Unrevised

Members present

Lord Best (Chairman)

Baroness Bakewell

Lord Clement-Jones

Baroness Deech

Lord Dubs

Baroness Fookes

Baroness Hanham

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill

Lord Horam

Bishop of Norwich

Lord Razzall

Baroness Scotland of Asthal

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Professor Suzanne Franks, City University, and Professor Karen Ross, Northumbria University

Q1 The Chairman: Professor Franks and Professor Ross, you are extremely welcome. Thank you very much indeed for giving up your time and coming and joining us. We are very appreciative of that. I know that either or both of you have to leave at exactly 4.30 pm. At that time you must make yourselves scarce, because you have important other business to do. You are going to be on the record, of course. You will be broadcast. I cannot guarantee a worldwide audience, I am afraid. We have a series of questions for you, and all of my colleagues will be asking them. If you have some opening remarks, we would be very glad to hear those. Do not feel obliged, but perhaps you might just introduce yourselves for the record. Shall we start with you, Suzanne, if we may?

Professor Franks: I am Suzanne Franks. I am a professor of journalism at City University. Shall I do the opening remarks now?

The Chairman: Please, if there are some openers you would like to make.

Professor Franks: You asked me briefly to say the reason why I have become interested in this and why I have studied it. I was, myself, a BBC news and current affairs journalist for many years. I started in 1979 at the BBC, and there were certainly very few women in leading positions then in news and current affairs, very few on screen. In fact, I remember working with Joan as her producer and she was the only female figure in “Newsnight” at that time. She was a very rare bird, who was the arts correspondent at that time, but that was it. That is something that has stayed with me over the years. Things had changed a bit, but they have taken much longer than I would have thought all those years ago. I then became an independent producer, and, after that, I did a PhD, and I now teach journalism at City University.

I am delighted you are doing this. I think it is absolutely fantastic, because I think, in the end, one of the conclusions that one will come to is that just by highlighting these issues and by counting them, which is what we do at City, and studying this and campaigning and making a fuss and showing that things are not changing as fast as the public perception is, that is the way that we are going to make a difference, rather than by implementing legislation.

The last thing I wanted to say is that at City University, where I am in the journalism department, it always strikes me, when I look out at the classroom, it is predominantly female. Overwhelmingly, it is women who are studying journalism. We are one of the leading schools of journalism. Most of our students go into great jobs. We have fantastic alumni all over the place but when I look out at the classroom and I see that it is predominantly female, year after year after year, I then wonder where these women are going to go and why is it that this is not being reflected then when they go much later on into the workplace and rise up the hierarchy. I am delighted to be here.

Professor Ross: I am Karen Ross. I am Professor of Media at Northumbria University. Unlike Suzanne, I do not have a broadcasting or media history, but I do have experience of being someone who has had a political position 20 years ago and became very conscious of the way in which the media framed me as a woman politician.

From my point of view, what I bring to this inquiry is I have been publishing in this area for about 20 years. The first piece of work I published was in 1994, based on the Labour leadership election, called “Bambi, Thumper and the One in the Dress”. In some ways, that characterises much of the work that I have been doing, which is looking at the way in which women parliamentarians have been framed within media discourse. What I have seen is the kinds of arguments that myself and many colleagues, including Suzanne, have been making in terms of representation, not simply about women parliamentarians but women in the media more generally, both in terms of portrayal, representation and employment, over the last 20, or, in fact, 30 years we are still making.

Similarly to Suzanne, when I look out into my classroom I also see exactly the same thing, what we see is a trend over the last 10 or 15 years of an increasing number of women students coming into media programmes and going out of those programmes into the industry in very similar numbers to men and then something happens. When we look at the top, something has happened to all those talented young women who enter the profession full of enthusiasm and competence and expertise. Something happens to them.

I am also incredibly pleased to see this inquiry happening. I am very pleased to have been invited to give evidence. It would be great to have an outcome, which is to see something that encourages change. No, not encourages change; forces change to happen, because we have seen at least 30 years of policy, guidance and recommendation on this very topic and we see incremental change. I would like to see something a bit more accelerated.

The Chairman: Thank you very much. We are going to go round. My colleagues will ask a question. I am going to ask them if they will declare any special interests that ought to be drawn to our attention before they ask their question. Can we start with Lord Clement-Jones?

Q2 Lord Clement-Jones: Thank you for your introductions. Good afternoon and, of course, there is some overlap with your introductions, but I wonder if you could each start with a brief overview of what, in your opinion and following your research, you would describe as the current situation for women working in news and current affairs both on air and behind the scenes. Have you seen the position change over the last five years one way or another? Do you believe it has improved or become worse?

Professor Franks: I think there have been possibly some small improvements but a lot of that is what I call the “Look at her!” syndrome, which is there will be one or two high-profile hirings, particularly of on-screen presenters. That is taken as, “Oh, that is fine; we have dealt with that now”, because of Mishal Husain, for example, who is now on the “Today” programme, “so that is not a problem anymore”. If you look underneath the very high profile hirings, it has not changed as much as one would think.

There are a number of problems I am sure you are going to cover, but one of them is this resistance to older women appearing on screen. They seem to fall off a cliff after about the age of 50, whereas men carry on anchoring the general election programme or having high-profile reporting presenting positions well into their 70s. That is one series of problems.

The other one is behind the screen there is a problem that women come into the industry and they do all right at the early stages, but then they tend, as the evidence shows, as again the most recent skill diversity network report showed last week, then to disappear. They go off and they do not make it up the ladder and it is a very tough life. News and current affairs are incredibly demanding. You are totally dependent on news agendas, often working very long hours and, in a digital world, it is even tougher than it ever used to be. People used to think you could sit at home on your laptop and that would be fine, but it is not like that. The intensity of a news cycle is greater than it ever was.

There are all of those problems and also it means that the few women who do stay the course do not tend to be the ones carrying other domestic responsibilities, which is a shame. When you interview them, as I have done for the report I wrote last year, that is not necessarily through choice.

Professor Ross: I would echo the good points that Suzanne makes and I think also, if we just look in terms of numbers, then, yes, we have seen more women entering the industry, but I think we need to go beyond the body count, because it is: what are those women doing? If we see that there are more women in the industry than ever before, and that increases year on year that is one thing and that is to be welcomed, but if we see where they are and how they are progressing, it seems to me that is what we need to be focusing on. It is not simply enough just to say, “Well, great, we have more women”. What are they doing? What kind of authority?

In the work that I have been involved with, which I will talk about a bit later, around women in decision-making, we see very clearly the higher up you go the fewer women there are. When women do get to the top, unless there is a nurturing environment, there is no reason to believe that they are going to necessarily do things differently. I think we need to be a bit more sophisticated in our understanding of what it is that we are looking at when we are looking at the issue of women in broadcasting.

Lord Clement-Jones: Is there any variation between institutions? You have given us the broad picture. Is there any ray of sunlight in this picture?

Professor Franks: A lot of the institutions have great policies, terrific policies on the books if they adhere to the policies. For example, the BBC, if you read all of the rubric, it looks lovely.

Lord Clement-Jones: So it is delivery?

Professor Franks: Yes.

Professor Ross: It is implementation because there are any number of policies, not just within this country but globally. Most media organisations of any size do have equality policies or do have diversity policies, but, unless there is a form of implementation, unless there is a commitment to say, “Okay, we have this policy and now we are going to do something about it: we are going to implement it; we are going to monitor the data; and we are going to devise an action plan”, then it is just so much wasted paper. Answering the question “Is there a chink of light?”, I think the answer to that question is “Look around.” Look to see in any of these media industries who are the DGs and who are the CEOs. You then start to answer your own question.

Q3 Baroness Fookes: First, I must declare that I have no special interest in this, unless you count failing to get an interview to work for the BBC when I was a young woman.

The Chairman: The rest is history.

Baroness Fookes: Yes.

Professor Ross: No axe to grind?

Baroness Fookes: I wonder if we could look more closely at the hard evidence that I think you have done some work on. Could we have a bit more detail about that, particularly the difference between, as you yourself have described, the wonderful policy and the failure to implement?

