Harriet's Hobbyhorse

I have never read anything by Carol Sarler until recently, but I can heartily recommend the following comment piece - which appeared in The Times the other day.

To my mind, this speaks volumes about the priorities of the Labour Party - with its laughable and ridiculous  Older Women's Commission - while the issue of equal pay for low paid women council workers lay dormant for years.

Now I know that Harriet is her own woman and doesn't take orders from any man - yet the man in Harriet's life is none other than Jack Dromey - now a Labour MP, of course, but formerly the Deputy General Secretary of Unite - Britain's largest union.

Jack was also one of the three key national union negotiators (on behalf of the TGWU at the time) - who signed the 1997 Single Status (Equal Pay) Agreement at UK level which promised to sweep away the widespread pay discrimination facing so many female dominated jobs.
      
So, it says a lot about Harriet's priorities - and those of the trade unions - that after all these years equal pay in many parts of the country is still not a done deal.   

TV’s missing women should blame themselves

By Carol Sarler

These fading presenters weren’t complaining when they primped their way on to the screen

Harriet Harman’s hobbyhorse cantered into the Today studio yesterday, whinnying the usual outrage over the number of older women on television. This time there were facts in support: new sums show that only 18 per cent of presenters over 50 are women, while among the 481 presenters of all ages at the BBC, Sky, ITN, Channel 4 and Five, the headcount of 50+ women is just 26.

The upshot is a meeting between broadcasting executives and the Older Women’s Commission (no, really, there is such a thing) which, predictably, will agree that this is shocking. It’s the politics of the bleeding obvious: Anna Ford is just as qualified as Jon Snow, yet she’s out to grass and he’s still there. S’not fair. Fix it.

They won’t, though. Because this is not about age itself but the effect of age on appearance; its roots lie in a television tradition in which women are not there to present the news but to decorate it — a tradition that has only flourished for so long because women smart enough to know better tacitly collude with it.

The problems didn’t start when on-screen women got older; they started when they were 25 and perfectly happy to muscle past their plainer-Jane colleagues by primping and preening themselves into what passes for contemporary beauty: big eyes, glossed lips, defined breasts, dieted hips and all the trimmings of fecund allure. Not that they bemoaned the effort at the time, well rewarded as they were for their attention to the physical over the cerebral. I don’t know if Joan Bakewell minded her handle, “the thinking man’s crumpet”, but I do know she was not sufficiently troubled to lengthen the skirts that displayed eye-popping yards of comely legs.

Only now come the grumbles, as Ford’s claim to have been sidelined is echoed by Selina Scott, while Fiona Bruce says she doesn’t “dare” let a grey hair show and Kay Burley candidly admits to a career-elongating facelift.

What else did they expect from their Faustian pact? If you trade with looks as currency, you should not be surprised if it devalues as they fade.

One of the perpetual beefs of these women is that older men are not treated so dismissively when the wrinkles set in. Ford has singled out the “charming dinosaurs” David Dimbleby and John Simpson: “I fail to see any woman of the same age, the same intelligence and the same rather baggy looks.” But what she does not mention is that these men never relied on appearance to get their jobs — so the effect of age upon looks that never mattered in the first place is irrelevant.

Andrew Marr illustrates this as well as any. He was only 40 when he took over the on-screen job of political editor at the BBC. Now, personally, I think he has a lovely face — and still will have, in 40 years time. But how many women of 40 would have so cheerily faced a camera with that thinning hair and those ears, neither surgically pinned back nor even covered?

It is, of course, a moot point whether the cosmetic is predominantly a choice of the presenter or a demand of the boss (which, subconsciously, we all read as “male”, even when they aren’t). Both parties to the collusion, however, could find improbable enlightenment on US television screens. Yes, some Americans do groom within an inch of Barbie. But not all. Think of the magnificent Candy Crowley, the chief political correspondent at CNN. She’s 64, porky, dumpy and there’s not always clear evidence of a close encounter with shampoo — yet there she is, moderating presidential debates with the best of them. Or, at Fox News, Greta van Susteren who, at 58, sports her signature dragged-through-a- hedge-backwards hairstyle — yet is lit from within by skill and legal expertise.

Coming up behind them, a relative baby at 40, is MSNBC’s prime-time Rachel Maddow: cropped hair, no visible trace of make-up and too engaging for it to matter either way. And behind Maddow?

Behind Maddow, on both sides of the Atlantic, are the only women who really could be a force for better. The old gals may chuck as many sour grapes as they please; they are compromised and, as such, powerless. They sold their souls to the Devil decades ago and now comes payback.

Real hope for change lies with today’s 25-year-old female presenters and their youngish bosses who might give plainer Jane a second look, cut down the primping and preening and see a few pounds put on without reaching for the P45. Nobody stands to gain more than they do — for, as the men have proved, start as you mean to go on and you go on longer.