Women participate in a strategic session in Kyiv as part of Women Leaders in MEdia: Building a Sustainable Community of Media Leaders through Ukraine – Nordic Exchange programme (Photo: Valya Polischuk).
Women media leaders in Ukraine advance DEI amid war
As Russia’s full-scale war continues to reshape Ukraine’s media sector, women newsroom leaders are carrying growing responsibilities: managing teams under pressure, responding to safety and burnout risks, and keeping inclusion and gender equality on the agenda despite shrinking resources.
Against this backdrop, the NGO Women in Media, with support from IMS, brought together women leaders from Ukrainian media for a strategic session in Kyiv on how diversity, equity and inclusion can become practical tools for strengthening newsroom resilience in wartime.
The event formed part of the Women Leaders in Media: Building a Sustainable Community of Media Leaders through Ukraine – Nordic Exchange programme, implemented by Women in Media with support from IMS. The initiative strengthens women’s leadership, peer exchange and inclusive newsroom practices at a time when Ukrainian media are facing severe financial, security and staffing pressures.
In this context, participants discussed how the DEI index can be translated from principles into practical newsroom management decisions.
What the DEI index covers
Diversity means the presence of people of different ages, genders, ethnic backgrounds, disabilities and life experiences in a team. Equity means creating fair working conditions, pay and equal opportunities for career growth without discrimination. Inclusion means an environment in which every employee feels valued, heard and involved in the life of the team.
“Ukrainian media are working today in unprecedented conditions of war. That is why leadership cannot be discussed separately from safety, professional burnout, gender equality and newsroom resilience. These are precisely the issues we want to help participants address in a systematic way. One of the greatest values of this programme, Women Leaders in Media: Building a Sustainable Community of Media Leaders through Ukraine – Nordic Exchange, is community. When women newsroom leaders speak openly about their challenges, share solutions and support one another, it benefits not only individual media outlets, but the entire media sector,” said Liza Kuzmenko, Head of the Board of Women in Media.
According to Kuzmenko, Ukrainian media have already taken important steps to embed the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. These include more balanced representation of women and men among experts and speakers, broader inclusion of voices from national communities and improved accessibility of content, including through the use of sign language. Some newsrooms are also introducing more inclusive approaches to audience engagement, including digital communication for people with visual impairments.
At the same time, one of the most acute challenges today is the unprecedented workload carried by women working in the media. With many men mobilised, women have often taken on additional professional responsibilities without being relieved of their existing workload. This contributes to emotional burnout, chronic fatigue, difficulties balancing work and family responsibilities and, in many cases, a sense of guilt over not having enough time for loved ones.
For this reason, one of the key priorities for women media leaders this year is to identify practical solutions that can make working conditions for women in the media more sustainable, safe and humane.
Participants in the strategic session said that, by 2026, Russia’s full-scale war had further deepened economic and staffing problems in the media sector. Independent newsrooms lack sufficient state support mechanisms that could provide a basic level of economic security. Most media outlets do not have the financial capacity to establish reserve funds, meaning that when an employee’s home is destroyed by a missile or drone, when critical health problems arise or when family members are killed, editorial teams often have limited means to support their colleagues. While many media are introducing psychological support programmes and applying a people-centred approach, the objective challenges are numerous and the resources needed to absorb them remain critically insufficient.
As of summer 2026, women also remain underrepresented in leadership positions and continue to face systemic online violence, gender-based disrespect and stereotypes about women’s work in intellectual and public-facing professions. There are also practical safety challenges at the technical level. Among the needs identified during the war is protective equipment adapted to women’s bodies, including body armour for women correspondents working in frontline areas. Many continue to use bulletproof vests designed for men, making work in areas of high military activity not only unsafe, but also physically exhausting.
During the strategic session in Kyiv, participants identified priorities for a new chapter of the gender equality strategy, developed a shared vision for how the DEI index can become a practical tool for newsrooms operating in wartime and reaffirmed the importance of horizontal support among women.
Marharyta Buhaichuk, Editor-in-Chief of The Ukrainian Week, said that after taking part in the first phase of the programme, the newsroom strengthened its work on inclusion and societal resilience, expanded its pool of authors and launched a feminist column. “In addition, we adopted a gender equality policy, were included in a collection of best gender practices among Ukrainian media and are now working on a policy for the ethical use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom,” she said.
According to Aliona Yatsyna, CEO of Kordon.Media in the Sumy region, the newsroom’s biggest challenges remain the physical safety of journalists, their psychological wellbeing and the risk of professional burnout. “One of the solutions that emerged through our cooperation was the introduction of individual professional development plans in the newsroom. Every person who joins the team understands how they can develop further,” she said.
“After taking part in the programme ‘Women Leaders in Media: Building a Sustainable Community of Media Leaders through Ukraine – Nordic Exchange’, I also realised how valuable women’s support and a professional community are. That is why today I try to build this culture of mutual support inside our newsroom as well,” said Anastasiia Ravva, General Producer at Espreso TV.
Participants agreed that sustainable change is only possible when work happens at several levels: personally, through horizontal support networks, visible examples of women’s leadership and the dismantling of stereotypes; at the newsroom level, through gender equality policies, flexible schedules, safe working conditions and partnerships with organisations that share feminist values; at the industry level, through a national mentoring network, inclusive business education standards and systematic donor support programmes; and at the state level, through support programmes for journalist mothers, legal mechanisms to counter online violence, platform regulation and tax incentives for newsrooms.
Roman Kifliuk, IMS National Adviser in Ukraine, said that before the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian media had been actively introducing diversity, equity and inclusion standards: conducting gender monitoring, adopting editorial sensitivity policies, developing ethical guidelines against hate speech and integrating the voices of internally displaced people and veterans. Large media groups were among the first in Ukraine to sign the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles, while Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne introduced regular sign-language interpretation of news.
In the global context, data from the Global Media Monitoring Project 2020 and the Global Gender Gap Report showed that before the full-scale invasion Ukraine was ahead of most post-Soviet countries and comparable with some European states in terms of gender balance in news.
About Women in Media
Women in Media is a Ukrainian civil society organisation founded in 2019 to unite Ukrainian women journalists in a community based on mutual support, feminism and professional development, and to promote gender-sensitive newsrooms and media free from stereotypes and discrimination.
Together with Ukraine’s media regulator, the organisation conducts annual gender monitoring of the media, which shows that women make up the majority of the profession but remain significantly underrepresented in leadership roles. Through its map of online attacks, Women in Media documents the systematic use of sexist practices and high levels of online violence against women journalists. The organisation develops recommendations for newsrooms, the media industry and the state – from gender policies and mentoring programmes to support for journalist mothers – and cooperates with international partners including UNESCO and IMS.
In 2024, Women in Media was shortlisted for the international IPI-IMS Free Media Pioneer Award, which recognises organisations that defend press freedom and introduce innovation in the media sector.
Other materials on Ukrainian journalism
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Thirty-five years of Ukrainian journalism: facts, paradigms, stories
MERIT Forum participants explore how Ukraine’s media landscape might change after EU accession
We invite you to learn more about journalism in Ukraine in the news article on the emotional state of media professionals, as well as in the news piece on investigative journalism.
