Here is The News

I had not, until today, heard of Nan Winton. 

In June 1960 she became the first female newsreader at the BBC, in itself a major stride forward in a very much male dominated Corporation.

It was not the catalyst to open up the airwaves to women that may have at first been anticipated. Nan Winton was removed from her frontline position on the small screen after only 8 months after audience research by the BBC indicated to those in authority that a woman reading the news was just not acceptable. (She was in fact reinstated three times) 

It is also thought that a barrage of correspondence airing the same opinion was also received, much of it generated by women listeners. 

It would be another 14 years until Angela Rippon took centre stage again and it is her name that attained the celebrity and prestige and not her disillusioned predecessor. 

The BBC, that organisation so respected and revered around the globe, was in fact struggling with its own particular brand of male elitism, intellectual snobbery and sexism through much of the post war era and indeed is still stuck in some aspects of that out of date culture to the present day. 

The 1970’s were a time of what we now call political incorrectness and in 1973 the Management at the BBC brought out a document entitled “Limitations to the advancement and recruitment of women”. 

It was page upon page of comment and policy expressing a scarcely veiled outright hostility towards women by the State Broadcaster. 

Its origins were much deeper in the history of the organisation .It is difficult to see what specifically went wrong and why given the early promising indications of a career in the media for women with, in 1901 a 9% representation growing to 17% in 1931 and yet faltering to only 20% by 1961. 

The infamous 1973 Report stated that “Women have class bound voices unsuitable for news reading and may introduce emotions”. 

This to some extent had been borne out by the public pressure to relieve Nan Winton of her job but other explanations were simplistic and insulting to women. 

These included that the pitch of a female voice could not be taken seriously, that viewers were more likely to be fascinated by looking at the newsreaders hairdo or ear rings ( the insulting term News Tarts has been attributed) and most damning that a woman would not be able to handle hard news stories involving violence, death, injury, massacre or tragedy in general. 

Some issues in the Report were cloaked in a sort of “little-lady” attitude , for example a woman would be unable to work on outside broadcasts in the cold and wet. A moralistic approach was also taken in the sentiment that a woman would not be able to make an overnight stay on location with male colleagues whose wives would not like it. 

One senior manager reported that he had interviewed many women for reporter jobs but had never found any with the remotest chance of working in that capacity. 

There was traditionally in place in Journalism a “Marriage Bar” whereby a woman reporter had to leave the job after getting married on the grounds that as a wife and mother there would be too many demands on her time to allow any usefulness in the workplace. 

The policy line of the BBC was that although a married woman had an increased knowledge of subjects the very fact that she was married made it more difficult to work on shifts. 

This recurring reliance on and indiscriminate blending of moralistic concerns and downright chauvinism made for a very confused policy approach at the BBC. 

So what career possibilities were there for women in the broadcasting and media sectors? 

There was an awareness amongst management of the high percentage of the audience being female and that journalists of the same sex were therefore qualified to identify interesting stories on their behalf. This was extremely patronising. 

Even with the appointment of the first female news duty editor in 1964 the young male journalists did not like working for a woman when in charge and many requested redeployment as a consequence. 

This was not so much a glass ceiling for women in the media as an unscalable brick wall. 

It took and continues to take the persistence and dedication of those following Nan Winton and other women  in successive decades to change the outdated and shameful attitudes of that particular male dominated world.