Toe to toe

There's something now slightly unseemly about the campaigning for position of BBC Director General. A little peer behind the Times paywall on Friday found a discussion of two contenders - "women, but ..significantly older than their male rivals".

 "Insiders" and "supporters" were either asked for or proffered opinions as to why Caroline Thomson, at 57 and Helen Boaden, 56, were not already at the top of the tree at such an immense age.

For Caroline: “She was conservative in her career choices at a time when her male counterparts were pushing ahead. It should be more widely understood that women have different career patterns because of the pressures of motherhood. Now she’s in her fifties, she can operate like all the men could in their forties.”

For Helen: Ms Boaden’s supporters say that her gender also contributed to the slower progression of her career, but for a different reason. She and her husband were unable to have children, which a friend described as a great sadness to them. The friend said: “She thinks men have more of a game plan, whereas she felt she’d reached the summit of her ambition when she became a Radio 4 reporter. She thinks a lot of ambitious men decide they have mastered a job after a couple of years and then move on. She has tended to stay in posts well after mastering them because she was enjoying herself.”

A similar agenda flows through a long career profile of Caroline Thomson by Dan Sabbagh - so detailed that it looks like the answers came from Caroline herself, rather than "supporters".  Whatever next ?  Live public hustings ?  DG debates ?

• The photograph of Caroline accompanying Dan's paean of praise is by Louise Edwards of Cater, set at a jaunty angle and cropped by Guardian News and Media Imaging, who've sorted eyebrows and added eye twinkle. Let's see them try that on a male candidate....