For its next boss, the BBC must resist the Old Girls’ Network
The director-general role requires the best person for the job, not the best woman
Last October, I participated in a debate at the Cambridge Union about whether Eton should be nationalised. I was the only woman (of six) in the debate, and it was clearly going to be a very macho tussle about class. I embraced the challenge with zest.
Did it bother me that I was the only woman? Not in the slightest; in fact, it hardly crossed my mind until I was confronted with the visual spectacle of five tuxedos at the dinner beforehand.
It didn’t seem to interest anyone else much, either – neither my fellow speakers nor the audience.
This was, in my view, as it should be. Women (and men) should be seen first and foremost as people and judged accordingly. A few months previously I had done a debate at the Oxford Union, primly confined to female speakers. I found this insulting, since it implied that as a woman, I would somehow be crushed were I to come into contact with a man’s argument.
Unfortunately, however, the idea that without hand-holding and special measures women can’t do the job properly goes beyond student debating chambers, and has for some time permeated British society right to the very top. Famously in the 1997 general election, Tony Blair deployed all-women shortlists to select candidates in half of all winnable seats. The legacy of this has been mixed, to say the least.
Now, the dubious logic behind sex quotas is threatening to sway the appointment of one of the toughest and most culturally sensitive jobs in the country: that vacated last week by Lord Hall, director-general of the BBC. It has been made clear the Beeb wants a woman for the top job, and is (almost certainly) going to have one.
In October, veteran Today presenter John Humphrys, one of the most macho interviewers on air, declared: “It is still outrageous that the BBC, which is nearly 100 years old, has never had a woman directorgeneral and I think that is just plain wrong and the next one has to be, in my view.” Thanks for that, John.
Appointing a woman would clearly be politically advantageous, given that the corporation is currently mired in legal battles and humiliating revelations over its gender pay gap.
Earlier this month, Newswatch presenter Samira Ahmed won a landmark £700,000 employment tribunal against the Beeb for back pay; last week, Today presenter Sarah
Montague was awarded a £400,000 payout on the same grounds. The corporation’s bill to female employees paid less than their male counterparts could stretch deep into the millions.
But playing gender politics to keep up appearances at an awkward time is an insult to the director-general role, to those who pay the BBC licence fee, and, crucially, to women.
The job’s specs include deciding on the future of the licence fee, working out how to handle the impact of Netflix and its ilk, and how to work with the viewing habits of smartphone-glued young people. This is going to be mind-bendingly tricky to negotiate: clearly, the directorgeneral role requires the best person for the job, not the best woman.
Then there’s the fact that the whole thing exudes hypocrisy. Desperate to appear to be championing equality, and above all banishing any semblance of an old boys’ club, the BBC seems to be recruiting from the old girls’ network instead.
Those being tipped for the top job are already establishment figures, run major corporations, are impeccably well turned out and appear deeply comfortable in their own, wellentrenched power – as they should be.
Top contenders include Alex Mahon, the Channel Four chief executive and the first woman to run a big British broadcaster; Charlotte Moore, the BBC’s director of content; Gail Rebuck, the chairman of Penguin Random House UK and long tipped for a big job at the BBC; and Dame Sharon White, former head of Ofcom.
All of these women have impressive credentials: White, currently the chairman of John Lewis, was also the first black person, and the second woman, to become a Permanent Secretary to the Treasury.
In 2017, as head of Ofcom, she said the BBC was “too middleaged and middle class” and did not rule out quotas for making British broadcasters “reflect the diversity” of Britain – a hideous imperative for an organisation trying to make good entertainment, but just the kind of thing the woke-courting BBC now appears to lap up.
One of the main aims of feminism, at least in the Seventies, was to get the world to recognise that women were people, not toys, or inferiors, or servants, or objects – and, above all, that we can think and work just as well as men.
When it comes to jobs, the problem has been old sexists blocking our path, but they’re being weeded out one by one. What organisations can do in the meantime is show they’re capable of considering women for top roles based on their merits alone, and not their sex.