Professor Franks: The very recent evidence, which was last week, the Creative Skillset report, showed that the profile of women in television is completely different in terms of age from that of men. Most women in television tend to be at the younger end, whereas most men in television are spread out more evenly and occupy the higher age group. You have to ask yourself, “Why is that? Why is there not a balance?” They bring out these reports every two years, monitoring the television workforce, and the one that they came up with last week had that same pattern. That is a pretty interesting fact as to the disjuncture between the age profile of people employed in television.

Baroness Fookes: There do not seem to be many not very attractive younger women?

Professor Franks: You said it.

Professor Ross: When I first started looking at news and presenters, it used to always be that you would have the older, indifferently-attractive man coupled with the younger, very attractive woman. The older man would always lead off the news, would be the authoritative voice of the news, and the young woman would then be coming in after, maybe doing something about the misshapen vegetable or the kitten rescued by the Rottweiler. They would always be lighter stories. There was always that sense that she was there as decoration and he was there as the voice of news. I think that has changed. We can see that from most evening news. It is not quite that severe.

In answer to the question about the evidence in terms of the relationship between the existence of policies and the number of women in decision-making positions within broadcasting and current affairs and news, the work that I have done at a European level looking at 99 organisations across Europe, a mix of public and private sector organisations, would say that sometimes there is a direct relationship and sometimes there is not. The reason why there is not always a direct relationship is that, as we have said, policies need to be implemented in order to be effective and it is very easy to undo a policy by the culture of the organisation. You might have the most fantastic policy in the world, but if it is not implemented and/or if there is no commitment to a culture of equality then nothing happens. We need to find ways to make something happen, at the very least to strongly encourage media organisations to implement the policies they already have.

Baroness Fookes: What about the women behind the camera, so to speak? We have talked about reporters and presenters, but obviously you have an admin behind of great importance. What is the position there?

Professor Ross: That is why we have to go beyond the body count. If you look at the support or the service departments in terms of HR, the technical or the admin, you see many more women as a proportion of staff in those areas but, arguably, those are perhaps less prestigious or less glamorous areas. What you do see within media organisations is horizontal and vertical segregation. Women tend to work in these areas and men tend to work in those areas, and we do see that across the board. Certainly within large-scale European media organisations you do see that very clearly.

Professor Franks: Are you also referring to production and editorial hierarchies?

Baroness Fookes: Yes.

Professor Franks: The higher up the hierarchy you go, you see a diminishing proportion.

Baroness Fookes: Does it mirror what I call “front of house”?

Professor Franks: Yes, very much so.

Q4 Baroness Hanham: Can I just have a word on employees to start with? The only programme that I watch very much on television is right at the end of the night when it comes to what the papers say and they clearly have a deliberate policy of having one man and one woman. The trouble is they tend to be always the same ones. Obviously, somebody has done something there, but I want to take you away from that into the experts that appear on the news programmes who are quizzed. The evidence apparently at the moment is that it is 4:1 against having a woman expert on anything. It is probably hard to generalise this, but in what you have done and looked at are there some areas in particular where there are far less women who are able to give the expertise—and that is a whole other question—so they are not there to be called on, or is it simply that they are being ignored?

Professor Franks: This is an interesting area. If we are looking at experts, if you want to interview the Pope or the Chancellor of the Exchequer or whatever, that is a news player. There is nothing you can do about it, so let us put that to one side because that is a huge societal issue about whether you are ever going to have a female Chancellor of the Exchequer or female Pope. However, if you go for straightforward expertise, which I think probably is more what you are talking about, you are absolutely right.

We are doing ongoing studies on this at City University where, week in, week out, we have students monitoring all the main news programmes, counting how many experts there are talking about global warming or the war in Syria or everything across the board, and that is where you get this astonishing disparity. That is where you get these figures of 4:1, and 4:1 is a good one. On occasion it has gone up to 6:1. You may be familiar but the real high point of this was when the “Today” programme did an item on breast cancer, which was John Humphrys interviewing two men, and a week later they did an item on teenage pregnancy, which again was a male presenter interviewing two men. That is an example of how bad it can get.

On the counting that we do, I agree with Karen that it is a bit crude sometimes just counting, but in this area it is very important to do that. There is no question there are women experts out there in lots and lots of these fields. Since this work has become more and more prominent there is the “Expert Women” campaign where you have had thousands of women signing up, academics, people in think-tanks and so on, to say that they would be available and be interested in appearing. There is no dearth of experts out there. The problem is getting them on air.

Baroness Hanham: Do you think it is laziness on behalf of the broadcasting companies? I was rather joking about what the papers say, but the same people are hauled in week after week after week, which suggests to me that people just say, “Oh, we will have her today and we will have her tomorrow”. Unless people are prepared to make, or the directors are prepared to make, a determined move, it does not suggest to me from what you are saying that that is the evidence that is out there.

Professor Franks: I think you are absolutely right. I am partly guilty myself when I think back to the days when I was a researcher or a junior producer. You are under pressure. You are in a rush. You need somebody to go on live. You need to know that they are going to turn up on time and that they are not going to fall apart in front of the cameras or in front of the microphone. They are going to do the job. They are going to talk concisely. You get in the same patterns of, “Oh, we know Fred. We had him on two weeks ago talking about airlines crashes or whatever. We know he will do the job. I have his number here; let us just call him”. It is laziness and it is small “c” conservatism. “I know they will do it. I do not want to take a risk and pick this woman out of the air who has never done it before”.

The other problem is the women themselves. Many producers will tell you this. You ring somebody up who has a great CV. She knows all about it, but she says, “I am not very knowledgeable. Perhaps you ought to try so-and-so. I do not want to stick my neck out. I am not sure that I can do this”. They need a little bit more nurturing and encouraging. If you are a producer in a great rush and you need somebody on the “PM” programme in two hours’ time, you are not in a position to do that.

What is very interesting is that, since this work has been going on at City University, the BBC has come up with this initiative now of these training days for expert women. They have had a huge response and they have done this follow-through with the women they have done this training for, and the graduates of these training days are doing incredibly well. You are right. If you can overcome the laziness, if you can overcome the inertia, and if you can put a bit of effort in and encourage people, you will get results.

Professor Ross: The point there is that there is that initiative, the kind of women expert days. There is also the Women’s Room. There are databases of women experts who would be willing, when they get the phone call, to say, “Yes, I am happy to come on”. The issue then is that broadcasters and journalists need to know that those things exist. There exists in this country and in pretty much in every member state some directory of women experts. The issue is to try to encourage journalists to use these databases; to not even take a risk, but to make more interesting television, because if you are just listening to the same-old same-old, that just gets boring. Surely it makes economic sense. You do not want people to be turned off watching these programmes because it is the same-old same-old. You want people to continue watching because they hear something new and different and refreshing, a different perspective.

The fact is you have hundreds of women out there waiting for the call and I think it is trying to match our desire to stand up and talk about our specific subject area against journalists desperately trying to figure out who they can get at short notice. We just to need to make that match.

Q5 Bishop of Norwich: Taking us on to the next stage, in our written evidence I think Cynthia Carter quoted some of your work, Professor Ross, about men choosing other men as sources in journalism. I would be interested to know whether that is related to what you have just been saying in relation to experts and whether it is also true, particularly in the media, that men choose to employ other men or whether women are just as bad at choosing to employ other men or whether there is any evidence that, where women are in senior positions in journalism or in the media, that does create some step change.

Professor Ross: There is an enormous amount of evidence that suggests that, if you just do a content analysis and you look at articles written by men and you look at the sources, they tend to also source other men, for the reasons we just discussed, particularly if it is expert sources. They have their diary of people who they can constantly call on. I think sociologists, in terms of men employing other men, would use the term “homosocial reproduction”; that is they are just reproducing themselves. They are seeing an array of people in front of them and they feel more comfortable appointing someone who looks a bit like them.

If you have a shortlisting panel comprising men and then you have a recruitment panel comprising men and you might have one woman and several male candidates, then it just seems to me evidentially what happens—because if you look at senior decision-making positions, they are predominantly men—it does not take very much effort to think, “Okay, something must be happening”. If we have all-male panels and we have men being appointed, then something is happening in terms of appointing men rather than women.

Question: how can we stop that happening? As we said, the Pope is male. At one level, there are ways in which you can think, “Okay, what about if women are not applying?” Maybe women are not applying in the same way, maybe women are less confident about putting themselves forward. However, unless we have data to demonstrate, looking at who is applying, who gets shortlisted and then who gets appointed, we cannot make an argument either way, because what employers will often say is, “Women did not come forward and, therefore, we did not have any women to choose from”. I would say, “Okay, show me the evidence. I would like to see the women who are not applying. I would like to see that evidence”.

