Bodyguard portrayal of women in top jobs ‘wishful thinking’
WITH a female home secretary, counter-terrorism commander and police chief, not to mention female bombdisposal experts and markswomen, on the face of it the BBC’S Bodyguard was a triumph for gender equality.
But one of Britain’s leading screenwriters has criticised the glut of women characters. Daisy Goodwin, creator of ITV’S Victoria, said the casting does not reflect reality and is showing the world through a “genderblind lens”.
“It’s a woman’s world in Bodyguard, and to some extent that bears out the facts: a woman is currently in charge of the Metropolitan Police [Cressida Dick] and until recently Amber Rudd was home secretary.
“But splendid as the notion is that women are now seamlessly integrated into every aspect of authority, it is at best wishful thinking – and at worst undermines the fight for equality,” Goodwin writes in the latest edition of Radio Times.
She pointed to Carol Howard, a former Metropolitan Police firearms officer who won a case against her employer for sexual and racial discrimination. “I completely understand the impulse of Bodyguard’s writer, Jed Mercurio, to make the world more equal than it really is,” she said. “But the problem with wishful thinking is that it lulls us all into a false sense of equality.
“If the millions of people who watched Bodyguard think a world without gender friction is real, then it makes the plight of women like Carol Howard that much harder. “It also makes it less likely that anyone would make a drama about a woman battling discrimination in a specialist police unit.”
But Mercurio said recently: “It doesn’t really occur to me that certain jobs and certain roles are male-specific or female-specific.”