What Does James O'Brien Have Against Women?
These are revealing interviews with people who rarely give in-depth interviews, be it from politics, entertainment or news.
It sounds like a great podcast and I began listening when it started back in March of 2019. The first interview was with Tony Blair, not exactly someone who shies away from the limelight but certainly a coup. Then it was Ricky Gervais, a comedian who seems to thrive on controversy. Then it was Simon Amstell, another comedian and TV presenter. The fourth interview was with Dragon's Den "dragon" Deborah Meaden and I realised that this was the first interview with a woman. Four interviews and only one woman. Huh. That sort of gender imbalance is getting increasingly noticeable and not in a good way. But maybe it's just a case of scheduling and there'll be more women along later.
Sanjeev Bhaskar, Brian Wood, Kenneth Clarke and then Prue Leith. Eight interviews and two women - again 25% of the interviews. This started to feel like a pattern.
Steve Coogan, Ian Hislop, Billy Bragg, Bill Nighy, Frank Skinner, Katherine Ryan. Fourteen interviews and only 3 women. 21%. I thought things would be getting better by now but they're actually getting worse.
But then we had Paloma Faith for interview 15. Ah, ok, we'll have a run of women now, to correct the balance.
Chris Moyles, Rory Stewart, Adam Kay, Danny Baker, Timothy Spall, Michael Palin, Ben Elton, Malcolm Gladwell, Russell Howard, Michael Morpurgo, Romesh Ranganathan, Lenny Henry, Lemn Sissay, Gulwali Passarlay, Ross Noble, Nazir Afzal, David Mitchell, Lesley Manville.
That's 17 men before we get to the next woman.
After 33 interviews we have only 5 women interviewed. That's 15%. And that's just not good enough.
I'm not trying to disparage any of the men being interviewed, but there are few who meet the criteria of "rarely [giving] in-depth interviews". There are some I haven't heard of - Lemn Sissay, Gulwali Passarlay and Nazir Afzal in particular are new to me and they are fascinating people who deserve a wider audience, but can we really say that Michael Palin or Ben Elton are unknown or private entities? Michael Palin has literally published his diaries for goodness sake!
I stopped listening at some point, frustrated with the stream of men that I've often heard elsewhere. But then I saw that the latest interview is with Margaret Atwood and I decided to take a look and see if things have got any better.
They haven't.
I made a quick spreadsheet of all the episodes where O'Brien interviews someone. They totalled 56 episodes. Predominantly using Wikipedia I found the gender, age, nationality, ethnicity and profession of his interviewees and did some very simple statistics. This is what I found.
Out of 56 guests, 13 were women. This equates to 23% or just under one in four. The trend that was established in the first few podcasts has continued. It's worth noting that things are getting more balanced. Since the UK went into lockdown on the 16th March 2020, the gender balance has been much more even: 6 men and 7 women. This may be because the interviews are now being done remotely rather than in person which allows for more flexibility when it comes to booking guests, but that's just speculation.
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| Gender of guests by episode (blue is male, pink is female) |
When we compare the age of guests we can see that there are broad similarities, but some noticeable differences. The maximum age of guests is similar (the oldest female guest was child holocaust refugee Lili Pohlmann, aged 90, while the oldest male guest was 87 year old former MP Michael Heseltine). The mean age of the women was 4 years higher than that of the men (57 vs 53) and the most striking difference is the minimum age of guests. The youngest woman was 37 year old comedian Katherine Ryan. There were 6 men younger than her who were interviewed, with 25 year old refugee and activist Gulwali Passarlay the youngest of these. While I have no doubt that all these young men are worthy of interviewing, I also have no doubt that there are equally active and interesting young women that would be eager to be given the opportunity to speak to someone as prominent as James O'Brien. Women who, unlike for example, Daniel Radcliffe, don't have interviewers begging for their time.