The answer to the question “Do men employ other men?” is: not always. Is there any evidence that women in decision-making will employ men or women? Again, we do not know. You can get the statistics on who is employed, but you cannot get statistics on how many people have applied, shortlisted and recruited and so on. All I would say is the evidence would suggest that, if you have mostly men making the decisions and you have mostly men being appointed, then the answer to your question must be yes.

Bishop of Norwich: Yes. Undoubtedly the Pope is male, but the majority of Roman Catholics in the world are female, of course. It is difficult for me to say too much about that. You cannot draw much from the general synod of the Church of England, but the all-male House of Bishops was 97% in favour of the consecration of women as bishops. The proportions went down in the clergy and then the laity, until you came to the laity where the majority of women were found. I am just conscious that, certainly in the church and perhaps even still in wider society, there are quite a number of women who always seem to want to see men in authority. You would not expect that in the media. I expect that in the church. Every time I am at the BBC or somewhere, the views of people in theory are so liberal that you would not expect to find this, of all places, in the media. That is the thing that I am trying to get my head around. I am used to this in the church. I am used to trying to appoint a female vicar and having the women in the congregation saying they do not want one, but I am just amazed that this is also true in the media.

Professor Ross: I totally take that point, but I think in some ways that will change if we have more role models. In your example, if we see more women taking the sacrament and doing it successfully and doing it effectively, I think that we will then see far fewer women laity saying they do not want to see a woman priest or a woman bishop. I think it is that role modelling and the successful role modelling that is what we need to try to boost.

Whatever we think about quotas, when quotas came in for women prospective parliamentary candidates, we saw in one election the proportion of women in Parliament doubled as a consequence of all-female shortlists. There are all sorts of issues with quotas, but sometimes you cannot make an appeal for gender justice. You have to force something to happen. When it has happened, after a few years it has become so normalised that people just think, “Why did we not do this 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago?” I think it is that people do not want change. If you force change, eventually they will say, “Yes, what was the problem?”

The problem with the media is that, for as long as we have mostly men in decision-making positions who mostly are choosing to recruit people on the basis of the fact they used the urinals rather than the women’s room, then we have a problem. It just seems to me that it is difficult to imagine what else is determining those decisions when we see what the output or the outcome of those decisions are—ie, mostly men in decision-making positions.

Q6 Baroness Bakewell: You will recognise that this question has my name on it. A Government report published last year found that TV presenters under the age of 50 were broadly representative of the population in general, but when it came to people over 50 it was not so. Why do you think that is?

Professor Franks: The figures are now so dramatic. A couple of commentators have said, “If you came from Mars, you would think there was a kind of genocide of women over 50 in our culture. Suddenly they all disappear”. This is so ingrained that one can only assume it is a kind of continued, still very unfortunate, sexism, where women over 50 are not seen as valuable figures of authority, whereas men over 60 or over 50 or with grey hair are still able to command that kind of authority. As I said before, having somebody of 74 anchoring the general election—or if you look at John Simpson, aged 70, has now being given an indefinite contract to stay at the BBC as long as he likes. Where are the female reporters of 70 who are being kept on? There is an innate problem here.

Baroness Bakewell: But is that an innate problem across the board. For example, Grace Wyndham Goldie, a legendary woman pioneer in broadcasting, said absolutely she would not have women journalists. She wanted her “boys” as she called them. She was a woman in authority to appoint women and there have been such women in politics, as we know. They do not appoint other women. It is not just as you were saying, Professor Ross, that the appointment panels are male. Perhaps women in those positions too do not seem to appoint older women.

Professor Franks: I think it is quite difficult sometimes there to break outside the mould and say, “We are going to appoint a woman in her 60s to do the prime ministerial debates in the general election,” or something like that. Even to have a woman doing those debates is already seen as pretty revolutionary and that is only going to happen for the first time, if at all, next year, but then to say that is going to be a woman of 74 you need to stick your neck out as a producer.

Baroness Bakewell: Professor Ross, have you seen any signs of change in that direction?

Professor Ross: You are making an important point, which is that we cannot assume that women in decision-making positions are necessarily going to be sisters, that they are going to be pro the equality agenda or that they are going to appoint women. We have enough examples around of women who are in authority, not necessarily in broadcasting but in authority more generally, who have what has been described as queen bee syndrome. They want to be the queen bee. They do not want to appoint other women because then it means that their own cachet is diminished in some way, which of course just assumes that equality is a zero sum game, “If I have more, then you have less”, which is a rather unhelpful way of looking at things.

There is something about this idea of playing safe, about not wanting to take the risk of the women, and partly I think that is to do with this idea that somehow choosing a woman is kind of second best; that if we are going to have quotas or we are going to find specific places or allocate places for women, then somehow it is second best and we are reducing standards. My argument against that is, if we look around the House of Commons for example, do we believe that the 80% of people who are there—ie, the 80% of MPs who are men—are there because they are the best people for the job? I would suspect not. I think that women have to feel—

The Chairman: We will need to take a break as that involves voting by Members of the House of Lords. Will you excuse us? There will be about an eight-minute break from now.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

The Chairman: Baroness Deech, perhaps we can return to you.

Q7 Baroness Deech: I am interested, in that my daughter graduated from City, the journalism course, worked for the BBC for 14 years and has given up to go freelance after 14 years in news, which was exactly the situation you were describing. On the older women issue, it has been quite striking when you look at American television, if you get the chance, or if you look at the American presidential debate, you find not only are women anchoring, but a woman who is not slim or not young, not quaffed. I wonder why older women who are not beauty queens manage to achieve these positions in the US when they cannot here.

Professor Franks: That is a very interesting question because they did not always, as I am sure you aware, but then there were a number of very feisty women who were being made redundant and pushed aside, once they did not look like a sort of glamour babe any more, and they fought back pretty ferociously. One of them took a huge case and won against her employers and then she wrote a book about it called Too Old, Too Ugly and Not Deferential to Men. That was the title of the book by Christine Craft. The quote was from the focus group that the employer used against her. They had been out and talked to audience focus groups and that is apparently what the audiences thought about her and that is why she had been sacked. She took a case. She won that and then a number of other women also took cases against their employers and some of them are winning millions of dollars. That must have produced some kind of step change. I know we had something similar here with Miriam O’Reilly, who took that case. It has changed the culture a little bit. People did sit up and take notice, but it has not had the same adjustment, unfortunately, across the board that it did from these cases in the USA.

Baroness Deech: Do you have any views on this, Professor Ross?

Professor Ross: Only to echo what Suzanne is saying. Given what we know about the typical audience for terrestrial television, it tends to be women and older women. If you imagine a focus group looking at that particular demographic, the most popular, the most loyal demographic in terms of terrestrial TV, who they would like to see fronting news shows, current affairs shows, any kind of shows, I cannot imagine that there would be too many people in those focus groups saying, “We do not want an older woman”. Therefore, if it is not the audience saying that they are put off by women who are not beauty queens, not young, white and beautiful, then what is the rationale? One can only imagine that something else is going on, that perhaps producers or directors are projecting their own lack of interest in the older woman on to the audience, because I do not think there is any evidence. There is no evidence that I have seen in terms of audiences saying, “We do not want to see older women on the television”.

Baroness Deech: Are you convinced that those audiences are telling the truth? If you are on a focus group and you are asked this, of course you will say that, but when you consider television in the round and indeed the pictures in our newspapers, what seems to sell the fashion magazines, the newspapers and everything to women as well as men is exclusively focusing on the attractive younger woman. It is very deep rooted, is it not?

Professor Ross: Yes, I think it is very deep rooted, but then I think that is just playing with our own neuroses or the anxieties that women have, fuelled by the media, that we all should look young and beautiful. Even those of us who are not young and beautiful, even at the same time as understanding that we are being played, are still vulnerable to those requirements, that somehow we need to look a certain way. I think there is lots of vested interest. The whole diet industry would go completely down the toilet if we rejected the way in which the media are framing the perfect woman, so there is a vested interest.

