be wrapping up negotiations with the father of Donka Dimitrova, an 18-year-old he expected to marry weeks later. Bargaining had narrowed to between 10,000 and 15,000 levs, or $7,500 to $11,300, well more than a year’s worth of the average Bulgarian’s wages of 8,400 levs. He said he saved the money working construction in Cyprus.

According to Velcho Krustev, an ethnographer with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, “the man is not buying a wife, but her virginity.” The payment ensures the bride will be treated well by her new family, he said.

Good looks nevertheless command a price. “If she’s really beautiful, the price can go up” to 20,000 or 25,000 levs, Mr. Georgiev said, within easy earshot of his prospective bride. (Others said a great beauty might fetch 40,000 levs.)

“I don’t approve,” said Ms. Dimitrova, who unlike less educated Bulgarian Roma girls recently completed a landscaping course. “You shouldn’t look at the money,” she said, “but at the person, his way of speaking, thinking, feeling and all the rest.”

Her cousin Todorka was blunt. The money, she said, “is no guarantee that the marriage will last forever. They can still find another better one 10 days later.”

Kalaidzhi families usually marry off daughters between the ages of 16 and 20 and take them out of school by eighth grade, allegedly to prevent their being “stolen” by suitors. (How often true bride theft occurs is not clear. Young people said it is often a face-saving family story when a daughter elopes.)

Kalaidzhi women have long woven their daughters’ dowries, and stoked the fires for their husbands’ craft. They are wives, mothers and assistant tinsmiths.

Education has not been a priority: the Open Society found in 2004 that one in five Bulgarian Roma women are illiterate — almost double the share among men. Only 10 percent of Bulgarian Roma women have secondary education, according to the World Bank, compared with 16 percent for the men.

However, support for marriage traditions is waning. A 2007 study by Amalipe, a nongovernmental organization in Bulgaria, found that 52 percent of Roma opposed parents' choosing the spouse of their children, with 35 percent in favor. Only 18 percent of Roma supported the bride price; 69 percent rejected it.

Kalaidzhi are among the most tradition-bound of Roma. But even they are changing — to the distaste of elders like Ivan Kolev, 73.