It’s 2020 and it doesn’t seem to be a good time to be a woman. Again. Multiple studies have found that women are picking up the slack at home during the coronavirus crisis. The government has been repeatedly criticised for the lack of women in coronavirus decision making. And women are also being hit hardest at work with them more likely to be furloughed.
Now, it seems, that the row about the BBC’s treatment of Emily Maitlis and Newsnighthas mired the BBC in allegations of sexism. Again. Even apart from debates about Cummings, impartiality and what was actually said, Twitter is ablaze with the sense that Maitlis has been treated more harshly that many outspoken BBC male colleagues – some of whom even have regular columns in right-leaning papers where they speak freely.
Where, they’ve asked, was the ticking off for Andrew Neil, for instance, when he tweeted that Observer journalist Carole Cadwalldr was a ‘mad cat woman’? Neil was made to delete the tweets and retweeted a BBC press statement saying he ‘recognises it was inappropriate’.
Of course it’s not the first time the BBC has had issues around sexism – the pay gap, the Samira Ahmed case, their treatment of Naga Munchetty, Carrie Gracie and the closure of the Victoria Derbyshire show have all been mentioned in the last heated 24 hours as moments where women have been treated badly in stark contrast to their male colleagues.
It’s not just about whether they’ve been treated differently, it’s about whether men have actually been praised for doing similar pieces.
That issue of ‘tone’ seems to be again rearing its head. Why are men ‘hard-hitting’ and women are ‘extraordinarily aggressive, unnecessarily rude, biased & confrontational to point of intimidation’? That’s to use the phrase of MP Daniel Kawczynski, who then claimed he’d declined an interview on Newsnight because of how he ‘finds’ Emily Maitlis.
Finds. This comes just weeks after Matt Hancock ‘found’ that he didn’t like the ‘tone’ of Dr Rosena Allin-Khan, asking a question in parliament.
When we’re at the point of fury about women asking questions on news programmes or as elected members of parliament, it’s a little ‘Women Know Your Limits!’ isn’t it? It’s a little, no, it’s a LOT absolutely exhausting.
Of course, the BBC doesn’t make these statements off its own back – it makes them in response to complaints. Which makes you wonder – not to let the BBC off the hook - if there’s another root to the problem. Perhaps the kind of people who make complaints are mainly male, mainly right wing and mainly more likely to think women aren’t doing as good a job as the men? We wouldn’t say that though, because that is probably sexist.
Anyway, there is now a lot of new people complaining to the BBC – many have written to the BBC in fury at the affair and the way Maitlis and Newsnight (a show produced by a largely female team) have been treated.
In her now famous intro about the Dominic Cummings affair, Maitlis said the public mood was ‘one of fury, contempt and anguish’.
Now more than ever it seems the public mood, or at least that on social media, is definitely ‘one of fury, contempt and anguish’. Which begs the question about whether Emily Maitlis was lacking ‘due impartiality’ or just bang on?
READ MORE: Every Detail Of The Dominic Cummings Controversy Is An Insult To All Of Us