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| Boxplot of ages by gender for guests on Full Disclosure (blue is male, pink is female) |
It gets more interesting when you look at ethnicity. I've used very broad categories, categorising people into a set of ethnicities based on the birthplace of their parents as a number of guests were first-generation British and several others arrived in the UK as refugees from other countries. While the majority of interviewees are European (mostly white British), there is good representation of other ethnicities and backgrounds. For the men. For the women, all but Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan (Polish mother and Pakistani father, born and raised in London) are white. Not all are British - Margaret Atwood and Katherine Ryan are Canadian, for example - but the lack of diversity is striking, especially when compared to that of the men.
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| Ethnicity of interviewees by gender (blue is male, pink is female) |
The final thing I looked at was the profession of the interviewees. The podcast says it interviews people from "politics, entertainment or news". How well does it do at covering this range? I identified 14 different professions interviewed:
- Actor
- Author
- Business-person
- Comedian
- Journalist
- Musician
- Poet
- Politician
- Radio DJ
- Refugee and activist
- Restauranteur
- Soldier
- Solicitor/barrister
I classified these according to the "politics, entertainment or news" categories then calculated the percentage of interviewees for those categories by gender. As you can see, entertainment is the dominant profession for both men and women. Of the 13 women interviewed, 8 were in entertainment (3 actors, 2 comedians, 1 author, 1 musician and 1 chef/TV presenter). The two women in politics were both current Labour MPs. Actors (7) and comedians (11) dominated the male interviewees as well. The men in politics covered a broader spectrum of political views with 5 Conservative (former) MPs and 3 Labour MPs.
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| Percentage of interviewees by profession and gender (blue is male, pink is female) |
You may well be asking why this matters. Why am I picking on this particular podcast when there's so many out there with probably even worse gender balance? And why is gender the thing I'm focusing on? Can't I accept that the interviewees are interesting to listen to and not whine about under-representation? These are all good questions and my answers are as follows:
I'm picking on this particular podcast because it's one I listened to and gave up on because of the gender imbalance. I've given up on a few others for similar reasons (most notably The Infinite Monkey Cage). It's just that Full Disclosure is fairly new and has only one guest at a time so the data are pretty easy to gather and analyse.
I'm focusing on gender because that's something that I'm interested in. Just today we've seen that female voices are "drowned out" in reporting on Covid-19, a pattern we see time and time again. The lack of female voices on interview shows such as Full Disclosure only adds to the silencing effect. Are we really to believe that there are only one quarter as many interesting women out there as there are men? I think not. I think that it's another example of (hopefully unconscious) bias against women being given an opportunity to promote themselves. And given that the show promises people who "rarely give in-depth interviews" it would be a perfect opportunity to get away from the well-known names and find some people who are doing interesting work or have interesting stories to tell and give them an opportunity to speak.
What really struck me from this brief survey, and what prompted me to write this up rather than just keep it to myself, was the ethnicity and background of the interviewees. There has been what looks like a concerted effort to go out and find people who don't normally get a chance to speak to the press, but only if they're male. There's a major lack of intersectionality in the guest choices: you can be an ethnic minority in the UK or you can be female but you can't be both. Where are the female refugees? The female first-generation Brits? Their stories are just as diverse, just as interesting, just as important, but they have been ignored. Women are 50% of the population and yet our voices and our experiences are heard much less than half the time.
There is often talk about the 'bond' of womanhood but our differences are arguably just as profound as our similarities. Our backgrounds, our life experiences all shape us into unqiue individuals. When we hear a diversity of men's stories we recognise their individualism and when those stories are told well we empathise with those men and become more understanding and accepting. And when we ignore women's voices and experiences and assume that all we're all pretty much the same and just bunch of uteruses on legs then we lose that opportunity to empathise. Instead we treat women as a homogenous collective, whose problems can be grouped into "women's issues" and sequestered away, not to be talked about in polite company. We need women's voices to be given the same opportunities to be heard that men are given. We need to recognise that women are mutifaceted and that listening to one woman does not mean you've listened to them all. We need to accept that there are no universal experiences that bind women together any more than there are for men, and that we need to listen to women from all walks of life so that we can stop assuming we understand them and actually understand them.
Podcasts like Full Disclosure have a really powerful opportunity to share the voices and experiences of people who should be heard but are ignored by mainstream media. It pretty much says that this is its aim. So maybe it could stop chasing the big names and go after the interesting ones. It will be better for it.
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