by Lilac Ali
Journalistic headlines often foreground class, disability or identity, framing success as improbable, thereby reinforcing bias and undermining achievement by positioning individuals as exceptions rather than equals
When a person from a marginalised context achieves something, the media instinctively reach for the identity marker that makes the achievement seem unlikely and lead with that instead of the achievement itself.
“Tailor’s Daughter Is Nowshehra’s First Female Judge.”
Her name does not appear anywhere in that headline. Her father’s occupation does.
Ask yourself, would that headline exist if her father were a banker?
The class angle is not entirely out of place. Being a tailor’s daughter in a profession where working-class families are severely under-represented has its own structural challenges. But the headline does not report that. It implies it, using her father’s job title as shorthand for a class narrative it never bothers to verify. It invites the reader to fill in the blanks: financial struggle, limited resources, and odds stacked against her, without checking whether any of that is actually true.
Maybe her family was financially comfortable despite her father being a tailor. Maybe he ran a successful business. Maybe she had every resource she needed. The headline does not know. It assumes, and asks you to assume alongside it, merely based on a job title.
The “Despite” Problem
The Central Board of Secondary Education Class 10 results were announced on April 15. What followed was a flood: social media and news outlets were overflowing with success stories, topper interviews, and “result reaction” videos. Among these was the story of Zainab Bilal, a student from DPS Srinagar who scored 95 per cent in her board exams. She also happened to be visually impaired and had written the exam independently on a laptop, without a scribe.
That feat is remarkable. Ninety-five per cent is high by any standard, and she achieved it on a laptop, navigating a system that was not devised for her. That is the story, not because she is visually impaired.
The news got it the other way around.
“Visually impaired girl scripts an inspiring success story, scoring 95% in the CBSE Class X exams despite disability.”
Let us dissect that headline.
Her disability is clearly the reason this is a news story; thousands of students score 95 per cent and do not get headlines. Therefore, naming her visual impairment is honest and necessary. But the headline does not just name it. It foregrounds it. It makes her condition the first thing you know about her. She is not a student who scored 95 per cent. She is a visually impaired student, and the 95 per cent is the surprise that follows.
The word doing that work is “despite”.
It is a small word with a particular function. “Despite” suggests that two things conflict. Riya plays good cricket despite being a girl. Read that, and you understand that the writer thinks being a girl is a barrier to playing good cricket. It may not be explicit, but it does not have to be. “Despite” says it for you.
“Scoring 95 per cent despite visual impairment” works the same way. It tells you that blindness and academic excellence are not expected to coexist, that her score is remarkable not on its own terms but in relation to what her eyes can and cannot do.
Then there is the word “inspiring”. The headline calls it an inspiring success story. Here, the problem becomes more nuanced because calling something inspiring is not inherently wrong. It is entirely valid to find Zainab Bilal inspiring for navigating a system not built for her, for choosing to write independently, and for developing her own methods in a world of textbooks and exam formats that cater to sighted students. That admiration is earned and true.
The problem is more specific than the word. It is about what, exactly, is being found inspiring. Is it her choices, her method, her preparation, or her decision to write without a scribe? Or is it the fact of her blindness itself, against which her score becomes legible as remarkable?
Stella Young, an Australian comedian, disability activist and writer, addressed this in her 2014 TED Talk, now one of the most cited pieces on disability representation.
“We have been lied to about disability. We have been sold the lie that disability is a bad thing, capital B, capital T. It’s a Bad Thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It’s not a bad thing, and it does not make you exceptional.”
Young’s argument was not that disabled people do not face difficulty. It was about where the difficulty actually exists.
“I use the term ‘disabled people’ quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what is called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.”
Zainab Bilal has lived in her body her whole life. She did not experience that exam as a sighted person suddenly functioning without vision. She experienced it as herself, a person whose entire relationship with information and learning has been built around her actual sensory reality. Her eyes are not the obstacle she overcame. The obstacle was a system of textbooks not easily accessible and an exam format that required her to request accommodation.
When people call her inspiring, they are, often without knowing it, projecting their own imagined fear of blindness onto her actual life.
