No Willy No Woman's Hour
mulqueeny.wordpress.com
"Men stand up for women" on Radio 4, whilst the BBC refuses to allow tech women on the programme to represent themselves
mulqueeny.wordpress.com
BBC Radio 4 - National speech radio channel with news current affairs, comedy and drama. Distinctly middle class. News is serious high quality and it is a serious debate platform for politics.
Women's Hour - Week day mid morning daily 45 minute (if you don't count book of the week) with a weekend highlight version. It is focussed on a wide range of issues of concern to women. This includes serious issues like domestic violence, practical issues, childcare and public policy, and lighter stories and some equality promoting issues such as women in tech.
Women's Hour podcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/whnews
I think Radio4 is globally available online and has some very good content http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ Let me know if you can't access this from abroad and I will correct this.
Update: And in case anyone is wondering there is a Men's Hour too although it is on a different station (and unlike Women's Hour I have never listened to it). I think it is only weekly though. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t32zg
Emma Mulqueeny (http://mulqueeny.wordpress.com/about/) works on encouraging children to code in particular girls.
Women's Hour was planning a section about activities to encourage girls to code and invited Emma to contribute. She was later uninvited.
She then discovered:
1) That both participants would be men, both involved in programming for kids but only one with particular emphasis in supporting women/girls.
2) The reason she was dropped was that they wanted men.
3) This is Women's Hour and she was dropped for being a woman.
Being turned down for being the wrong gender is not good in any scenario, being turned down by the Equal Opportunities committed BBC especially on Women's Hour for being a women has the potential to be quite gutting.
Edit: My speculation:
From the perspective of the Producers every story needs an 'angle' and they seem to have gone for one about how some men are working to help women into tech. This may have been decided after the initial invite to Emma Mulqueeny and led to the invite being withdrawn. I don't know the process for finding guests but it probably involves junior researchers ringing round lots of potentially relevant people. At the very least the invite should have been more tentative and the dropping better handled.
My feeling is that not having a woman both as an example of a woman in tech and to vouch that there are men helping girls and women into tech would have strengthened the section but I'm not a radio producer or in the main target demographic for Women's Hour so offer the view very tentatively. In my first post I just provided background for those less familiar with Radio 4 but no comment on the story itself but you have drawn me into expressing a view.
Edit2:
Women on TV and Radio was the topic of BBC Radio 4's Media Show this week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dv9hq
Willy is juvenile slang for penis. "Women's Hour" is a long running programme on BBC Radio 4 covering a variety of issues from a women's perspective.
> I also like Capital sometimes,
Capital is some other commercial radio network.
> satire is our bag, right?
We enjoy satire.
> the same bit of me that loves Boris being the Mayor of London.
Boris Johnson, the current mayor of London, is a loveable buffoon who is immensely popular even though he's a politician. He's a bit of a guilty pleasure among some people.
> It is not always helpful to be stabby and cross about things,
Stabby - an informal colloquialism from "to stab", expressive of anger and violence.
> who was a GP
GP is "General Practitioner" - this is a family doctor.
> was so totally gutted
Totally disappointed; disheartened; dispirited.
etc etc.
Other people have covered the rest of it - a radio programme aimed at women wants to cover the lack of women in tech conferences and invited a woman to speak about it, but then called to cancel her because they actually wanted men to talk about the lack of women in tech conferences.
Male Geeks Rise Up for Women
At present, only 30% of computing jobs are filled by women and when it comes to the number of female speakers at computer conferences, the figure is much, much smaller. In an attempt to address this problem, men are now signing an online pledge to boycott conferences where there are no women on the panel. But just how effective can this tactic be? Should men be doing more to get women and girls into computing? And does the problem really lie with conference organisers or in the fact that just not enough girls are taking computer studies at school? Jenni talks to Aral Balkan, a web designer, who has signed the pledge, to 13 year old Amy who loves computer programming and to Dr Tom Crick, Chair of Computing at School in Wales.
So, the only woman on that panel, including discussing "affirmative" action like boycotting technical conferences, is a 13 year old girl...
My initial skepticism of an article that seemed to be hastily written in anger and with no trivial amount of bridge burning has been replaced with incredulity!
Therefore, I am keeping an open mind going into the show tomorrow, but I am very much looking forward to talking about how Computing At School (CAS) is trying to change the perception of computer science and tech careers in the UK.
@DrTomCrick
They probably decided to run a piece about equality in the tech sector and, on discovering that there are men with strong opinions about the problem, chose to take the opportunity to take a male angle. An opportunity that problem doesn't come up all that often for them given that most men are fairly apathetic about sexism.
Relating to the content, there's a strong analogue with a lot of the congressional testimony regarding women's reproductive health in the USA. The panel testifying in congress was made up entirely of men, which wasn't a fact lost by many involved in the discussion.
In some cases, I'd find it appropriate. You would want the foremost reproductive rights/health spokesman defending you in congress, but when there's a full panel in congress, not including a single female on the panel is a curious omission.
In the author's case, it seems incredibly odd to talk about women in tech, without actually including a woman in tech. And what seemed even more bizarre to me, was that it was a conscious decision on a program entitled "Woman's Hour"
I co-founded a program/organization to help women to get in to tech (which then spread globally). Wired UK did an interview, but the editor only wanted women for interview and the photos, so I was excluded as a man.
I was happy enough that they were interested about the subject which more important. I didn't need to get offended or call anyone anything.
Both Woman's Hour and Feedback will welcome emails about this.
There's currently discussion about the amount of male speakers on radio 4 programmes. I think iPM had something about it this week.
Also, "pink data" - jebus.
Should a male speaker be pissed too if he were the one that got kicked out because organizer wanted to make room for a women?
Seems like the author wants organizer to consider her gender only when it means that she will benefit from it.