Pages: (1-14 )
Abstract
Women agitation for gender equality in all disciplines and professions, including journalism, has been in the front burner of international discourse since the 1990s,especially after the Beijing Conference in 1995. One of the important submissions of the Beijing Conference was that females should be encouraged to study Mass Communication so that they can inject gender sensitivity into the practice of journalism. The study was carried out to find out the encouragement female students of Mass Communication received before enrolling for Mass Communication as a course of study as well as to investigate the willingness of female students of Mass Communication to practice journalism upon graduation. The study was limited to 400 level female students of Mass Communication, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago – Iwoye, Ogun State, Nigeria. Survey research design was used to carry out the study while Taro Yamane was used to determine the sample size. And it yielded 65 as the sample size. Simple random sampling was used to select the respondents for the study. The study revealed that most of the students enrolled for Mass Communication without any form of encouragement from any organisation. The study recommended that female students should be encouraged not only to study Mass Communication, but to practice journalism.
Keywords: Gender Equality, Journalism, Journalism Practice, Nigerian Women, Quest,