 Hi, let's talk about meeting communication once again. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the story of India's social health activist workers that demanded fair wages, better conditions went a bit unnoticed. And we focus our conversation today on this, the poor health infrastructure in India and the challenges that are faced by frontline workers, especially women, who play a very important role in community level health care. And we have the pleasure of welcoming Usha Rahman. She's from the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad in India. And she let us know more about how the care work performed by these workers was portrayed in mainstream media. Okay, so today we explore how media coverage overlooked their contributions and we stress the need to recognize and value women's caregiving work at all levels. Usha, welcome to our episode. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So right in the beginning of your article, you're right. We argue that care work, whether paid or unpaid is positioned through media discourse as a natural and routine part of women's work, thus reinforcing a normalized construction of such work as gendered and simultaneously of high social yet low economic worth. Can you elaborate on on this and about the importance of the study that you conducted. Thank you for the question. So basically it's not just at this point in time that women's work has been problematic in terms of how it's been valued economically in all discourses whether you're looking at health or family. You know, family economics, we find that care work has been. It's been valued notionally in the sense that you know women are praised for being amazing mothers, amazing caregivers, but there's been very little done to a key place and economic value on that work. And when it comes to health care, you find that that becomes then a triple burden in a sense on a woman right so as a working woman feminist have for long talked about the double burden that is a woman bears the burden of care at home and of work outside the home. But when it comes to women health workers, there's the additional burden of care, which is an invisible part of the work that she delivers in terms of providing health to communities and so so that's really the core of our argument that the care work that these volunteer workers do so called volunteer workers do goes economically unnoticed. Of course, I want to explore a little bit more this can you. So what were you hoping to find specifically let us know more about the research gap. Can you elaborate on that. Yes, so, you know, if you look at the paper you'll find that we draw on two broad frameworks. One is the feminist economy of health feminist political economy, and the everyday political economy of health and what we felt or what we were seeing through the pandemic was there was a lot of celebration of the fact that frontline workers were doing so much, you know, amazing work that they were taking risks that they were going into communities and providing care. And so the expectation was that the media would use this opportunity to perhaps look a little more deeply at what exactly was going on in terms of women's work in health. And the pandemic in many ways did open up our minds to different ways of thinking about health. We thought this would have been an opportunity for the media also to reframe the way women health care workers were doing their jobs and how we needed to value their work so the research gap in a sense it was more of a knowledge and a perception gap, I think that we were hoping that media coverage would actually bridge. And so we went in wanting to see what exactly how the media had covered these issues. So the perception gap it's interesting let us know more about the findings now let's jump into them. Okay, so the way we did the study was it was a classic media framing study in the sense that we looked at two major newspapers in the country and we wanted to see how they had covered women workers particularly during the pandemic. And so we did a textual analysis in the sense we first did a search using keywords that would yield or would allow us to harvest articles that talked about women workers that talked about women workers in relation to the pandemic. And we came up with a corpus of, you know, around 200 articles. And, and then we read these more closely to see how they had framed women in work. You know what kind of language was used to talk about the value of their work if in fact, the value of their work was talked about what sort of terms were used to describe the women and their work. And that's how we went about it. So what we might call a classic framing analysis of media. And what we found was a little disappointing but perhaps not surprising. We found that, you know, there was a lot of mention of these women workers in India we call them Asha workers that is accredited social health, accredited social health activists and they're actually not that supposed to be volunteers but they're paid a very small stipendant some states, and in other states they are paid an incentive based wage based on the number of homes they visit the number of deliveries they assist in, you know, vaccinations, those kinds of things. So they're really very low paid at all times. And what we found through our analysis was that there were two broad narratives that emerged in relation to how these women were covered in the media. And the first narrative was was again, it was a complex narrative but it was one where women emerged as victims of the system. And this was sort of a double edge narrative right so what was what was happening during the pandemic and again this is not just in India but I think globally was found that during the pandemic women became particularly vulnerable, not just because they had less access to healthcare, but also because they ended up, you know, becoming much more vulnerable to home based violence, domestic violence, etc. So, so while that technically doesn't fall under the purview of our study as about healthcare workers, what ended up happening was very often where we talked to where the stories talked about women. The victimhood was spread across categories of women. So there were three categories of victimhood that emerged one was, you know, physical health related vulnerabilities that women were most susceptible to. And then the second was domestic violence and the third was economic distress now. How