3.10 How do media workers in Zambian media workplaces respond to gender discrimination? The first step to dealing with gender discrimination is ensuring that places of employment develop gender awareness policies. Gender relations in the workplace require active and ongoing management. It is therefore important to fully comprehend the broader implications of what constitutes gender equality and conduct employment systems review of policies, procedures and practices. The effectiveness of gender awareness policies will determine an organisations success in dealing with discrimination in the workplace. We felt it was crucial to ascertain the response of media workers to gender discrimination mainly for two reasons. Firstly, the way media workers respond to gender discrimination is indicative of the type of environment that exists in their respective media workplaces when it comes to dealing with gender discrimination. Secondly, any information gleaned from the responses would have a bearing on mapping what needs to be done. Therefore, the response given to gender discrimination within the workplace, be it by those in positions of authority or by the victims of the practice, is of crucial importance to both the prevention and the fight against the practice. Asked what they would do if a colleague was discriminated, an overwhelming number of media workers indicated that they would take some form of action as evidenced by Figure 10 below. Figure 10: What would media workers in Zambian media workplaces do when a colleague experiences gender discrimination A large majority of the survey respondents; 47 percent were willing to report gender discrimination to the relevant authorities should they be aware that it is happening. This suggests that there is awareness that the practice was wrong and that it needed to disappear from the workplace. This is certainly so because 85 percent of the media workers indicated that gender discrimination is a problem in the country’s media workplaces 2 . 8 On the other hand, when we asked whether media workers who had been subjected to gender discrimination had lodged any complaint, we found the results below. 21