Wonder if the BBC feels any embarrassment when it lectures us so sternly on wimmin’s rights?
Caroline Thomson has once again lifted the veil on the BBC Bubble….a little ungrateful considering she walked off with a pension pot of £1.7 million, and as she was made redundant she no doubt received a hefty golden handshake.
Why hasn’t a woman ever run the BBC?
It is quite clear how much Thomson loves the BBC. She has dedicated her professional life to it. And she played a major role in protecting it, helping to negotiate it two licence fees and the current charter – protecting it for the next generation.
However, she more than most, is exceptionally qualified to answer just why has one of the most impressive cultural organisations in the world never managed to appoint a woman as its chief?
It’s 2012 and still not happened. And it cannot be for a dearth of talent. And what better time to ask – 24 hours after she has left that chapter behind?
Pulling no punches Thomson explains that the BBC still has issues around ensuring gender equality that women are promoted regardless of career breaks and working part-time, and making ageism is a memory of yesteryear.
“I think it takes time to properly change a culture around. The BBC still needs more time….However, despite the BBC having improved as a place to work as a woman – with three female executive [board] directors – it still has a long way to go on the equality agenda for women and ageism. The two go hand in hand and its culture will only change when these issues are addressed. You can’t assume you have done it with women – it’s quite a fragile issue to address.”
And good the BBC has all these quotas in place to ensure diversity and equality of opportunity…shame none for ‘Conservatives’.
“John Birt [the former director-general between 1992 and 2000] had targets for making sure we had women and ethnic minorities well represented in the BBC. I don’t approve of quotas but targets are really rather useful tools for management,” she explains in her candid style.
Makes you wonder what else, apart from Jimmy Savile’s unusual habits, BBC employees are keeping under wraps so as not to rock the boat.
Maybe someone will blurt out the contents of the Balen Report.
If you think that is biased , then check out difference between a tory saying “fucking plebs” and a labour Mp Tweeting “Tory bastard scum” > http://kebabtime.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/two-faced-labour.html one got media coverage…
If you think the two are even faintly comparable you must have a screw loose. Mitchell is alleged to have sworn at a policeman. Karl Turner tweeted a ‘humorous’ picture. You’d have to be pretty thin skinned to find that offensive.
Yep Billy you would have to be as easy to offend as a g-36 /mp5 carrying trained anti terrorist enforcer to find that upsetting !
“thin skinned”
Would that be black skin?
I found neither “offensive” i was highlighting the double standards and hypocrisy.
But i think you knew that anyway.
It’s not a double standard. One is a very much worse offence than the other.
Not getting enough hits from your Guido posts, Billy?
Oh, I like that: she doesn’t like ‘quotas’ she likes ‘targets’.
That a classic evasion of someone who spent years in a bubble where no one’s around to tell her she’s talking rubbish.
Meanwhile, in so far as yet another former member of the BBC’s senior management has outed herself as a leftist kook (femiloon branch), you’d think they’d have sense to avoid raising the whole ‘diversity’ thing.
With nutty Caroline on the top floor, carefully counting up the number of male versus female weather forecasters – but not janitors or security guards – I guess there was no need to worry about impartiality when issues like boardroom quotas came up, huh?
It’s the BBC’s turn in the barrel. At last. It has been a long time coming. The moralising piety of this corrupted organisation is going to bite them very hard on the bum, methinks.
Having listened all day yesterday to their “excuses” over Sa-Vile we are now being offered “reasons” for the tax evasion they collude in with their people. And they are claiming they are saving taxpayers money by not paying tax. One Nation? LOL.
It stinks as illegal and immoral, and must be taken head on by the HMRC and Ofcom. And the Police, to whom the BBC were so supportive over the Mitchell issue that they ignored any other possible version of events.
What no one ever really asks is is the ‘woman’ is actually capable of doing the job. After all, isn’t merit the basis of equality?
It’s like suggesting that people should be promoted when they can’t do something just to fill up some numbers. That’s not fair on either side.
I know in today’s PC, regulated, no free speech unless we agree with it world such ideas are considered trite, but perhaps we could have a degree of actual ability instead of gender/skin colour/trouser preference?
The problem with meritocracy is that everyone gets promoted to their level of incompetancy.
