Veronica Walsh asks if Irish current affairs media programs discriminate against women
So, we know there is a gender imbalance across Irish society. And it was brought home to us in screaming technicolour last week when Joan Burton was publicly humiliated and passed over for the cabinet finance brief that many believe was hers by right. Which got us all thinking and talking… though it’s dying down as an issue now, and we’ll go back to acceptance and same old same old. Before we do – I’d like to share a little exchange that Sara Burke had with Eamon Dunphy on Dunphy’s Sunday morning current affairs show yesterday.
The panel that morning was made up of Eamon, Philip O’Connor, Alan Dukes, Emmet Oliver, and the lone woman Sara Burke. although I suppose we were lucky to have even her, as it is not unheard of for this show not to feature even one woman on the panel. I’ll set the scene…. some way into the show the conversation turns to the pieces by Diarmaid Ferriter, Mick Clifford and Shane Ross in the Sunday newspapers – all suggesting that Burton was shafted. Eamon agrees and says it appears to be discriminatory – and Sara says she is ‘incensed’ at it etc – only Alan Dukes dismisses it as nonsense (quelle surprise! Oh what is it about him that makes me speak French?!). So, okay, grand… chat chat chat, blah blah blah…. THEN, after Eamon declares that “such discrimination weakens our democracy”, Sara puts it up to him that he himself discriminates against women and only features occasional ‘token women’ on his show. Good woman yourself, Sara!
So, what did he say? Um. I’m not sure. Here’s the exchange verbatim:
Sara Burke: “Eamon, the issue of gender equality isn’t confined to Dáil Éireann, it’s across society, it’s in this studio…”
Eamon Dunphy: “Let me tell you Sara, I go… and have done as a journalist… to inordinate lengths in the teams that I construct as a radio… ‘cause I’m the boss, I run the thing, I’m the editor of the program… in terms of getting guests, in terms of getting people and promoting women, eh, it is a problem when you go…”
Sara interrupts: “there’s often weeks when there’s no women on your panel and…”
Dunphy cuts her off: “There are weeks when, well, I’ll tell you why…”
Sara cuts him off: “There’s often just the token one, as I am today…”
Dunphy answers: “No, no you’re not. I’ll tell you why… that is… and I’ll be unequivocal about it, the qualification for being in this radio studio on a Sunday morning with me is intelligence. And honesty, probity. I won’t have spoofers, I won’t have token people, and I won’t have spinners in the studio. And in all the times. we’ve got 52 and a half percent more listeners than we had when we started because of that principal, and I think it should apply everywhere… no tokenism at all! We’ll take an ad-break now, and we’ll come back and talk some more….”
(to listen back go here - 31 minutes in….)
The programme returned from an ad break, and he read out a couple of texts then moved on to talk about something else, abandoning the discussion.
But I’d like us to look at it again. Do we agree with Sara? Why do we accept that this is just how it is? What do we think of Dunphy’s reply? What’s he on about? It’s a pity he didn’t expand on his “it is a problem when you go….”. It’s a shame he never addressed the main question of why he appears to discriminate against women on his panel, instead waffling into a defence of his show against the idea he’d allow tokenism, and then escaping to a break and a change of subject.
l searched for data on the panels for the last few months from the programme’s twitter timeline at @thedunphyshow, and lay it out starkly (see list below). There was no woman last week. There was no woman on the double election special panels the week before. In the preceding weeks there was either no woman or one woman on a panel of four men.
So what do you think? Discrimination? Is it any better on other prime time current affairs shows on radio and TV? Is it time we said enough is enough, and demanded some kind of gender balance be applied in the media pundit world?
(Hey! You media producer people struggling to ‘promote women’ as Eamo put it, check out Margaret E. Ward’s list of potential female contributors to Irish media right here 
Veronica Walsh is the organiser of the Dublin Current Affairs Group & MD of www.CBTandFeelingGood.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @VCurrentAffairs.
