Shocking, stunning, horrifying, unmissable. Guardian report on female invisibility.

Interesting. Depressing.

Also just read the article AyeSmagic posted, where the president of the Girls' Schools Association says girls should be told that they can "be anything they want to be" but that they might face barriers in achieving what they want (fair enough). The article states she was "back in her study" 7 hours after giving birth to her third child. Yes, 7 hours! (not days, or weeks) and that she therefore "led by example". That is absolutely not a good example of womanhood or good parenting by any stretch of the imagination. How is that in the interests of either her, or her child, or women / girls in general, or even society?

I'd love to break down the macho corporate world but not by using my kids as battering rams or indeed my own head. After having two kids and being back at work about a year and a half I left to set up my own business. In the end I had to as if I'd been a lawyer for another year I would have had a nervous breakdown from the stress.

smallwhitecat - yes I watched the RBS programme and yes it was totally male dominated. It was men that caused the financial crisis. Pure and simple.

The FT journo you mentioned is Gillian Tett. I always read her columns and she is one of the most eloquent and well informed commentators on this crisis and has won many awards for her work over the last 8 yrs. She has a deep understanding of the causes and consequences and in my view is exactly the kind of person who should be sitting on the Board of our nationalised banks to influence its resolution.

She is currently US Managing Editor of the FT. Has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University, based on research conducted in the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. She speaks French, Russian, moderate Japanese and Persian.

Oh she has two children and a husband as well.

forkful - yes two have tried the charity Board NED route. They find that a) either the job has already been allocated internally so the advert is a sham or b) the charity wants someone who is on a corporate Board or another charity Board already.

One has even enlisted the services of a specialist who places people on Boards and got nowhere.

There is always a good reason why they keep getting knocked back but the reality is that they are not getting anywhere because of good old fashioned discrimination in their past career and now when they are applying for NED jobs.

It is well known that Boards select candidates that will fit and that the other members know already. The few women that do sit on Boards tend to get recruited repeatedly because thaey are seen as safe candidates (not that they aren't good in their own right of course) and so very little fresh blood comes into the system.

Just wanted to cross reference to this thread with email contacts for Lord Patten for those who wish to write in with their concerns.

Given that the ASA seem to be taking complaints seriously now (see other thread on this,) we might as well try our arm with the BBC as well. What's to lose, eh?

I've just written as well, MMarmite.

plus ca change

verysmellyeil - Yes I've noticed media people don't have the best worklife balance themselves and don't tend to be willing to adapt to my attempts at such (or, you know, my teaching responsibilities, meeting etc etc etc). A 6am Breakfast news spot was arranged at 6pm the night before, even though I need to travel 300 miles for it (had on kids then, they very inefficiently flew me down on a late flight to Heathrow, got me a taxi to Amersham for a hotel and then a taxi to London at 4am. Last train and a cheap hotel in Kings Cross would have done it, but that's a whole other rant!). They often want mobile numbers to call people at home and a few weeks after the Breakfast thing I got a 6.30am call about a completely different matter from a researcher on a different news program.

Haven't done any media releases since I had the baby but I know it'll be much harder.

This is going off-topic a bit, but you'd think the sub would have realised there was a reason the reporter had written "she" throughout. Did they just think, "Women are never consultants, therefore the reporter must have accidentally typed 'she' six times instead of 'he'"? I mean, wouldn't anyone with any sense just check with the journalist first? What an idiot.

PS I would love to spend longer debating these issues but have to go and get the kids from school, take back the overdue library books and buy some more nappies. After that, I might have another pop at that glass ceiling. Or maybe just .

I did complain, and had a 'verbal apology'. The reporter complained too - it wasn't his mistake. The irony was that one of the reasons that I had been put forward by one of my professional organisations to comment on the issues was that the organisation is very aware of the gender bias and is trying to actively improve it

That's dreadful about the reporter Smelly! Did you complain?

The rest of your post makes a good point.

verysmellyeli - that is unbelievable! I hope you rang the paper up and gave them hell.

that's crazy... have subbed and would have been binned for that i reckon.

But actually, I love being a mother to my small children more than I want to continually bang my head against the glass ceiling.

I feel the same way too

Also - as an aside - I think that women often don't feel that they have 'enough' to say or the 'authority' to say it. When I am phoned up to give quotes or do press, I get very nervous and worried about making a fool of myself. I'm not sure that my male colleagues would worry about those things as much.

But even if she has a name that's not gender-specific: it's still a job of work to go through and change she to he AND her to him AND hers to his. I know it's one button but you've got to do it for all the grammatical cases...

I was quoted as Dr Smelly. So obviously must be male.

it is quite bizarre. do you have a non-gender specific name?

Sorry - not to ignore the rest of your post, which was interesting - but the sub-editor changed all the pronouns to masculine ones?
That is fucking outrageous!!

I am a hospital consultant. I am one of five women in a department of around forty. I am currently on maternity leave with my third child which may colour my views! I think the issue is more complex that 'women should try harder' or 'women should be allowed to stay at home if they want to'. I have three children and work part-time, my husband is an academic and although he is extremely supportive, I am the 'main' parent in terms of administrating our family life. I do not want to sub-contract any more of this than I already do. (4 days of childcare including breakfast and after school club, a cleaner, holiday sports clubs, occasional help from grandparents, lots of online shopping)

It is about legitimising the WAY that women work and not presuming that in order to be at the 'top of your field' - and asked to go on Today and QT etc. - you need to be working all the hours in the day and never seeing your family.

I encounter casual sexism every day at work. Some is from colleagues who can be patronising (in a calm down dear sort of way) and some is offensive (suggesting I became pregnant again to get out of doing emergency work over the winter etc) but most is low-level. Some of you might say that I should challenge it all, but then I would never get any work done. Some of my patients (and their relatives) are still surprised to find a female consultant looking after them but over half of my medical students are women. So we have to work out sustainable ways of supporting women to prominence based on competence and achievement, rather than confidence and availability (ie. long hours!) We also need to allow women who want the chance to do the bulk of looking after their children when small to be able to do this without disastrously affecting their potential to return to the workplace and continue their trajectory. I worry that in the current economic climate that is not a priority. Certainly in medicine things like the GP retainer scheme and 'Flexible Careers' which allow people to do a small amount of clinical work to keep their hand in whilst they bring up a family are no longer funded.

I have done some media work, and it is ALWAYS very short notice, often at inconvenient times (school run etc) and in one memorable article for The Times, the journalist who interviewed me over the phone wrote a great article but all my quotes were changed from 'she says' to 'he says' - as if the sub couldn't possibly believe that I was female.

So I can't suggest a simple solution, apart from that fact that things do seem to be incrementally improving - perhaps we need to be better at 'rapid networking' - men often have ready made networks through uni/sports - using things like Mumsnet/Twitter. But actually, I love being a mother to my small children more than I want to continually bang my head against the glass ceiling.

forkful - exactly. When our friends and family don't see woman in successful positions (whether they aren't in these roles or in fact they are successful but aren't asked to comment on the Today program etc), we and our daughters will be expected to to the traditional female roles.

I don't think this is about whether a woman should want to be a SAHM and iron shirts all day. Its about whether other people want her to.

Its about what happens when we don't see many woman in public life.

And that is young woman find their role models elsewhere, employers find it easier to picture a man in the role and parents praise us for being good mothers when we give up work to be a SAHM, whether its whats we really want or not.