Abstract
The corporate world is trying hard to get more women involved in business. Why isn't the world of journalism doing the same?
Sometimes it takes the wisdom of innocents to show us a truth we've been blinded to, so long have we lived with it. So I'm thankful to my 20-year-old daughter, Amy, for helping me to see the light on a sun-drenched Sunday morning in the back garden, surrounded with the scrunched up sections of The Sunday Times.
The Business section had fallen open on a spread almost entirely taken up with four comment pieces written by white, middle-aged men. You'll know the two pages I mean because the same faces are there almost every single week. Peeking over the main magazine, she spluttered “Sexist”, before adding, perfectly reasonably: “Why do men have to write business stories and women the human interest stuff? Aren't journalists meant to be the ones trying to push for equality in the boardroom? So they're sexists and hypocrites – saying one thing and doing another.”
So much for a peaceful Sunday reading the papers. Like most knackered fathers faced with a stroppy (not-so-innocent) daughter on a peaceful summer's day, I completely ignored her, aside from a well-hidden roll of the eyes. But then the following weekend I remembered our conversation and went straight to The Sunday Times Business section with a fresh perspective.
There were more than 20 bylines in all, one of them a woman's, and all the picture bylines were of men. When almost the same thing happened the following Sunday – the industrious and talented Sabah Meddings was the single female writer once again – I decided to conduct an entirely random, not terribly scientific but very revealing experiment.
I wanted to know how many female writers adorn the newspapers’ business pages and how many of those writers have picture bylines next to news stories, features or comment pieces. And I did so not as a journalist of more than 20 years’ experience, mostly working on and running features departments, but as a father.
Our subconscious minds accept a reality that perhaps we wouldn't allow ourselves to in “normal” life. Men in the business sections and women in the magazines is acknowledged as the norm by those of us who, unlike my feisty daughter, find comfort in the status quo. Men do certain things, women other things, that's how it works. A lazy and very dangerous mindset.
So over a week I analysed the City pages of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, i, FT, The Guardian, The Observer, Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. Just a small amount of the daily business media output, but a significantly influential cross-section of paid-for publications.
Over seven days, the scores were as follows:
So less than two per cent of all the City stories in all of those newspapers in a single, random week were accompanied by female picture bylines – six of those 11 were in the FT (just for clarity's sake, I didn't read the male-dominated markets supplement of that paper). Yet in all the newspapers almost 15 per cent of stories had a male picture byline. And almost 70 per cent of all stories are written by men. So, over seven days in the Business sections of nine of our most important newspapers, there were five female picture bylines.
Apologies for not comparing those with the bylines in the features and magazine pages, but I think we can all agree how gender-imbalanced they would be too. And picture bylines are important. They give confidence to writers, provide an identity for a newspaper section and send out a message to readers, PRs and the corporate machine. Plus, they influence ambitious young women who might want to carve out a career in business journalism.
Then again, why should we care about who writes the stories as long as they're interesting, accurate and informative? There may have been plenty of women involved in the commissioning, subbing and editing. Although not so much the ultimate editing, as Kath Viner is the only woman to edit one of the nationals I monitored.
Except it does matter and we should all care. Not just because of the impression it gives to readers about the type of person most suited to reporting such stories – almost exclusively middle-aged men – but because of the agenda newspapers are rightly trying to set, follow and perpetuate, reversing the marginalisation of women in business.
At the time of writing, there are still only seven female chief executives in the FTSE-100 – which, ironically, is almost exactly the same number as the amount of female byline pictures I found in the above-mentioned newspapers over a seven-day period. The number of all-male FTSE-350 company boards fell from 152 in 2011 to 10 in 2017. Evidence has shown that bridging the gender pay gap could add £150 billion to the UK economy by 2025. Indeed, tackling the gender pay gap is part of the government's modern industrial strategy.
That agenda is being enthusiastically pursued by the newspapers every day. In the same week that I measured the byline count, the following stories just happened to crop up and were reported across most of the newspapers I read.
First, there was The Times CEO Summit where gender was a key theme and the damaging effects of inequality were starkly laid out by the BUPA CEO Evelyn Bourke. Journalists queued up to include the old “more Daves than women in the FTSE-100” line.
Next, City veteran Helena Morrissey, who is head of investing at Legal and General Investment Management, gave a round of interviews to support her so-called Girlfund. This will allow investors to pour money into UK businesses with gender-diverse boardrooms and was rightly given a resounding welcome by City journalists.
In the same week, the Hampton Alexander Review published its 2018 report, this year focusing on the worst excuses for not giving women the top corporate job. Explanations for not having more women on top company boards include “they don't fit in”, “they don't want the hassle” and “all the good ones have already gone”. The committee has called for bosses to ensure that one-third of FTSE leadership positions are occupied by women by 2020. Good luck with that.