LIST OF PUNDIT PANELS ON THE DUNPHY SHOW FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS ( women in bold):
March 13th: Joining Eamon on the panel today are : Alan Dukes, Emmet Oliver, Sara Burke and Philip O’ Connor.
March 6th: Joining Eamon on the panel today are Dan O’ Brien, Constantin Gurdgiev, Shane Ross and Ed Molloy.
February 27th: Joining Eamon on the panle form 11-1 are Pat Leahy, Eddie Hobbs, Cormac Lucey and Ger Colleran. The Political panel up first on The Dunphy Show: Pat Rabbitte, Leo Varadker, Shane Ross and Psephologist Adrian Kavanagh.
February 20th: Joining Eamon on the panel today: Donal Donovan, Constantin Gurdgiev, Dearbhail McDonald and John Waters.
February 13th: Joining Eamon on the panel today are Sean Kelly, David Humphreys, Chris Luke and John Allen.
February 6th: Joining Eamon on the panel today is Alistair Campbell, Cormac Lucey, Jim Power and Noirin Hegarty.
January 30th: Joining Eamon on the panel this morning are Eamon Ryan, Orla Tinsley, Constantin Gurdgiev and Pearse Doherty.
January 23rd: Joining Eamon on the panel this morning are Damien Kiberd, Pat Leahy, Siobhan O’Connell and Senator Shane Ross.
January 16th: Joining Eamon on the panel this morning are Jill Kerby, Dearbhail McDonald, Ger Colleran and Brian Lucey.
January 19th: Sunday panel: James Reilly FG, Paul Somerville Markets Analyst, Pat Leahy, Lindsey Earner Byrne UCD.
Got the picture? Good. Mail your complaints to: thedunphyshow@newstalk.ie
Anthea McTeirnan
Croí na Duibhlinn
Aoife Barry
Aoife McLysaght
Arlene Hunt
Attracta McCarthy-McKenna
clairehennessy
Ann Cronin
Amanda Brown
Eleanor Fitzsimons
Edel Coffey
Anna Carey
Lauren Murphy
Jennie Ridyard
Jude Leavy
Hazel Katherine Larkin
Léan Ní Chuilleanáin
Leigh
Lisa McInerney
Laura Slattery
Maman Poulet
Megan McGurk
Clare Kleinedler
Molly
Rosita Boland
Catherine Crichton
Sinéad Gleeson
sarahefranklin
siobhandowling
Susan Daly
theantiroom
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
(To see a list of Dunphy panels going back to last July, go to : http://www.meetup.com/Dublin-CurrentAffairs/messages/boards/thread/10559380 )
Ahh sure, but don’t we have ‘Expose’ on d’telly to address all the tings us wimmin would be concerned about? Sure an’ that’s LOADED with wimmin presenters.
But whatever about Dunphy with his (sometime) 3:1 ratio, take a look at the Today FM website, there are NO female presenters in the station (not even in the crappy weekend slots)
“Joan Burton was publicly humiliated and passed over for the cabinet finance brief that many believe was hers by right…”
I’m glad of this. Burton was talking nonsense before the election about the causes of the Great Depression, saying that US President Hoover “slashed Government spending to balance the books”.
http://www.joanburton.ie/uncategorized/joan-questions-fairness-of-pension-levy-in-dail
I looked at the US government’s own historical data on Federal spending and receipts over the period:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy07/pdf/hist.pdf
It shows that Hoover drastically INCREASED spending while in office. Roosevelt continued and accelerated this trend, and the Great Depression emerged under these two high-spending leaders.
So what on earth was she talking about? Either she was mistaken about something it takes five minutes to check on the internet or she was dishonest. Either way I’m glad she didn’t become finance minister.
It’s not just Dunphy. Look at Vincent Browne’s show every night, very often it’s just 1 female.
And often that one female appears only in the segment where the papers are reviewed. The hard stuff is left to the men.
Though every so often Browne does have all-women panels. And when he does, Twitter goes mad with male viewer complaints.
