“I see progress but we’re impatient for equality”: Expert Women project tips the scales towards gender equity in broadcast news

“I see progress but we’re impatient for equality,” said Right Honourable Baroness Harriet Harman at the Expert Women – 10 Years On conference, which was hosted at City St Georges, University of London.

The event revealed the latest statistics on gender equity in broadcast news and found double the number of men experts feature on air compared to women experts.

While this is far from equal, it is a significant improvement compared to a decade ago, when the academic research project began, as men experts were found to be featured at four times the rate of women experts.

Baroness Harman, who sits in the House of Lords, said she always listens to the results of the project “with interest” and “sees progress” but called on the BBC to implement gender quotas.

Men still dominate the news, but the Expert Women project has been driving progress

The study was carried out by Professor Emerita Lis Howell and Professor Suzanne Franks from the City St George’s Department of Journalism.

“We’ve seen the Expert Women on Air project make a real difference to gender parity in broadcasting,” says Professor Howell. “When we began, broadcasters were getting quite competitive in fixing their stats.”

What followed the launch of the project was a series of new initiatives – such as training days hosted by City St George's at ITN, training days at the BBC, work by broadcasters to expand their databases of regular commentators.

In 2017, presenter Ros Atkins launched the BBC’s 50:50 data equality, which is now lead by producer Miranda Holt, who was a panellist at this week’s conference.

The event saw around 90 attendees – made up of journalists, academics and members of the public.

One such attendee was aviation commentator Sally Gethin, who credits the conference in helping her “catch a break into broadcast media”, starting with a live interview on BBC News. “I haven't looked back since then!” she added.

The project has grown to become international, with journalist Betty Kankam-Boadu delivering a panel on the results of the monitoring project in her home country of Ghana.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show the following day, Professor Howell made a pitch for the radio show’s hosts to become the successors to the monitoring project.

A step change in health reporting: lived experience is recognised as expertise

An additional strand to the research conducted for the Academy of Medical Science found patients were beginning to be treated by broadcasters as experts in their own right. By virtue of their lived experience, they were seen as able to influence policy, rather than simply being featured as examples.

Speaking on a panel about this step change in health reporting was Lynn Laidlaw, a Co-Investigator of COVID Shielding Voices. She has a rare disease and shielded during the pandemic.

“Acknowledging me as an expert through experience does not diminish the expertise of others,” Ms Laidlaw said. It was patients, she argued, that provided evidence when things went wrong.

Fellow speaker Heather Evans is the widow of Perry Evans, a haemophiliac who was affected by the Infected Blood scandal.

Following the death of her husband, she found speaking to media about her experience “taxing” and “exposing” but felt she was finally being “listened to” and encouraged other women to speak up.

She felt a positive switch had happened when the media began using the terms “the infected” or “the affected” rather than describing people like her late husband as “victims”.