Women

A frenetic International Women's Day for the BBC.  Helen Boaden, Caroline Thomson, Jana Bennett and Janice Hadlow will all have been relieved to be included in a "power list" of the top 50 women in UK film and tv. Bob Shennan, Controller Radio 2, announced that Alan Carr's weekend slot will be filled by Liza Tarbuck, 47.

And then that steady pair of hands, CFO Zarin Patel, gets the tone wrong in an interview with a specialist economics website, discovered by those cheeky media boys at the Guardian. "To be honest, we have stopped worrying about gender issues at the BBC".  What I think she meant was across the workforce in general, not on screen.  Zarin says half the BBC workforce is female - the most recent figures I can find put it at women 48.5%, men 51.5% (though taking Scotland on its own, there it's 52% women against 48% male. Scotland, however, is not helping with ethnic diversity targets. Black and Minority Ethnic staff are 3% of the workforce, against 12% for the rest of the BBC). Most recent figures from the Civil Service as whole say women there make up 53% of the workforce.

The issue is, therefore, with a healthy gender balance supporting the output, why isn't there better representation on screen ?