Baroness Bakewell: Can I ask a supplementary to Baroness Deech’s question? Can I ask about production values, because you mentioned John Simpson and David Dimbleby? It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you have done it year in and year out, you will deliver a higher production value, which can perhaps only be detected by very conscientious producers and directors, that women who are beginning to do it simply will not be able to deliver. There is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, is there not, if you have a system that is going to go on like that?

Professor Franks: I would have thought that then goes back to the question that Baroness Hanham asked before. If expert women are not being used then it is the same thing, unless you are willing to give people a try. If you look at somebody like Julie Etchingham, for example, on ITV, for the first time ever there is going to be a woman anchoring the election debates next year for ITV. Somebody there has obviously taken a decision and they are going to break the mould and do something different, but it takes quite a bit of courage and things like this Committee pushing and making a fuss about it that is going to drive change.

Can I just also add one thing? Many years ago, when women newsreaders were first being contemplated in the 1970s, relating back to the question that you asked earlier on, the audience surveys apparently showed that women audiences did not like to listen to women newsreaders because they lacked authority. It was exactly the point that you were making about the problems in the church. Sheila Tracy and these women newsreaders that were tried in the 1970s were all just given six months and then sacked. Now I would like to think that the idea of a woman reading the news on Radio 4 is totally unremarkable; it is hardly something we would bother to notice. Just as with the issue that you made about the older woman, there are possibilities for culture change, for expectations to change over those long periods, but it takes quite a while.

The Chairman: We come to question 7 and to Lord Razzall. I know, Professor Franks, you have to leave at 4.30 pm, so perhaps when you address the question from Lord Razzall, you might just give us any final thoughts before you have to depart.

Q8 Lord Razzall: I think I have to declare a non-financial interest in that, although she is not yet 50, my daughter does work for “Newsnight”. We are interested in the Global Media Monitoring Project and what it says about the portrayal of women in UK news, and I wonder if you could expand on that a bit.

Professor Ross: The Global Media Monitoring Project started in 1995. It came out of the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women and it has happened four times so far, every five years: 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2009. The GMMP’s purpose is to take one day of news across the globe in as many countries as possible to try to see where women feature both in terms of news content as subjects of news but also as news producers—so journalists, reporters and anchors. What the accumulation of those studies show is that between 1995 and 2009, between those four years, the proportion of women making the news has gone up from 17% to 24%, which means that it will be another 43 years before we have parity of women featuring in news.

When women do feature in news, they predominantly feature in three ways: most frequently as victims, usually of male violence; as mothers; and as wives and girlfriends of celebrities. Where they do not feature is as experts, as politicians, as lawyers or as professionals. What you see in terms of news discourse is a news discourse of news about men and, notwithstanding again the Pope reference, clearly the three party leaders are all men—in fact, four if we now consider UKIP, who would like to think of themselves as the competition. We have four party leaders who are all men. Clearly, if we are talking about a quote from a party leader, it is going to be from a man, but as we have said, with experts, with other politicians and with other professionals, there is no reason why more women or similar numbers of women to men should not be featuring in the news. They do not and they consistently do not. What we have seen is, as I said, year on year, we persistently see women appearing in news in a very restricted repertoire of story types and with very restricted status. That has to change.

Lord Razzall: Where do we in the UK stand in any notional ranking?

Professor Ross: Notional ranking. We—

The Chairman: Could we pause on that one and just hear finally from Professor Franks? I know you only have a minute or two left.

Professor Franks: Yes, I am hosting a meeting with Lyse Doucet, who is a woman over 50 in the BBC, so it contradicts what I say.

I would just echo what Karen has said. It is a fantastic resource, this Global Media Monitoring Project, and I have used that with students. If you look right across the world, it is pretty bad right across the world. There are variations and obviously some countries are much worse than we are. They are tiny numbers, less than the fingers of one hand, the percentage of news stories that involve women, particularly women of authority. That is a much wider issue out there but, again, these things are cultural. Just like the women newsreaders I was referring to earlier, these things are not set in stone and the more we focus attention on them the more they are likely to change. Thank you very much indeed.

The Chairman: Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us.

Professor Franks: Thank you so much.

The Chairman: If there are answers to questions further down the list, please do write to us. That would be great. Thanks awfully, Suzanne.

Professor Franks: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Sorry to have interrupted the flow.

Lord Razzall: No, I was just going to say where—

Professor Ross: We are about on the average.

Lord Razzall: On the average.

Professor Ross: Yes, but we are no better than the average.

Lord Razzall: Who is the best?

Professor Ross: The Scandinavian countries. Both in the Global Media Monitoring Project but also in pretty much any other European-level comparative study the Scandinavian countries just do it better, but then so do some of the eastern European countries, for different reasons, though, which I can bore you with at some later point.

Q9 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: I think you have partly already answered my question. I was just wondering where we come in the ranking, but the ones that are succeeding more, why is that? Is it legislation or culture or both?

Professor Ross: It is both of those things. I think we do look to the Scandinavian countries because their legislation seems to percolate through to organisations, not simply the public sector. What you tend to see in Scandinavian countries, and also some eastern European countries but for very different reasons, you see more women in decision-making positions within the broadcasting industries more generally, largely because, in my view, there is much more of a commitment to the equality agenda. It goes back to the idea that so many of these companies have policies, but so few companies have processes of implementation and monitoring.

In a number of Scandinavian countries, particularly the public service broadcasters in those Scandinavian countries and some of the other countries as well, they do more than simply have a policy. They do more than simply say, “This is our policy, this is our legislation and this is how we appear to be responding to it”. For example, Austrian public broadcaster ORF has been experimenting with quotas although I am not sure that they have been hugely successful because, as with all these things, it is guidance and it is policy and it is recommendation. Most countries do not have the force of law, other than, interestingly, Ireland with RTÉ. They have a requirement for board members. I think the requirement is there needs to be at least five men and at least five women.

There is a relationship between legislation that has a direct impact on the public service broadcaster, so we could go down that route. I think the reason things work better in the Scandinavian countries is because there is a genuine cultural attitude, not simply within broadcasting, but within the country more generally that equality is in and of itself a good thing not simply because of gender justice, but because it works financially. It works economically. It does not make sense to squander the talents of 50% of the population. I think once you get your head around that reality, it is not simply about the moral imperative; there is a bottom-line imperative. If we can try to persuade organisations, including the media organisations, to recognise that reality, I think we would be doing very well.

Lord Horam: What would you do in the UK?

Professor Ross: The one thing that I think that we could do, as I have said before, is get the media organisations to implement the policies that they have.

Lord Horam: How will you get them to do that?

Professor Ross: I think that they need to be mandated by the media regulator.

Lord Horam: By Ofcom?

Professor Ross: By Ofcom. I think what we have seen—

Lord Horam: What do you mean by “mandate” exactly?

Professor Ross: I think that Ofcom should say, “This has to happen”, because what we have seen is self-regulation tends not to happen, because if they are left to their own devices, nothing is going to change. The Broadcast Equality & Training Regulator did do a good job and obviously it does not now exist. If public service broadcasters, or in fact any other broadcaster, were encouraged or forced in their annual report to show their monitoring statistics in terms of, as I said earlier, their recruitment and promotion and where women and men are in their organisation both vertically and horizontally, if that was a requirement—and why would it not be a requirement because they are the public service broadcaster?—that, in one fell swoop, would force something to be brought out into the open.

In the work that I have done in terms of the European study, we developed three gender indicators by which media organisations could measure their progress towards gender equality. Those gender indicators have been taken up by the Council of Europe and adopted. However, that adoption is simply, again, a set of recommendations and the Council of Europe—

Lord Horam: That is no good, is it?

Professor Ross: It is no good because it does not have the force of law. If this inquiry ends up with something that does have the force of law, I think that we would see change in the same way as, no matter how much we might not like having quotas, if we think about all-women shortlists—at a stroke it did double the number of women politicians. That has normalised, and brought normality to, seeing women in Parliament. Even if we do not like it, I think that sometimes we just have to force a behavioural change in order to get people, us, to think, “That is okay. Why were we kicking and screaming before?”

Lord Horam: So Ofcom should insist on quotas for all the major news media or whatever it is?

Professor Ross: Even if we did not go the quota route, I think that we need to have some way—and we have Ofcom. Ofcom already exists. We did have the Broadcast Equality & Training Regulator. That did exist, so it is not like we are inventing something. Let us try to make the things that we have already work more effectively.

The Chairman: Okay. Thank you very much indeed and thank you for staying to the bitter end.