[...] here for blog by Veronica Walsh about ‘token women on air’. THanks @VCurrentAffairs for [...]
[...] See the rest here: Guest Post: Token women on air? « The Anti-Room [...]
Good Post, I get tired of male-weighted panels suppurating
in their own cleverness. It’s be nice , as a consumer (like)
not to have to switch off the radio *lots*- when the
tiresomeness and self-congratulatory circle-jerk begins
to raise its head..
(no pun intended)
Misogyny here is treated so casually that’s it’s almost an inevitable social fact…loads of jokes last week (on Brendan O’Connor’s TV show too, where every week he giggled like a boarding school boy on some note of sexual innuendo) about the two female front benchers, etc. It’s all hilarious really. During the campaign there was a lot of private whispering games from FF elements about Joan Burton being a loud mouth harridan, a ‘difficult woman’ and so on, because she’s outspoken, fought her corner, can do her job, but that didn’t stop her being treated like a fishwife of the left.
[...] Walsh is absolutely correct when she points out in her Antiroom post that there is a large gender imbalance when it comes to discussion panels on current affairs [...]
Just read this now. (Was away for 2 weeks). Veronica and Sara are absolutely correct. All the figures show that women are grossly under-represented on radio/tv..both as contributors and presenters. Today FM has no female presenters AT ALL and very few female contributors.
On other commercial stations the prime time hours of 7am to 7pm are a largely a male preserve. From a strictly commercial point of view I find this very, very odd. Women make the radio listening/ tv viewing decisions in most homes and the majority of household purchasing decisions. You’d think that sponsors and station owners would actually be demanding more women on air to help boost listenership figures and sales of their goods and services!
Why is there such a huge gender imbalance on the airwaves? It’s hard to know as no recent extensive research has been done in this area.
There are so many questions to be answered/ researched:
Do many male presenters naturally choose men to talk to? Is this a generational issue that only applies to men over say, 45? Or is it because men and women are separated in the Irish educational system?
Do producers and researchers think men are better guests or believe the myth that “listeners prefer men?”
Are women poor communicators? Are women bad at aggressive self-promotion? Do we lack self-confidence? Do we shy away from the strongly-held opinions so beloved of media producers? (Dunphy never answers the question in the exchange outlined above. He seems to imply that women are more often spoofers or lightweights. Is that true?)
Is it really because women can’t drop everything to head into a radio/ tv studio because they have other commitments (childcare, work, family)?
Are men better at “winging it”? Do women over-research or over-think their responses?
Maybe it’s time for an HONEST public debate on the issue? Mr Dunphy..how about it?
While I do think there is under-representation of women in Irish media, it is worth talking to the women and men who actually organise the guests on shows such as Vincent Browne or Frontline. Each time, they start out with a topic and a desire to have a gender-balanced panel (because they get such stick for male bias when they are even one number out), but invariably they cannot get women to come on to the show.
The question is not “Why are women not invited on to the show?”. The question is “Why do women not come on to the show?”, which is probably a more profound one in the societal issues it touches on.
Worth commending is Elaine Byrne’s open directory of new voices, male and female, willing to make their case in public:
http://elaine.ie/2011/02/01/new-voices-potential-young-contributors-to-irish-media/
It’s great to see Elaine Byrne has also created a list of people willing to make themselves available to go on radio & tv. We need a greater diversity of voices in the media to ensure the most robust possible debate on the very important issues that face our society.
For those of you who may not be familiar with it a directory called “The List” of potential female contributors to Irish media has been available on journalist.ie since September 2010. This spreadsheet now includes over 500 entires from female experts in every field from medicine and science to comedy, politics and current affairs.
New entries are added every week and highlighted to ensure producers and researchers know who the newest voices are in the debate.
This list is used regularly by the national broadcaster and commercial and local radio and tv stations in Ireland and the UK.
If you’re an area expert and would like to be listed please contact margaret@clearink.ie