Published: 25 January 2013
Country: UK
BBC Academy in conjunction with Broadcast magazine, hosted an Expert Women’s Day. About 65 industry professionals spanning broadcasters, independent producers and agents took part in master classes and networking. This event was organized as part of the BBC campaign to tackle the gender imbalance on-screen and on-air.
BBC Academy carefully selected 30 women from the spheres of science, history, politics, business, engineering, architecture and technology and organized the first training for them.
During the day the women, half of them with scientific backgrounds, were included on a panel for a live TV studio discussion based on The One Show, a Start the Week radio round table discussion, as well as training in soundbites, and walking and talking on a specialist subject, to camera, reports the Guardian.
BBC Radio 4‘s Today programme was the focus of recent criticism about the lack of women on air. The researchers at the website OurBeeb have found out that on an average day’s programme on BBC Radio 4, only a third of voices belonged to women – none of them over 60.
According to the report published just before the Olympic Games 2012, the BBC on-air presenters and quests are mostly white, well-educated men.
The Expert Women’s Day pilot event, co-hosted by industry trade magazine Broadcast, which launched an Expert Women campaign in 2010, was based around coaching and networking with about 50 programme editors, commissioners and agents in attendance, and cost £20,000, reports Guardian.
Anne Morrison, director of the BBC Academy, said she had been overwhelmed by the number of experts – 2,000 – wishing to participate, after the event was publicised. The rigorous selection procedure to target women in the key problem areas, led by science, had resulted in 450 finalists submitting video demos.