does Asia work or how do the healthcare workers fit into the scheme. Very often the healthcare workers were also seen as victims of the system without necessarily providing an answer to how this victimhood should be should be addressed. The second narrative that emerged and perhaps this was the more dominant narrative was women is centrist heroes. And again, this, this echoes the findings of, you know, how women are portrayed, particularly women in care, giving roles are portrayed in other situations in that it shows caregiving as a natural part of women's work. And not acknowledging that during the pandemic actually. Asha workers were not only reaching out to communities about, you know, precautions to take, save social distancing norms, those kinds of things, but they were also providing psychological and emotional care to families, you know, particularly in vulnerable communities. But this was often marked as something that, you know, was, was to be celebrated, but not necessarily compensated. So those were the two broad things that we found. And very relevant now I think, from all you found is to explore the potential or existent already potential policy impacts. What are they. Well, during the coverage of the pandemic, you know, we, we searched for articles not just news stories but also editorial pieces. And interestingly, there were just a handful I mean just about three or four editorial pieces that use this opportunity use the focus on the context of healthcare to talk a little more about systemic issues, including issues of gender within the healthcare space. And so there were, you know, there were some people, particularly senior women scientists with the WHO, and in senior health administration in India, who did in passing talk about the need to look at particularly Asha workers more carefully and to recognize the care burden that was falling on them during such pandemics or during health emergencies. But two or three articles in the space of a year is certainly not enough to impact policy. So the hope is that by making visible the fact that these were issues that were not covered that perhaps we can nudge people in health administration, people in health systems reform to think more carefully about what it means for women at really there at the bottom of the caregiving ladder in terms of the health service delivery chain. And what it means for them to provide such care with that longer compensation. So, I think what we've done is just the beginning in terms of bringing awareness to the issue, and we're hoping that those who have more of a role in policy will pay attention to the course. I'm curious to know more and I think you started to touch upon that a bit. I'm curious to know more about future research venues. So where do we go from here. So, you know, of course, what we've done is just look at the media and look at a very narrow slice of the media. Where we can go from here is to do a little more ethnographic work to talk to our shell workers, talk to communities to see how they proceed and possibly also work with health economists to try and find if one can actually make the value of caregiving. And that's a long road, of course, and you know I think feminist economists have talked about it in other contexts as well, that, you know, we really need to place an economic value on emotional and psychological and provide not just in roles that are defined as caregiving such as the actual workers but also in other roles where there is a significant emotional or psychological care component. So I think working with health economists doing a little more ethnographic work, perhaps looking at other media forums, right, community media is to see in those are spaces where one can possibly change the way you know the perception gap can be closed. So these might be other ways in which the work can be taken forward. So what we've done is really sort of a broad defined the landscape and now we need to go in and pay more attention to the details of that landscape. Promising venues for the future. Usha, can you share some relevant resources that helps us and the listeners understand and engage with this topic further. Yeah, so we referred actually to a lot of the literature in the paper and I know I would suggest that listeners can go back to our reference list and look at some of those pieces. Specifically, I think work done during previous pandemics for not pandemics but previous health emergencies such as Zika and Ebola. And that's where some of the, you know, seminal work has come out of so Sandra Harman's work. And, you know, the work that WHO has been putting out on gender gaps in health and healthcare delivery. I think those are good resources but also to look at some of the work on feminist economy, feminist political economy that the ILO has been doing, which recognizes the burden of care as something that we need to seriously consider and figure out how we as a society really value both economically as well as in social terms. Well, that's good. And for our listeners that are watching this episode on the let's talk about meeting communication websites below the video you can find the recommended materials that Usha just suggested to further explore the topic. And now Usha, to close this episode, the end of your article that has a very important message to long to say here but basically reads that we need to value healthcare and remove its gendered associations and then incorporate these perspectives into journalism training to to foster a deeper understanding of social issues. So is this the main message of your article, or is there something more you want to add? I would say that, you know, since both Sumana and I, Sumana Kasturi is my co-author, Sumana and I come from a media studies background. We hope that the work we do will go back to inform the practice of media. And, and I think a lot of our attention was on how the media covered this. So, if we want to start to address that perception gap, it is it has to start with the media so definitely I think you know training journalists on on understanding the nuances of healthcare on appreciating the gendered aspects and how they need to think about them could probably help. Thank you Usha. Thank you. If you are watching us on YouTube, you can find all the resources and the materials of this conversation on the let's talk about media and communication websites, and you can also listen to this episode, wherever you get your podcast.