Professor Ross: Not so bitter, hopefully.

The Chairman: Great, that is terrific. If you think of anything that we have not covered, do please drop us a line and make sure that we do not miss it. Thank you for joining us.

Professor Ross: I have my notes, yes. Thank you for your attention and thank you for giving me this opportunity.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Examination of Witnesses

Kate Kinninmont, Women in Film and Television, Jane Martinson, Women in Journalism, and Michelle Stanistreet, General Secretary, National Union of Journalists.

Q10 The Chairman: Welcome to our team there. Thank you very much for joining us. You have seen what happens from the back row, so you can see how it all works. I am going to launch off, tell you that we are being televised and I am going to ask you, if you would, to say who you are so that is on the record and the particular perspective you are coming from, but please do not make a long speech, because we are going to get into the questions immediately thereafter. Shall I start with you, Michelle? Welcome and please, a bit about yourself.

Michelle Stanistreet: Thank you very much. My name is Michelle Stanistreet. I am the General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists, which covers broadcasting but also journalists working across the entire industry in the UK and also Ireland. We have about 30,000 members, about a third of which are women, although the rate of members coming in now at the start of their career tends to be pretty even in terms of take-up, so half and half—half of new recruits are women.

Kate Kinninmont: My name is Kate Kinninmont and I am Chief Executive of an organisation called Women in Film and TV. We have 1,400 members and they range across all genres. They also include people who work in animation and games and all the new varieties of screen creativity. Our mission is very much to support and promote the work and career of women, so that is the angle that I am coming at it from.

Jane Martinson: My name is Jane Martinson. I am the Head of Media at the Guardian and have been so since September. Before that, I spent four years as the Guardian’s women’s editor and have been the chair of Women in Journalism because of my keen interest in women and media. I would like to say, just as an opening remark, having spent the morning at the Select Committee in the other House listening to the Culture Secretary, I immediately want to congratulate you for the gender equality of your own Committee in contrast to Mr Whittingdale’s.

Q11 The Chairman: We will accept that compliment. Thank you very much. We have been hearing all this evidence and we are becoming familiar with the picture. There is a great dearth of women in broadcasting and news and current affairs, particularly older women, but why? What are the real underlying reasons why we are in the position that we are? We could go in reverse order down the line. Jane, could we start at your end?

Jane Martinson: Before saying why, because I think that is a much deeper question, from the research that we did we were very keen to get more data because in this area there is a lot of hunch work. There are a few odd random bits of studies, but in terms of across the board data we decided to do something on the front pages of newspapers, because many of our members at Women in Journalism work across print and digital media. As a shop window and because of the nature of the media, we felt that was important. We also covered three distinct areas.

That is a long way to answer the question, but we looked at the number of women versus men who were writing stories. We looked at the people that were quoted and in what capacity, so whether they were quoted as experts or victims or celebrities—we had five sub-headings including as experts and as victims—and we also looked at the use of pictures. That research showed some very interesting findings, some of which were surprising and some not so. That was published two years ago. Some of the things that were found about the way women are represented and the way they are seen is very much reflected across the entire media industry.

In terms of why, I think there was a question in the House, and many reasons are given, about working practices and about what happens. I think someone presenting earlier mentioned the fact that, in terms of entry into the media industry, it is very much 50:50, maybe even slightly more women who graduate from university and go to what is now much more of a graduate profession. By the time they reach their 30s, there is an absolute divide, where men continue and women do not. Obviously in the television industry the ageism is marked enough that the report done by Harriet Harman last May found 82% of all the over-50s on TV were men, so only 16% of the over-50s on TV were women.

When you are trying to look at it, it seems that, in terms of education and in terms of desire to be in the industry, that is very much equal. Why? Our research showed the attitudes towards women are pretty entrenched. I think we were all surprised at the number of men that were seen as experts compared to women, so 2% of all victims quoted on front pages were men, 60% were women and the rest were children. Of experts, 82% were men and 60% women. The sort of divide between the way women are seen was entrenched, which I think is relevant to how women progress not just in media, but obviously in academia, across a whole range of industries, and we should look towards parenting and what happens when men and women have children and how they are then treated differently.

I think there was an answer in the House recently in which this was seen as an across-the-board issue, where Helen Grant, in answer to a question from the Member for Sheffield Central about the representation of women in the media, said that this was an issue: the Government was helping women by reducing the cost of childcare, addressing the gender pay gap, increasing flexible working and parental leave. I would say that was part of it and the rest of it is cultural attitudes.

The Chairman: Thank you very much. If you agree with anything that has already been said, please do not bother to say it again. Thank you very much, Jane. Kate, please.

Kate Kinninmont: I would agree with Jane about it being cultural. When you think about it, we had an equality Act in 1975 and then we had it again in 2010. We have the legislation in place, but one of the things that rather intrigues me is why the BBC should be exempt from some of the legislation for editorial reasons. That is something I would be interested to hear an answer on.

Also, culturally, because men were always seen to have greater authority, when women came in they tended to be in a more junior role. There are about three times as many male reporters as women reporters and yet, when you look on the news, you are just as likely to see a woman in Afghanistan or Iraq on the front line, where we do not even have women soldiers on the front line. There is a disparity between what women can achieve and what they seem to be able to achieve within a departmental corporation.

One of the things that worries me is that women still do not receive the same pay in news and current affairs, and the correspondents are all on a special thing called Special Pay Standard, I think it is, where, although the BBC has all sorts of rates for producers and camera people and so forth, if you are a news correspondent you have a negotiated pay that no one else may know. Again, I would like to see transparency. I think across the board in everything that I have heard from the previous meeting and from this meeting, if we had transparency, people would have to step up. Where we do not know what is happening, where we do not know if freelancers are recruited in the same way as staff people, where we do not know if there is a gender pay differential, where we do not know just how many people have risen up on merits or not, I think, especially for a public service broadcaster like the BBC, it would be terrific to see pay audits and to see information about transparency in each department and some level of transparency about how recruitment occurs.

Michelle Stanistreet: I would agree on the cultural issues that have been highlighted already. In very practical terms, that translates into real challenges for women across the media industry that we absolutely see prevalent in broadcasting, which is obviously your focus today particularly. I think there are lots of factors. Certainly in the NUJ’s experience, you do get women coming into the industry and they are on a fairly level pegging with their peers at the start and then they do reach a stage in their career where they face more discrimination effectively in terms of the opportunities that are afforded to them in terms of how they are treated.

It just seems staggering that there is still such a major problem when it comes to equal pay, decades after legislation. In a recent survey that we did of our broadcasting members for the purposes of this inquiry, the figure that came out quite a lot as a minimum differential between what you might be getting paid for the same work as a guy who works in the same department or area was £10,000, which is an enormous amount of money. In some parts of the industry, it is much bigger than that. We had people filling in the questionnaire and saying they discovered that one of them was on 40% less than a man who was doing the commensurate work just because they do not have the same genitalia. It is outrageous and the fact that it exists in parts of the industry, for example the BBC—and the BBC is not the only culprit by any means, but it is a public body and it should have much higher standards. It should not allow those kinds of things to happen. Unfortunately, it is endemic across the media industry and particularly in broadcasting as well.

But there are other kinds of practical issues that women face in the workplace that I think add to those challenges. There is the problem of flexible working and the fact that part-time staff are often treated unfairly comparatively, so you reach an age where for family-friendly reasons you need to have slightly more flexibility on how you do your work. Women have been side-lined as a consequence, regardless of the experience and the skills that they can bring to that role. Those things are kind of institutionalised. It is also because mainly it is blokes who are in senior positions making these decisions and so the culture perpetuates in that sense.

Also, in the survey that we did and anecdotally and in representative cases that we take as the union, the instances of sexism are eye-watering and instances of bullying and harassment are often linked to a person’s gender or their sexuality or the fact that they are an older woman. These are not isolated cases. They are absolutely part of a pattern. The NUJ gave a submission, which was over 100 pages long, of first-person testimony to the Dinah Rose inquiry when that addressed ostensibly the historical problem of bullying and harassment within the BBC. That evidence showed that it was very much a problem that was alive and kicking. Some of those cases have led to investigations that I have handled personally over the last 18 months that have been truly shocking and have lifted the lid for me on how many aspects of the BBC operate—behaviour that has been allowed to take place and has been actively condoned.