The following day Inga Beale, the first female chief executive of Lloyds of London, announced she would quit just hours before the chair of the Treasury Select Committee – Nicky Morgan – demanded that the Bank of England promote more women to positions of influence.
These stories and many more like them, written by both male and female journalists, appeared over just seven days. Their prominence within the City pages was a clear reflection of how important the issue of gender imbalance is.
The phrase “people in glass houses” has never been more apt. Surely the problem is just as bad on the other side of the fence, with female journalist voices drowned out by their more clubbable male colleagues. As far as I can tell, the only women regularly editing Fleet Street City pages are Ruth Sunderland at the Mail on Sunday and Tracey Boles at The Sun.
Why is that? One senior female City journalist, who didn't want to be named, told me: “There is a real presumption against women in business and City journalism and it's no surprise so few get to the top. Even so, I am shocked by these figures and feel vindicated by them. Sometimes when things trouble me I think ‘oh maybe I'm imagining it’ but this makes me think not.
“I've done well in my career but I do wonder how much better I could have done if I'd been a bloke. In particular, now that I am in charge of younger people I can see how the young women lack confidence compared with the young men, even though they are just as good, if not better.
“I have several times been passed over by different newspapers in favour of a younger, less experienced man. The leapfrogging started when I was in my 40s. This is a bit of an irony because young women under 40 are viewed as less credible on ‘hard economicky subjects’. You probably have about six months aged 42 where you are seen as the right age for an executive role.”
By the way, this desire to remain anonymous was frustratingly familiar in the writing of this piece, as if speaking out about gender imbalance would in some way have repercussions.
Another female executive said she is still being asked to write about women in a way that betrays an in-built journalistic sexism. She said: “I have felt pressure to cover women executives in a patronising way. There is an assumption that stories about women on boards can only be covered by female journalists. This ghettoises the issue. Companies and PRs can be pretty sexist too. I have had the PA of a chief executive of a FTSE-100 company phone me up to ask me to arrange a lunch for a male colleague, as if managing his diary were my job. No male colleague would ever have that happen to him. I also get PRs phoning me when they can't get through to one of the blokes on the desk, as if I were their message-taker, not their boss!
“Small slights, but they add up. Are there advantages? Yes – people remember you more, you get invited to more things in order to fulfil the female quota. Sometimes people agree to interviews because they think you are a soft touch. But the drawbacks far outweigh the benefits.”
Quite apart from whether this is good or bad for journalism, what effect does it have on business?
One female CEO of a high-profile consumer goods business is adamant that the male-dominated media outlets discourage female leaders from being themselves. “It's all about the numbers for them. Which is completely understandable but sometimes I can see that male City journalists don't get what I'm trying to do here. That listening to my customers instead of always making hard-nosed decisions is – for them – a sign of weakness. That having a work-life balance is somehow lazy and unreasonable if I'm the boss. That not worrying too much about this quarter is tantamount to incompetence rather than a sign of trying to look towards the long term.”
Mars and Venus Clash
A friend who runs a PR business that specialises in health and pharmaceuticals raised another issue about the different approaches between male and female journalists. She said: “Men want the numbers, the macho bits about profit, loss and strategy. Which is fine but in my experience female City journalists are much better at bringing out the nuance of people, what drives CEOs and executives apart from money, and the kinds of relationships businesses need to forge with their customers. We need more of that in journalism, especially if both us in PR and the news organisations we work with want to build interest amongst consumers.”
And what effect does it have on readers? Which is where I started this piece. With every new technological advance, the popularity of newspapers wanes. But their influence on society is still as powerful as ever. They matter, journalists matter, the stories they write matter. There is more meaning in good, truthful journalism than there ever was, so coarsened and distrusted have national debate and online news feeds become.
Journalism still has the power to change how institutions, such as those in the City, are run. It's ironic that the story which most dominated those City pages that morning in the garden with my daughter was that of the Qatar airways CEO, Akbar Al Baker, who said that a company like his had to be run by a man because the job was “very challenging”. The subsequent newspaper outcry forced him to offer “heartfelt apologies”. I suspect my daughter might have a say in who we fly with next time we go long-haul.
The media industry is right to put pressure on City institutions to transform their images. But unless they practise what they preach, their efforts will carry less credibility. The male-dominated parliamentary lobby has begun to crumble in recent years, more women are writing on the sports pages to reflect rising interest among female readers, and you don't see all-male comment pages any more – or, at least, very rarely.
If we really want to inspire the next generation of truth-seekers, we need to make clear to people like my daughter that the City – working and reporting on it – is not a sexist and hypocritical club for old men, as she so astutely surmised.
