Greater Gender Balance Equals Greater Diversity? Well, yes, Rachel Smalley, but only in relation to gender - a factor which in no way guarantees a diversity of viewpoints. And it is, surely, the messages which are carried on the nation’s airwaves that matter most – not the gender of the broadcasters who carry them?
IT WAS ONE of the most “respectable” of the Suffragette
arguments. Give women the vote. Allow them to stand for Parliament. Make them
ministers – even prime ministers – and society will be transformed. The mere
presence of women in the halls of power (respectable women, that is, because
powerful men and disreputable women have never been far apart) can only soften
the raw masculinity of the political process and usher in a more caring, a more
productive, and – most importantly – a more peaceful world.
All nonsense, of course. No sooner was war declared in 1914,
than the leader of the British suffragettes, Emmeline Pankhurst, and her
ambitious eldest daughter, Christabel, were up on the nearest platform, loudly
urging every able-bodied British male to enlist in the great fight for King and
Country. From chaining themselves to railings, the Pankhurst’s impressive army
of suffragettes were swiftly redeployed to handing out white feathers to any
young man not in uniform. When it came to mass slaughter, the female of the
species was determined to prove herself no less deadly than the male.
Or, even deadlier. Because, once again, when women did
become prime ministers (be it Israel’s Golda Meir, India’s Indira Ghandi, or
Britain’s Margaret Thatcher) they did not show themselves to be one whit less
willing to unleash fire and death than their male counterparts. (As anyone
familiar with the careers of Boudica, Isabella de Valois, Catherine de Medici,
Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great could confidently have predicted!)
Old news, one might say. But, one would be wrong. Because no
matter how many times it is knocked down, the argument that women, simply by
being there, or by virtue of some magical essence peculiar to the female of the
species, will make an important difference to the way everything from
corporations to cabinets are run, keeps popping right back up again.
The argument’s latest protagonist is the broadcaster Rachel
Smalley, who used the occasion of John Campbell’s appointment as Radio
NZ-National’s new drive show host to lament the preponderance of male voices on
prime time radio.
“The perspective a male host takes into an interview is
often very, very different to that of a woman”, wrote Smalley, in her column on
the Newstalk-ZB webpage. “The perspective any of these hosts take into an
interview about domestic abuse, sexual violence, or funding cuts to women’s
refuge will be very different to mine.”
Really? I would have thought that, on any issue, a
journalist’s perspective – male or female – would be determined by their
willingness to set aside stereotypes and prejudices and allow their
professional judgement to be guided by the evidence on offer. And isn’t their
personal response to domestic abuse and sexual violence as likely to be
determined by their capacity for empathy as their gender? After all, it was a
male, David Cunliffe, who told a women’s refuge conference that the statistics
relating to sexual violence made him “sorry to be a man”. By no means all the
people who pilloried him for that comment were men.
Indeed, Smalley’s assumptions regarding the positions a male
journalist is likely to take on everything from paid parental leave, to aid for
victims of the wars in the Middle East, might, themselves, be characterised as
examples of sexist prejudice. Do fathers have no stake in the quantum of paid
parental leave? Do journalists like Robert Fisk, and our own Jon Stephenson,
not risk their lives to bring the stories of the victims of war to the world?
Smalley’s argument would have been a great deal stronger if
she had couched it in terms of ideological, rather than gender, diversity. The
problem with prime-time radio in New Zealand is not a preponderance of male
voices, but of right-wing voices. It is, surely, the messages which are
carried on the nation’s airwaves that matter most – not the gender of the
broadcasters who carry them?
Mary Wilson (the broadcaster John Campbell is about to
replace on week-nights between 5:00 and 7:00pm) will soon be playing a major
role in shaping the messages coming out of Radio NZ-National. Reality TV
suprema, Julie Christie, already plays a very similar role at MediaWorks.
Now, ask yourself: Are the radically different messages
carried by these women’s respective networks more likely to be the product of
their makers’ gender – or their politics?
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of 10 August 2015.