Achieving that cultural change in an institution the size of the BBC and with the levels of bureaucracy that it has is challenging. We are doing our best as a trade union, but it is hard going, despite some positive goodwill on the part of some of those running the BBC to try to achieve change. But when in practice, on a day-to-day level, you have managers who are allowed to hire their friends and set salaries that are completely outwith the collective agreements that are in place, that is quite difficult. If you look at other broadcasters, they do not even have the policies. They do not even have the words on paper that the BBC can point to and say, “This is best practice”.

Q12 Baroness Deech: Can I just ask a quick supplementary? Do you think having a woman chair of the BBC would make a difference? Perhaps Ms Kinninmont can answer.

Kate Kinninmont: It can only help, but I think it is part of a general feeling now that everybody wants to get it right. I do not think that the powers that be are misogynistic by any means, but I think people do not realise what is going on. When City University London’s journalism department started to do their expert campaign and started to monitor what was happening on news and current affairs programmes, it was then published and broadcast that in television weekly—and people were embarrassed to know—there would be six men’s voices for every one woman’s voice or whatever. They had not recognised it in the first place and then they did not know what to do.

The “Today” programme, which was always the most culpable in everybody’s eyes, was edited by Ceri Thomas, who said, “But there are not any more women” because he did not know any women who could work with John Humphrys, and suddenly you find there is Mishal Husain, who is utterly brilliant and was there all the time. This goes back to what Michelle was saying. Where you do not have open recruitment, where you have a lot of freelance people, people naturally do not want to take a lot of risk, they go to people they know and that is their circles, so how do you break that open?

A very parallel thing happened in television with women directors, which I will just tell you about very briefly. Directors UK take the royalty statements for every television director, so they know more than the broadcasters, more than anybody, who has been directing what. They did a survey and found that only 13% of directors were women on drama; they found there were drama series who had never employed a woman. The whole thing was utterly embarrassing to the broadcasters. They took their results around the broadcasters. The broadcasters were then coming to us at Women in Film and saying, “But are there women directors and writers, because we should know about it?” Yes, they should know about it, but what is happening is that they are pulling people from the same little pool and I think if things were advertised properly, if recruitment were followed through, they would find the hidden Mishal Husains.

Jane Martinson: Can I answer that as well? Having listened to Rona Fairhead at the Select Committee this morning, it is very early days, but one thing that I did find interesting, she did talk about how the trust is there to represent licence-fee payers. In talking about the “Today” programme, the reason that is often given and was given by Ceri Thomas several times in various interviews—and it has been given by many BBC executives—are people do not write into the “Today” programme saying, “Where are the women?” I do not think that is true anymore. I think there is growing campaigns across social media, whether Twitter or other outlets, in which people are doing diversity audits, “Where are the women? Where are the diverse voices?”

I also think the licence-fee payers are the focus. As Rona Fairhead said today, she wanted to work out what licence-fee payers wanted. I think if that is an issue, then the trust will have a bigger role, whether it is headed by a woman or not.

Kate Kinninmont: One appointment that definitely has helped is Tony Hall coming into the BBC from outside. He immediately picked up on the fact that, of all the radio breakfast shows, 85% were presented by a man, 15% were presented by a pairing, a man and a woman, and 0% were presented by a woman. He said to all the radio stations, “You have to get a woman on your breakfast programme. I know they will all say it is not possible, but it will be possible”, and he did and, lo, it has come to pass. He did the same with trying to make the BBC less class ridden and decided that there should be an apprentice in every station and, lo, it came to pass. That is partly because he has come from the outside and he is looking at it. That is where self-regulation comes in. If you are in the inside and you do know not women whom you could hire for something and you hire from your circle, how can you fix it?

The Chairman: Thank you very much. I think we are going to have to skip one or two questions if we are to get through on time. If you will forgive me, Lord Razzall, I think we will go to Baroness Bakewell next.

Q13 Baroness Bakewell: I am asking question 3. They are all familiar to me, as you will know over many years. How does the situation of women working in news and current affairs compare with the situation of women working in other parts of the media industry, in film production, and even wider, in the business production, the whole getting together of money and organising contracts? To what extent do you agree with the view that gender balance in this field is particularly important because of the wider reach that current affairs programmes have and the impact they have on society at large? How we compare with the film industry is very interesting, I think.

Kate Kinninmont: I think it is very, very similar across film and television. It is very similar in television drama, as the directors have discovered. Very often women are in the more caring roles—it is almost like nurses versus doctors—so people will say, “Oh gosh, I was in the BBC the other day and it is full of women”, but they are PAs and they are researchers and so on and so forth. I think it is at the sharp end, so whether that is a film director, of whom there is something like 13%, a similar percentage of women directors in drama, so that is film and drama are quite similar. There are more women working in children’s, but this is all part of that whole cultural aspect, where people do not seem to believe that women can be given a high budget. Very few of what they call the shiny-floor shows—“Strictly Come Dancing” and everything—are headed up by women.

It is purely a cultural thing, it seems to me. I started off at the BBC and worked my way up and did a whole lot of things, but now what is terribly difficult, I think, for anybody is the freelance nature of it. If a woman comes in and she works, there is no maternity rights, there is no sickness rights or whatever, as you know, if you are freelance, and that is the way the whole industry is going. Then if a woman steps out to have a child, it is almost impossible to get back in.

Baroness Bakewell: How much do you think it matters that news and current affairs, the hard core of this stuff, should represent women as equally as the rest? Why does that matter in our cultural life?

Kate Kinninmont: It does matter, because it is about credibility and authority. There are more women—this is the thing that never fails to astonish me. We are 51%; we are not 13% or 15%. More women come out with degrees these days, more women are coming out as doctors, more women are coming out as lawyers. Why in news and current affairs, where you want the sharpest minds and most able people and these courageous people, are we asking: where are the women?

Jane Martinson: Also, one thing is the representation, so the viewer should not have to just be served up a diet of endless men. Essentially, what you see on the screen and listen to on the radio should reflect the communities that those broadcasters are serving. That is one element of it, but it is also important that there is not just a tokenistic approach by broadcasters just to have the visible talent in that sense more gender balanced; it is important that that seeps through their entire operation, because if you do not have that in news and current affairs, then you are getting a news agenda and a current affairs agenda that is just seen through the prism of men, and often men of a certain age, in those editorial positions. You just do not have that diversity of story ideas and content and voices that come through, so we are losing out as consumers of that as much as women in the industry, and their talent and their skills and their experience are being ignored and side-lined.

Q14 Baroness Bakewell: Are you not in danger, though—I am playing devil’s advocate to some extent—of saying, if there were women in executive positions, more women producers and they are agenda setters, they would set what you would call a different agenda, which might be called a feminine agenda?

Michelle Stanistreet: No, I think it would be more diverse, but once you reach a tipping point, when it is normalised to have women in different levels and positions of seniority, the other things flow from that and things change and cultural change is achieved. It is not about having an editorial agenda; it is not like saying “Serve up the women’s pages”—a kind of ghettoised approach to news and current affairs. It is about genuine diversity in that sense.

Jane Martinson: I should say that one of the reasons that we chose front pages for our research—because other research had been done by WiJ committee member Kira Cochrane for the Guardian—because the news and current affairs heart of newspapers flows through to the rest of the media industry, whether or not that is online. It is very old-fashioned to think about front pages, as fewer and fewer of us are reading newspapers, but it absolutely dictates what goes online and also what is covered by, as Robert Peston has said, the broadcast industry. When you look at news and current affairs, that dictates so much of our cultural life, what is happening today and what we think matters. They are the areas that are absolutely dominated by men—roughly an 80:20 split. That applies not just to front-page by-lines, but to experts. Women in those jobs in broadcasting—and in fact, in the corridors of power in the House of Commons—is about 80:20. Is it not 22% of MPs are women? News and current affairs is the very heart of what the news media industry is supposed to be doing and of course you will get more women working for features and working for various bits of the organisation. That is not to say that those things should be so gender imbalanced, because men and women have a role to play in all aspects of our cultural life—the hard investigations and the current affairs that we all depend on, and that often lead to the features that we then want to read about and lifestyle issues that we care about.

Kate Kinninmont: May I add, Baroness Bakewell, that it is also an employment issue? If you have a son and a daughter, for example, and they both want to be television journalists and they are both incredibly bright, you would hope they would have an equal opportunity. That is where it is an issue.