Under Instagram reels covering her story, comments appeared that affirmed Young’s argument perfectly: “She has proved there is no disability when one is hard working.” “The only disability is a bad attitude.”
Young had an answer for that, too: “No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Smiling at a television screen is not going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille.”
The systemic barriers are real. Acknowledging them is not condescending but accurate. The question is not whether to acknowledge them, but whether you locate them in her body or in the system that was not built for her. The headline located them in her body. That is the problem.
Her Father’s Daughter
Iqra Farooq ranked second in the JKAS 2023 examinations. You may not remember her rank. You may not remember her qualifications. But you will almost certainly remember that her father is a tailor.
News media outlets and social media pages left no stone unturned to embed that detail in your mind. Scan the coverage, and you will barely find three or four out of over a dozen headlines that do not use the phrase “tailor’s daughter” while reporting her achievement. The rank, second, in one of the most competitive examinations in Jammu and Kashmir, is almost subordinate. Her father’s occupation is not.
The headlines were glaring. They seemed to suggest that a tailor’s daughter cracking JKAS was more about her father’s profession than her own rank, as if her clearing the examination were a miracle. As if being a tailor were an inferior profession, and its perceived inferiority made her success worth reporting? The media’s effort to establish this connection was so persistent, so uniform across outlets, that it has now been absorbed into the public record. Look up “Iqra Farooq KAS” today, and Google’s AI overview will tell you her father is a tailor, an algorithmic summary of her existence that leads with his job.
Similarly, in 2024, when Bhawana Kesar from the border region of Nowshehra became the first female judge of the district, her father also happened to be a tailor. The media showed the same consistency it had shown with Iqra. Her name in the AI overview is followed by her father’s occupation. The milestone, the first woman to hold judicial office in her district, is present, but it shares the headline with a tailoring business she did not run. By reducing her to her father’s occupation, her complexity, her humanity, and her reality as a person take a back seat.
The pattern is now visible across two women, two achievements, and two different years. But it becomes most intelligible when you introduce a third name.
Tasneem Kabir secured rank four in the same JKAS 2023 examination as Iqra Farooq. Her achievement was reported too. But search her name, and the AI overview will not tell you her father’s profession. It will not tell you where he comes from or what that is assumed to say about the distance she travelled to that rank.
Because her father is a civil servant.
That single fact, unreported, unremarkable, and never considered a worthy headline, is the most telling detail in this entire discourse about journalism and the stories it chooses to tell. Tasneem Kabir’s background apparently was unworthy of mention. She received the neutral headline, which simply states what happened, because her father’s profession sits on the “right” side of the assumption about whose children belong at the top.
Iqra’s father is a tailor, so the rank became secondary to the occupation. Tasneem’s father is a civil servant, so the rank was simply the rank.
Same examination. Same year. Neighbouring ranks. One woman’s father is embedded in memory. The other is invisible, as it should be in both cases, as it should always be. Because a father’s profession is not the story. The rank is the story. The achievement is the story. The person is the story.
The Template
“Lineman’s Daughter Cracks UPSC.”
“Shepherd Community Boy Cracks Civil Service Exams.”
“Hardware Shop Owner’s Son Gets 100th Percentile.”
“Visually Impaired Girl Scores 95% in CBSE Despite Disability.”
Different people. Different achievements. Different years. Same structure.
In each of these headlines, the person is reduced to their context before they are anything else: disability, class, caste, gender, and region. The person turns into a symbol.
The consequences are precise. It reduces someone to a single defining characteristic. It implies the achievement is surprising given who they are. It centres the non-privileged background as the dramatic driving force rather than the person’s intelligence and hard work. And it inadvertently reinforces the very hierarchies it claims to celebrate the breaking of. When you write “hardware shop owner’s son gets 100th percentile”, you are, without intending to, suggesting that hardware shop owners’ sons do not usually get that. Hence, it becomes sensational and surprising. It reaffirms the reader’s prejudice about whose children belong at the top.
Journalist Christie Aschwanden developed the Finkbeiner Test for writing about women in science, a checklist of identity-based framings that would never appear in a story about a man doing the same work. The principle translates clearly here: if a detail would not appear in a story about someone from a dominant background achieving the same thing, its presence needs justification. None of these headlines passes this test.