And old Harriot Harperson want’s a man who can load the dishwasher rather than give her a multiple orgasm.
Explains a lot really.
Be fair. If you were trapped in a house with Harperson which job would you prefer.
I’d be dirtying plates as fast as possible! (and no, that isn’t a euphemism)
Well she is married to the well know labour female short-listed MP Mrs Jack Dromey so as a lesbian a man would be a non starter anyway!
I’m convinced that said Jack Dromey is actually a hermaphrodite.
“it`s quite a fragile issue to address, actually”.
As opposed to slurs against Israel or the USA, suggesting that all men are potential rapists or suddenly realising that the bloke you eulogised last year as a charity champion turned out to be a paedophile.
Esther Rantzen thought herself a powerless woman when up against the BBC…the Tessa Jowell defence as it were.
Caroline Thomson seemed fine re taxi expenses and mopping up over Brand and Ross.
In Beeb world-and in Wimminzwulrd too-it`s all only about THEM-their pensions, programmes and a conferred suffragette sash.
As for the raped girls?…the worthless prepschool vogueurs and voyeuses like Rantzen, Toynbee, Hunt and Caroline…can only emote and cite that their hubbies were so scary to them-which is why it never could have made a That`s Life piece.
But hey-Childline…Children in Need?…the supine, abuse condoning, fingers in their ears, worthless tax dodgers at the BBC have a few more weeks…so let`s hope that they`ll continue to bore us to death, so we`ll not want to know how Naughtie etc get funded!
And they pay their cleaners, nannies sod all.
So much for the sisterhood !
Let me see if I can wrap my tiny, parochial, wingnutty, US, non-professional journalist brain around this: the BBC has no quotas on the hiring of women and minorities, but they do have “targets”. Unless my grasp of English has deserted me this morning, I’d define a quota as a specific number one is required to meet, while a target (in this case) is a specific number one tries to aim for.
So does a target become a quota when it’s met?
but david, of course have targets, normal white english, tory or worse still jewish
on anyone or anything else 😀 … well ahem! … maybe their just erring on the side of caution –
you know accidents do happen ….
only today, a mob of dyslexic parents have kicked the crap out of Jimmy Somerville.
and you know “that overall they ll get it just about right” 😀
of course they have “targets”
Not sure, as they have some doozies, but do they have a Director of Clintonian Semantics on £400k+perks+index linked?
Be surprised if they don’t.
Why hasn’t a woman ever run the BBC?
Because the BBC is more like the Labour party than the Tory party.
Only one woman has ever run one of these three organisations, and the Labour-Guardianistas at the BBC get into an awfully sexist frothing rant if you mention her.
But then I suppose that inevitably because of targets (CERTAINTLY NOT QUOTAS) they will eventually appoint a woman, simply because it will become unacceptably sexist not too, certainty not because she has the qualities that make them think of Thatcher.
Only rumours from a sometimes reliable source, but I would put bets on the Balen Report being leaked in May of next year, with the stuff about the BBC’s Climate Change policy, but not from the BBC.
I give up
I see that Kay Burley has got herself into trouble.
Bit of lack of empathy apparently in regard of the chances of finding the poor five year old girl in mid-Wales.
I thought women were meant to be good at that kind of thing.
She DID pass on the gossip though indiscreetly from the polce though-and women are supposed to be good at that kind of thing too.
Which is pretty much all we seem to want of our women hacks-I saw her on Sky yesterday cynically abusing the girls godmother for fun.
Reckon Kay is the next BBC big name-if she`s such a callous arse under Rupert, just imagine what a git she could be on the bigger stage of the BBC.
Maybe Kirsty etc could dish the dirt now before she gets there…miaow pussycats!
The trouble with hiring, er, women of a certain age for top jobs is that bouts of confusion, hysteria and tears often result in men having to do their work for them. So appointing the irascible Caroilne might cause a doubling of the executive wage bill, and therefore the license fee too.
my wife was sacked by them for only workin 9- 6pm when she returned from maternety
even though her manager knew she was breastfeeding.
he started sending her text next saying her only option is to resign ….the list goes on.
everytime i see their sicken commets on how womens lib they are makes me ill. they areself serving pricks