Lord Horam: Can I ask a question of Michelle? You said in your written evidence that the NUJ cannot understand the lack of input from Ofcom. Since you were sitting in, you may have heard mention of Ofcom in the last session. What do you think they should be doing?

Michelle Stanistreet: I think they should be doing what they were tasked to do originally, which is to be properly monitoring the situation and being transparent and reporting on that and holding the broadcasters to account. Clearly, over a period of time, I think they referred to it at one stage as draconian and too resource intensive, and they have kind of, I think, shirked that duty and those responsibilities.

Lord Horam: They have had a specific excuse, if you like. They have said it is too draconian and too resource intensive; is that what you are saying? It just does not have the priority.

Michelle Stanistreet: They may as well say, “Oh, it is too boring and it does not matter to anybody”. I do not accept that it is draconian. I think it is transparent and it is sensible.

Lord Horam: It is astonishing they should have said that openly, is it not?

Michelle Stanistreet: It says a lot about Ofcom and the attitudes that were prevalent at that time. I think that was back in 2005. Maybe they have become slightly more enlightened since—I do not know. But I think that that is a core duty and a responsibility and it is something that they can do very easily and in a straightforward way, I believe, and it would be something that the whole industry could benefit from, because I think that would seep through to the broader media, not just the broadcasters. If they were honest and upfront in publishing that information, it would also consequentially lead to changes in behaviour in the broadcasters. If there is a duty that they fulfil and it is publicised and it is transparent, then of course that will lead to changes of behaviour in terms of how people approach what are fundamental issues of fairness, I believe, in employment terms and in terms of the broader kind of cultural issues. But I think Ofcom has dodged that responsibility in the past and they have handed that power back to the broadcasters themselves. I think that they intend to just maintain that regime of voluntary diversity data, which in the NUJ’s view is just not fit for purpose. It is not good enough.

Lord Clement-Jones: In that context, have any of the voluntary initiatives adopted by any of the news and current affairs broadcasters had an impact at all?

Michelle Stanistreet: Not in the NUJ’s view, no. We are not dealing with philanthropists. There are reasons, of which we have talked about lots of different factors that have built up to a very long-standing culture, where women are side-lined or not treated fairly or not paid what they are worth. I think it takes a bit more than goodwill to change that, and I think Ofcom is in a position where it could facilitate the process of requiring them to provide that information and holding them to account when they do not or when they are failing in their duties. The BBC, as a public body, has a particular role to play and I think in the broader creative industries, the things that the BBC does well have an impact on the broader industry. They should lead the way on this.

Lord Clement-Jones: You see the solutions as regulatory, in a sense, rather than self-imposed. Do you need a regulator to ensure they happen?

Michelle Stanistreet: Self-imposed goodwill has not worked, so, yes, regulation would be the way forward.

Jane Martinson: I should also say, even before Ofcom regulates, we need just some way of collecting data on these things. When you say, “How effective are these voluntary initiatives?”, it is so important that we properly trace it, because every piece of research you do, people can say, “That cannot be right. There are loads of women in the newsroom. That cannot be right. You go into the BBC, it is full of women, loads of women here”. When you look at it, if you were to track the Expert Women initiative that the BBC did voluntarily, with much fanfare, they had two big cohorts of women and then they said, “Oh, we have Maggie Aderin-Pocock. It is marvellous”. It is marvellous, but they do not say, “When we look across all our input in news and current affairs, in the drama department, this is our gender diversity audit”. That is what you want even before. In a way, I think we are a very long way from saying that Ofcom or any regulator—such as IPSO, God forbid—could say, “We mandate you as an industry to do this”. We could try that, but the issue of mandating the media has never worked well. However, just being able to gather the evidence and to make that some requirement would be a great step forward.

Q15 Baroness Deech: Very briefly, Ms Kinninmont, why do you think so many women are moving to freelance rather than permanent contracts, and are they treated as well as permanent employees? I almost know the answer, but anyway.

Kate Kinninmont: I think a lot of people are becoming freelance not out of choice. I believe the BBC has just made 500 people redundant in news and current affairs. For example, all of the staff reporters on “Panorama” have been made redundant and they will be replaced by freelance people. I can see why that is happening: it is largely a financial thing, as it is much easier to get rid of people on a contract, but also you do not have to look after them in the way that in the BBC, when I was there, you would be trained, you would have your work reviewed and you would be lined up for promotion. The BBC invested in people and worked with them—I am talking about the 1980s and the 1990s—but if your entire staff eventually becomes freelance and they have no sick pay, they have no maternity rights, they are outside of the Employment Protection Act, nobody is responsible for their training or their development or their careers, I think a very worrying situation could ensue in terms of whether it is still a profession.

Baroness Deech: Are any women themselves choosing to go freelance because the permanent working conditions are not suitable for them?

Kate Kinninmont: Not in my experience, in so far as, being freelance, you do not know when your next job is coming up.

Baroness Deech: There is no childcare issue or anything like that, is there?

Kate Kinninmont: I do not think there is anything preferable. There are no crèches. The first thing the BBC did, I think, whenever the cuts came was to get rid of the crèche. I do not know of any family-friendly broadcaster that does any of that if you were a staff person, but there certainly is not anything if you are freelance.

Michelle Stanistreet: Can I just come in on that point as well? I think casualisation of the industry has been an enormous trend in recent years, not just in broadcasting, but throughout the wider industry. In many ways, it has had a devastating impact on newsroom culture and on people’s ability to stand up for themselves in the workplace. I think there is a difference between kind of genuine freelancing and the kind of casualisation, where a lot of people, you would think if you were working with them, you would just assume that they were on a permanent job. They might have been there for months or years but have no security of employment and are just reliant on day shifts, in that sense. It is partly as a consequence of all the redundancies in the industry this has become even more prevalent.

But if you have a problem, if you believe you are bullied or harassed because of your age or because of your gender or you think you are being paid less than somebody that you work with, it is very hard to put your head above the parapet and to complain about that when next week’s shifts could dry up as a consequence. It puts those individuals in a much more precarious position than people who are on permanent staff contracts and I think that is a negative issue. It makes it quite a compliant workforce, I suppose, in some other ways, so you can see what the attraction is for some companies.

But also on the issue of freelancers, particularly in the kind of news and current affairs environment, they do not get the same training. Kate is absolutely right that they do not get access to the same support. If you look at the moment in parts of the world where journalists are working in hostile environments, the vast majority of them are working on a freelance basis. All of that risk and responsibility has kind of been outsourced for a lot of the companies, so they are enjoying the kind of copy that comes in and they can take advantage of that, but they are not providing the safety equipment and for women they are not providing specific training. That is not just about the kit that you might have and the different kind of kit you might need as a woman practically compared to a male foreign correspondent, but also issues of risks of sexual violence and attacks when you are working in different parts of the world. That support structure has been pretty much dismantled in recent years and I think that is a major problem in the industry at the moment, and obviously foreign news is an incredibly risky business for journalists right now.

Q16 Baroness Scotland of Asthal: I just wanted to ask you about the evidence, if any, of anyone undertaking an equality impact assessment before they make these shifts either into casual work or otherwise. Is the import of your evidence that it is worth talking about the application of the Equality Act more forcefully to make sure that equality is delivered in a systemically prudent way?

Michelle Stanistreet: We have certainly had experience. We in the NUJ have absolutely pushed many times for equality impact assessments at the point in which a company is devising a scheme and particular structural change issues. We have had some examples where the BBC, for example, has eventually carried one out, but on the current cuts happening at the BBC and the so-called Delivering Quality First initiative, the cuts aimed at news and current affairs, they have not carried out an equality impact assessment. This was a dispute that the NUJ members at the BBC were almost going to be striking on at the time of the Scottish referendum. We have come to a resolution and a settlement that is still being worked through in practical terms.

The Chairman: Oh dear, very sorry. We are going to have to leave you momentarily. We will be about eight minutes. If you could hang in there, we would be very grateful. Thank you.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

The Chairman: Thank you for bearing with us there, and we have lost a few along the way. People will re-emerge, but we are going to go to the Bishop of Norwich. Oh, we did not finish. No, you are quite right. Let us do that one properly.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: You were talking about the assessment, but I wanted to ask you about expectation statements, because there has to be an expectation of best practice. I wondered what, if anything, you would like to say about Ofcom creating an expectation of good practice for the industry and how, if at all, that could be applied.

