The number of women journalists is increasing in urban centres, in English-language

newspapers, and in news channels but puncturing prevalent biases and practices will
take more time
In the '80s, when Nafisa Hoodbhoy would arrive at crime scenes in Karachi, notepad
in hand and questions at the ready, it created quite a stir. One day, she recalls,
a crime reporter from an Urdu newspaper, who saw her at every incident, finally
cried out in exasperation, "Doesn't Dawn have any male reporters left?"

Those were the days of 'lady reporters' who were restricted to certain beats, when
it was considered almost unseemly for women journalists to get down in the trenches
to work alongside their male counterparts. However, there were some outliers among
them, both at the editorial desk and out in the field, who challenged those
stereotypes and tore up the 'journalism etiquette for women's rulebook with gusto.

There was Razia Bhatti, who as editor of Herald, revamped what was then a society
tabloid into a news magazine; Nargis Khanum who became the news editor of TheStar;
intrepid reporters and feature writers such as Najma Babar, Lalarukh Hussain, Zohra
Yusuf, Sherry Rehman and many others that blazed a trail for future generations to
follow. Some women journalists went on to make the top tier at various media
organisations, among them Maleeha Lodhi, who became the first woman editor of a
national daily, The Muslim.

For many decades, until the early 2000s in fact, the journalism landscape in
Pakistan was largely limited to print. But it was a journalism whetted on the
grindstone of the tumultuous politics of the decades past, particularly the
resistance against Zia's dictatorship, and journalists -- including many women --
were at the forefront of the pro-democracy movement.

Today, the media includes around 30 television news channels and 170 FM radio
channels, besides more than 250 news publications. Even though in terms of numbers
women journalists are still nowhere near their male colleagues, they can be found
in both print and electronic media - covering rallies, terrorist attacks, natural
disasters -- and at all levels of the profession.

Nevertheless, the women journalists who came earlier were navigating truly
uncharted waters. "For me, the challenge was to get out and discover everything for
myself. That meant departing from the beats assigned to me, namely women, health
and social welfare," says Ms Hoodbhoy of her time as a reporter in the '80s. "My
editor gave me the coveted political beat after I dug into the health beat, and
reported on gunshot victims piling up in hospitals because of ethnic warfare. I was
still in my 20s while my colleagues were middle-aged men, who had neither the
energy nor the desire to race around like me."

A gentleman's code of conduct operated in the nearly all-male print newsrooms of

old -- even though it could be infuriatingly patronising at times. Zubeida Mustafa,
who became assistant editor at Dawn soon after she joined in 1975, remembers being
told that she was a "test case"; she realised there had been considerable
resistance to her hiring.

"No one even bothered to introduce me to my colleagues, and the men of that
generation were so correct that it was difficult to communicate with them. I was
the only woman there and for weeks I didn't even know where the ladies' toilet
was," she says with a laugh.

Moreover, although she was soon writing up to five editorials a week -- she was the
only woman editorial writer in Pakistan at the time -- the editorial staff would
take days to print opinion pieces with her byline. In fact it was rare in those
days for any paper to carry an op-ed by any woman writer. Much later, when she was
in charge of the op-ed section, Mustafa tried to redress the gender imbalance,
sometimes rather too well. "At times I'd have to pull an article at the last minute
because I'd realise that all the opinion pieces that day were by women!"

While senior managements in English journalism were comparatively -- albeit

reluctantly -- more open to the idea of having women in the newsroom, Urdu
journalism was a far more hidebound and conservative milieu. However, at Aman, the
pro-democracy, anti-Zia Urdu daily that drew many progressive political activists
into its fold in the early '80s, distinctions of gender were subsumed in the
fervour of resistance politics.

In those heady days, Mahnaz Rahman, the sole woman journalist there, saw herself as
part of history in the making. "Men and women, we were all the same. As far as we
were concerned, we were bringing about a revolution; we worked like crazy but it
didn't feel like work." Rahman, who is now resident director at Aurat, the women's
rights NGO, was also elected president of the Aman employees' union. Although, it
is pertinent to note, there was no ladies toilet on the premises.

She came up against the old prejudices while interviewing for a job at a large,
established Urdu daily. "I told them I absolutely did not want to work on their
ladies' page. They were quite amused, probably thought I was mad, and I didn't hear
back from them," she recalls.