Women at the BBC

Ten years ago, I wrote this in my blog:

“A group of middle-aged men are discussing 70s pop music and how good it was and I’m wondering why there are no middle-aged women there.”

Nothing has changed since then.


It’s International Women’s Day so I thought I’d write about something that’s been bugging me for years. The representation of women on BBC television. Or specifically, the representation of women in BBC music programmes. And even more specifically, Friday night on BBC4. Or as we like to call it, middle-aged white bloke night.

There was a particularly bad example two weeks ago when they ran a three-hour “celebration” of the Old Grey Whistle Test (actually, a celebration of one of its male presenters).

It didn’t look good when Annie Nightingale posted on Twitter that she’d asked to co-present and been snubbed. In the end she only appeared in voice-over. Annie, remember, was the only solo presenter apart from Richard Williams (only one series, but still got a slot on the celebratory sofa) and Bob Harris himself, who got the full three hours. And it was Annie who dragged the programme into the modern world.  

This new programme was dreary and badly thought-out. And it was full of men. I counted the studio guests: five women and 19 men. (And if you calculated the actual airtime they all got it would be even more skewed.) So I wrote to the BBC. And they didn’t agree it was a problem.

So I looked into it a bit further, and here’s what I’ve found out.

How the BBC handles complaints

Badly. We know that. The first thing you will get is call-centre bollocks. Every time I have written in I’ve had a patronising, standard, cut and paste response that doesn’t address the issues I’ve raised. And fails to acknowledge there is a problem.

When I complained about Music for Misfits in 2015, they said: “It's never our deliberate intention to marginalise women in our popular music programmes.” Then they cited 6 Music’s Three Wise Women series, Radio 4’s Woman's Hour and BBC4’s Girl in a Band. Which just proves the point that they don’t understand the concept of marginalisation.

This time, they told me: “In selecting presenters, actors, and other contributors for our programmes (and staff to work at the BBC) we aim to employ those with the most suitable talents for the role. We don't engage any presenter or programme contributor unless we believe they're competent and can meet the specific demands required of them.”

Which suggests that they can’t find enough competent women to appear on screen. Really?? I don’t think they even realised how insulting – and out of touch with reality – this actually is.

(Three years ago, they told me: “In 'Music for Misfits: the Story of Indie' we included bands and performers because we felt they had made a significant contribution to the movement and for no other reason.” Same insult, different words.)

Then they said: “There was no intention to display sexism during the programme.” Intent is not an excuse! They’ve obviously never heard of “unconscious bias”.

But anyway, the process.

You have to go through their official complaints form. This is pretty easy, except that there’s a time limit of 30 days.

If you’re not happy with the reply you can complain again (which I’ve done, to no avail). After that you can take it higher. Maybe this time I will. But it would help if others did, too.

What will make them take notice

There's not much point complaining on Twitter, because the BBC complaints department says it doesn’t take any notice of social media; you have to go through their defined process. This is odd, because I’m pretty sure they monitor social media to decide how successful programmes are. The producers of the cult radio show Sounds of the Twentieth Century were proud to say it was the BBC’s most engaged programme on social media for 18 weeks.  

But if you believe the official story, they didn’t know about the blog post that went viral after their Britpop programme in the Music for Misfits series three years ago, or the constant Twitter complaints every Friday night.

They also say they don’t take notice of numbers. I’m not sure how true it is. They publish responses to recent complaints if they identify them as “issues of wide audience concern which have either generated significant numbers of complaints or raised significant issues”.

And the fortnightly report for the BBC complaints service only covers programmes that get more than 100 complaints. 

They don’t seem to have published anything about gender bias on BBC4 so you know what to do – please get writing and show it is “of wide audience concern”.

What they say they are doing

The BBC has a diversity strategy, covering the years 2016 to 2020. We are halfway through and nothing has changed on BBC4. 

Much of what they say focuses on staffing, which is necessary (and it’s obvious from the recent publicity about the gender pay gap that there are things they need to sort out). When it comes to representation they tend to focus on minorities – BAME, LGBT, people with disabilities. Which is good. But “ensuring gender balance” always seem to come at the end of the list.

And women aren’t even a minority – although you’d think we were by how much screen time we get. Half of their licence fee payers are female, so why don’t we get half the airtime?

They are better on drama (I love Mum) and some other documentaries. But music documentaries seem to be a blind spot, for some reason. 

They’ve actually got a project called Expert Women aimed at getting more women “experts” on screen. They’ve got a whole list of things they want experts in, but “music” isn’t one. “Women in music” is.

 When they write their equality information reports, they say smug things about how well they’re doing but that they are not complacent.  That might be true about some departments but it’s not true about music on BBC4. They’re not just complacent, they’re not even trying.

What’s in the BBC's diversity strategy

Lots of fine words. The introduction by Director-General Tony Hall says:  “At its very core, our purpose is to represent everyone…. By the time we have delivered this strategy we want to be able to say that we have built an understanding of diversity in everything we do.”

The new strategy has portrayal targets “to ensure our content on screen and on-air reflects our audiences”. This includes a target for  “50% women on screen, on-air and in lead roles across all genres from Drama to News by 2020.”

To that end, they’re offering "unconscious bias" training and new commissioning guidelines. The guidelines suggest some targets for programme  makers: “On a specialist programme, are you drawing from a wide enough range of contributors?” (Two words: Danny Baker.)

I don’t think anyone in the complaints department has read the strategy. If they had, they might at least acknowledge that they are not meeting their own standards.

So what’s actually the problem?

It’s about representation. It’s a key concept in equality.

Rock music has always had male gatekeepers, as Helen Reddington observed in her brilliant book The Lost Women of Rock. It’s time that changed. And representation is key to that kind of change. It’s about role models, it’s about being taken seriously, it’s about being visible and having your presence acknowledged.

That’s the theory. In practice, it’s about this: being represented in the same numbers as men, and – this is important – in the same context. Not ghettoised in “girls in bands” programmes, but included in every programme – as “experts”, as performers, as presenters. With equal visibility as the men.

Saying you can’t find women to come on the television is a cop-out. Women performers in rock and pop might, statistically, be a minority but there are still plenty of them. There are also plenty of women rock journalists and DJs, who have an equal claim to expertise as, for example, Danny Baker.

And don’t forget the fans. The best series in terms of representing women was People’s History of Pop, because it included the fans, too. 

One of my Twitter friends observed perceptively that one of the things that’s usually ignored is “how women experience music”. In some ways, it might be different, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valid. People’s History of Pop proved that including women’s voices can give a different and refreshing perspective – a contrast to the same old, same old that we usually get.

Please tell the BBC this is what we want.