Kate Kinninmont: I had been on a committee called the Broadcast Equality & Training Regulator, which had a very specific purpose. It was part of Ofcom and it disappeared and I do not know why. I think Ofcom is dealing with so much that it might be a very useful thing to bring in such a specific committee again who would be charged with looking at equality and training.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Monitoring it?

Kate Kinninmont: Regulating it.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Yes. Sometimes they prefer the word “monitoring” to “regulating”. It is the outcome that matters as opposed to the word that is used, I think.

Kate Kinninmont: Very good point, Baroness.

Q17 Bishop of Norwich: We heard in the previous session that Scandinavia is a beacon of equality in this area, but we also heard that eastern Europe is to some degree as well. I think in the NUJ evidence you quoted a UNESCO report that might be quite old now to illustrate that. The thing that intrigues me is why eastern Europe might buck this trend, especially if, in your evidence, Romania has almost half of its senior editors in media as women in a culture that is, when you think about the power of the Romanian Orthodox Church, very patriarchal. If we are talking about culture, why are some of these countries, with a rather patriarchal culture, ones in which women flourish in the media, and can we learn anything from that?

Michelle Stanistreet: You are right that the UNESCO report that was quoted is quite old—I think it is almost 20 years old. I think there are different issues. There is the issue of density of women in the workforce, so you can look at some of the figures and it looks quite healthy, but then if you probe further, certainly in some of the countries that you have mentioned, some work that has been done with members of sister unions of the NUJ in the International Federation of Journalists would say that the profession of journalism, the industry of journalism, in some countries is referred to as feminised. So there are more women working in it, but along with that has come a drop in standards and a drop in wages and working conditions. They are not positive things in that sense, so having more women in the industry is used as a reason to kind of devalue it or to pay less. That is not something anybody wants to aspire to either. There are a lot of challenges for women journalists working in many of those countries, and certainly we have worked with a lot of our sister unions on issues of tackling sexism in workplaces and sexual harassment, so there are a lot of problems there.

Also, I think we referenced in our submission a more recent report from 2012 called Gender Pay Gap in Journalism: WageIndicator Global Wage Report in Journalism. That found that across the piece 40% of journalists were women, and in 16 countries it found that nowhere did women’s wages and benefits equal those of men, regardless of decades of equal pay legislation in all of those different countries. That was a pretty depressing finding across the piece.

Bishop of Norwich: That applies in Scandinavia as well, does it?

Michelle Stanistreet: I do not have the list. I can send separately the list of those countries, but in the UK at that time the gender pay gap was identified as 12% by the IFJ, which was a partner in that report. Interestingly, one of the findings was that the gender pay gap increased with age as well. Again, it is the different double-whammies of discrimination at different stages. In America, I think it found that women’s share of management posts had increased by only 1% per year since 1977, so if that rate continued, it would be another 30 years before there was gender balance in the top newspaper jobs in the States. I think there is a lot of international challenges as well as the ones that we are facing here in the UK.

Jane Martinson: In terms of content and who is quoted in those reports, again there is a real mismatch between women being much more typically seen as victims and men much more typically being seen as experts.

Q18 Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury: Let me come back to one of the themes of both this session and the previous session, which is that everybody knows there is a problem, all sorts of organisations appear to have policies, but they are not always implemented. We heard very powerfully before about the lack of implementation. What I would like to ask is this. I can see that having more monitoring or information to expose the position and to make people more aware and put pressure on them is a highly desirable thing. I can also see that it is helpful to have in place the right manager—you mentioned Tony Hall as an example—but this is obviously rather erratic, whether you get an active, committed manager or not. Having said those two things, if the authorities, be it Government or Ofcom, back away from regulation, what would be three practical things that you think could be done?

Kate Kinninmont: I think transparency and exposure worked very, very well in broadcasting when it came to the Expert Women campaign, which had started off as a postgrad piece of research at City of London University’s journalism department. Broadcast picked it up and then every week there would be an exposé programme by programme—it is like the old name and shame—about the number of women. Then the broadcasters were being compared and contrasted and that was possibly the most effective thing that has happened in the last couple of years. The number of women has become much more equal, not completely equal, but the question was over the last five years. Over the last two years, in the life of this Expert Women campaign, there has been a huge difference and that has just been naming and shaming in the media that they all read.

I think there has always been legislation since 1975 about equal pay and about equality of opportunity and that we should not discriminate against anyone because of gender and so on, so that is all enshrined in the law. I do not see that we would need to change the law, but what you are asking is how we make people carry it out. They should all have to write reports and they should be published. I do not think the public will care one way or another, but I think the Government should care and the industry should care, because in the film and television industry and in news and current affairs we have to be flying the flag and setting standards.

Jane Martinson: Can I follow up on that? I completely agree that transparency and, obviously, exposure are key. I also think we need audit to make sure that we have programmes such as Expert Women. For example, Kate mentioned Tony Hall, who has done many great things, but he has also appointed to his senior team more men called James than he has women. I think those sorts of things trickle through, so it is no good having a great diversity programme here and saying, “Look, we have done it”. In my industry, in newspapers, we have fought hard. The woman who set up Women in Journalism, Eve Pollard, has said that in the 1980s it was better on Fleet Street. There were more women who were at the top—I could argue with that, but I was not working in the industry then—but I think the attitude was that there were more women at the top so there were more editors. However, we have 44% of the workforce at the Guardian, the editorial workforce, who are women, but there is still no national newspaper editor—of the papers formerly known as broadsheets—who is a woman. I think it is to do with a cultural expectation, so you have to monitor, you have to expose, you have to audit and you have to keep checking, but you just need top-level buy-in. You need not just one programme, “It is great”. You need everybody, from the Government and from all the senior people at these organisations, to believe it is good.

Just finally, on this thing about the public not caring, I am just not sure that is right. It is true that whenever you do a survey, the top thing that anybody moans about is not that they cannot see the women. However, when the BBC did do the last survey of this under Mark Thompson, licence-fee payers did notice that there were no women over 50—they did notice. I just had a young man tell me that not having older women on screen does matter. I think people do care and young girls care, and young men care as well, because if you do not see it, you cannot be it. If you do not see older women, then I think it does matter.

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury: A final response, Michelle.

Michelle Stanistreet: I think absolutely audits—equal pay audits and tools that can be used in very practical ways within companies—are absolutely vital, but I do not think that there should be a backing away from regulation, because I think it is absolutely vital. It is going to be the only practical way to achieve genuine movement on these issues and there is not another panel back here talking about it in another decade. I do think it is time to push on that and, absolutely, transparency and exposure is a very important part of that process, too. If companies, when they were embarking on a radical kind of shake-up like what has happened in the BBC, had to go through an equality impact assessment before they launched their grand plan and made lots of people at risk of losing their jobs, then they could work through some of these problems and identify, “70% of the people we are going to get rid of are women or members of BME communities”. Those things could be thought of. The reality at the moment is that a lot of companies and a lot of executives do not think of these things, and they have to be put in a position where they are obliged to, in my view.

It also filters through in terms of employment rights in that sense. When you get to a stage where flexible working and flexibility in how we run our kind of professional lives is more normalised, when men are doing this as well as women, then you will find companies will find innovative ways of making this work for all of us. At the moment, it is seen as something that just affects women, which is a negative thing and holds the situation back.

Also, when you have victories in tribunal cases where a company has done something wrong because they have discriminated against somebody, for example, through age discrimination—I know you are going to be seeing Miriam O’Reilly—that is a very difficult thing for anyone involved to take their employer to court in that way, with the glare of publicity. But when you have what should be a victory that turns into an almighty defeat, in a way, because the deal and the settlement that is done when an organisation is found to have behaved improperly, when they do not have to give that person back their job or when they enter into a deal to give that person work and then they renege upon that, that sends a terrible message to all of those women who are in the same situation and pondering whether they should stick their head above the parapet and try to do something about it. You think twice about putting yourself through that when you see how that pans out. I think there are lots of things that could change and should change, and I hope that this inquiry leads to something tangible that will benefit women in the industry.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. If there are further thoughts that you would like to put to us in writing, they will get carefully attended to. You have not only informed us, you have inspired us, so thank you, all three of you, very much indeed for joining us today.