4 July 2020
Women, government,
and how could they have got it so wrong?
by Professor Lis Howell
At the UK House of Commons Liaison Committee meeting on Wednesday May 27th, Boris Johnson appeared to laugh at questions from Caroline Nokes, Chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee, when she asked about the lack of women in government.
As a bantering man on the verge of poking fun (Boris likes to think he is like Winnie – remember all those Churchill versus Nancy Astor quips, where the woman always comes off worse?) this attitude mainlines into the sexism of our government. But the last laugh may be with Nokes and the many other Tory women who haven’t made it into Boris’s kitchen cabinet.
Surveys by the Journalism Department at City, University of London, showed that our male dominated administration outdid itself in the disproportionate use of male to female experts and authority figures in the mid stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In February, before Covid-19 dominated the news, the figures on the number of women experts on TV and radio news “flagship” programmes, showed that just under twice as many male experts as female experts (including politicians) made it on to the airwaves. This is very probably a fair reflection of the number of male experts to female experts in society, considering the numbers in law, academia, and on the books of expert witness agencies. [1]
But in March, on the days monitored, the ratio rocketed, to show that 2.7 men appeared on “flagship” news for every woman expert. And the figures show that the villains of the piece were politicos. Over 5 times as many male as female politicians or government advisers appeared in our news bulletins.
Of course, we need to look at the methodology. In this field no methodology is without flaws. The BBC, for example, has an excellent scheme called “50/50” where producers self-assess how many men and women appear on their shows, with the aim of achieving gender parity. However, it also allows news-editors to say when a person, despite their gender, is inevitably the right interviewee – on the face of it a sensible caveat, but in practice perhaps letting news-editors justify interviewing whoever they choose. And a straight 50/50 gender equation can also result in important men being balanced by women in less important roles. A magician and his beautiful assistant constitute a 50/50 gender ratio, but this partnership does little for female authority.
The City methodology is based on postgraduate students subjectively counting the number of expert or authoritative people (including politicians) interviewed on six “flagship” programmes – BBC News at Ten, ITV News at Ten, C4 News, C5 News, Sky News at breakfast time, and the “Today” programme on BBC Radio 4. Only 5 days a month are monitored. From 2014 to 2019 this was done every month as part of a campaign to get more women on air. By 2018 a ratio of 2-1 was reached. After this, only three months were monitored in 2019, and three months in 2020, the idea being that three months a year would provide a benchmark. It’s not a perfect system, but over the years news-editors have accepted that the City figures are, by and large, representative and useful.
But with the Covid-19 pandemic, what should have been a happy noting of a trajectory towards gender parity has become an exposé of male dominance. This male dominance is rooted in the way our administration has chosen to communicate with the public during the pandemic.
The reason we had so many men opining in March 2020, is simply that we have so many men in authority. We have nearly 3 times as many men as women in this cabinet and even the women we have in the cabinet are mostly down the order.
I think we all know that women just haven’t been there on news programmes, during this pandemic. Unless of course you look at the figures for April, when the ratio suddenly goes back to 2-1. We still have 5-1 male to female politicians and political advisers. But suddenly, we have a lot more news items about hospitals, and very importantly – about care homes. So, more women.
When I first presented these figures, some rather odd justifications emerged. One particularly crazy suggestion was that it was right that male experts dominated in March, because more men die from Covid-19, so they would want to hear from male experts.
But men in New Zealand and Germany, Scotland too, respect their female leaders more than we respect our male ones. It’s been said before, but can’t be said enough – female leaders have done well in the pandemic. Jacinda Ardern; Angela Merkel; Nicola Sturgeon; Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen; Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen; and Sanna Marin, the Finnish leader.
Whatever your political views, there are so many experienced “relatable to” women who should be in UK government and who could have made its communications more representative – Nicky Morgan, Andrea Leadsom, Theresa May, Theresa Villiers, name your favourite. But the ratio of men to women in our administration remains well in excess of the level of male expertise in society generally. And they have suffered as a result. The NHS has its faults, but over the last eight weeks it has commanded unprecedented respect from the UK populace, unlike the government. The level of senior men to women in the NHS is 1.7 to one[2]. The ratio of senior men to women in our government, looking at the top ten posts, is 4-1.
To use the sort of wartime rhetoric beloved by our leader – it seems we are lionesses led by donkeys. The women in the Tory party are nervous of stating this. But it should be noted that the top ten members of the shadow cabinet are five men and five women. The public in other countries like female leaders. Why wouldn’t they here? Donkeys be warned.
[1] Howell, L., and Singer, J. B. (forthcoming) Pushy or a Princess? Women Experts and British Broadcast News. Journalism Practice.
[2] See NHS Digital figures for International Women’s Day 2019