There is also a larger political consequence that media critics warn of. Stories that foreground the single underprivileged student who made it are inadvertently doing ideological work, supporting a narrative that merit alone determines outcomes, that intervention is unnecessary, because look, the rickshaw puller’s son cracked IIT. This undermines the ninety-nine per cent who did not; students who are equally intelligent but did not have access to coaching or schooling, and had no time to study because they were working. Mainstream media covers the poor when they achieve something phenomenal. It does not cover them on the average Tuesday, when the school has no table, no textbook, and no teacher.
The argument is not that class, disability, or gender is irrelevant, because it is not. A person’s journey is shaped by where they came from, and that is legitimate journalistic territory. But the headline is in the wrong place for it. “Tailor’s daughter” belongs in paragraph three, in her own words, on her own terms. It does not belong in the headline, doing the work of explaining why her achievement requires explanation.
Good Intentions, Bad Headlines
It would be remiss to view these editorial choices as purely cynical. Most journalists are not operating from a place of bias, but are instead reaching for a template that is tested and effective. In any newsroom, the “human angle” is a fundamental pillar of storytelling, intended to bridge the gap between a dry statistic and lived reality. There is a genuine instinct to highlight how individuals navigate systemic inequality, to show that the distance travelled matters as much as the destination. Moreover, journalists are responding to the brutal honesty of the data: these headlines work. They attract the clicks and shares that keep digital platforms alive.
Yet this raises an uncomfortable question about why we, as readers, reward this kind of template. If we are moved by the “tailor’s daughter” but scroll past the “civil servant’s daughter”, we must ask what we are actually seeking in these stories. Does our attraction to these headlines stem from genuine empathy, or are we simply using another person’s challenges as a backdrop for our own emotional projection? The problem is not the existence of the story; the struggle is real and often worth reporting, but the fact that the headline is the wrong container for it. When we click, we confirm the editor’s suspicion: that for a certain class of people, the rank is never enough on its own.
The Rewrite
A person is not a barrier, they are presumed to have overcome.
That should be the guiding principle.
People arrive in the world with stories, abilities, contradictions, ambitions, and plans. They cannot be reduced to a father’s occupation, a diagnosis, or whatever condition an editor decides makes their achievement appear improbable. To introduce someone through what you assume was their obstacle is to diminish a human being into a narrative device.
The better approach is simply to lead with the person. Lead with the achievement. Let context follow.
Take Zainab Bilal.
Yes, she is visually impaired. That fact is relevant. It helps explain why her story drew attention in the first place. But it is not the most interesting thing about her.
She scored 95 per cent. She wrote her exams independently, on a laptop, without a scribe. She is a technology enthusiast. She is also RJ Zainab for Radio DPS. She is ambitious, bright, and confident.
Blindness does not make her exceptional. Her intelligence and achievements do.
Zainab Bilal Scores 95% in CBSE, Writes Exams Independently Without a Scribe
Notice the difference. The disability is present, but it informs the story instead of defining it.
The same principle applies to Iqra Farooq.
Her father’s occupation is not her identity, nor is it the explanation for her rank.
She ranked second in JKAS. She is a horticulture graduate. She made a shift from science to the humanities and excelled.
The story is not that a tailor’s daughter succeeded.
The story is that Iqra Farooq did.
A better headline:
Iqra Farooq Secures Rank 2 in JKAS 2023 After Transitioning from Science to Humanities
So too with Bhawana Kesar.
Not “tailor’s daughter becomes judge.”
She was a court reader. She became the first female judge from Nowshehra.
A better headline: Bhawana Kesar Becomes First Female Judge from Nowshehra
Achievement first. Person first.
Class, disability, gender, and region may all matter. But they should appear in the reported story, in the subject’s own words, not in the headline, where they function as a surprise.
Because people are not remarkable because they exceeded assumptions about people like them.
They are remarkable for what they did.
(The author is a college student and is currently an intern at Kashmir Life. Ideas are personal.)
