BBC – a job creation scheme run by women, for women

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Mike Buchanan

[Note added 11.3.14: This piece has just been published on ‘A Voice for Men’]

Have you ever wondered why the BBC’s output is so relentlessly female-friendly and clearly designed to appeal to women? Even when men are presenting programmes, or are the key characters in documentaries etc., it’s as if all the viewers are assumed to be women. I’m a fan of the TV chefs ‘The Hairy Bikers’, but it has to be said that ever more of the content of their BBC shows is information-light and entertainment-rich. Even the most factually based BBC pieces are reliably associated with an emotional angle. The Hairy Bikers are regularly put into situations clearly designed to humiliate them. In their latest series, in one episode, they dress up as sumo wrestlers. The suspicion must be that female TV executives are humiliating men for the amusement of female viewers.

A number of people have alerted me to the increasing domination of women in the television sector, and it’s not unique to the BBC. Partly because the BBC isn’t a commercial organisation, women have been enabled to manipulate their way to senior positions.

The following link will take you to the latest edition of the Hairy Bikers’ latest series, The Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure. The credits start at 58:33. The programme will be available on iPlayer (in the UK, at least) until 27 March.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03wvbv1/The_Hairy_Bikers_Asian_Adventure_Thailand_Beaches_and_Mountains/

Here’s a breakdown of the roles of the people associated with the programme:

WOMEN (13)

BBC Commissioning Editor

Series Producer

Producer

Executive Producer

Edit Producer

Editor

Production Executive

Production Manager

Home Economist

Development Producer

Assistant Producers (2)

Production Co-ordinator

MEN (8)

Editor

Researcher

Dubbing Mixer

Online Editor

Colourist

Sound

Photography

Additional Photography

The most important (and presumably highly-paid) jobs are being done by women, while the technical jobs are being done by men.

As Steve Moxon outlined in The Woman Racket (2008), women display a very strong same gender preference when recruiting and promoting staff, while men don’t, contrary to feminist conspiracy theories such as the ‘glass ceiling’. Steve and I were members of a panel which gave evidence to a House of Commons inquiry (‘Women in the Workplace’) in November 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwqTi6HN0pM

Two women were on the panel. One was the sociologist Dr Catherine Hakim, whose paper on Preference Theory, published in 2000, we cite all the time. Her research showed that while four in seven British men are ‘work-centred’, only one in seven British women is. And that isn’t changing over time, despite feminists’ conviction it is.

The other woman on the panel was Heather McGregor, who for many years has been the owner and Chief Executive of Taylor Bennett, a London-based executive recruitment company. We challenged a claim she made during her evidence at the inquiry, concerning the financial impact of increasing the number of women on corporate boards in Norway (following legislated gender quotas, in 2005) and she altered her evidence (as published in the final report) accordingly.

Ms McGregor was a founder member of Helena Morrisey’s 30% Club, which aims to increase the proportion of women on major corporate boards. A third of FTSE100 chairmen are members. A reasonable person might think that Ms McGregor is keen on gender equality, so let’s look at the gender balance of her own company:

http://www.taylorbennett.com/team/#/meetourteam

Of the 17 members of staff, just three are men. In the past it’s been just one or two.

About Mike Buchanan

I'm a men's human rights advocate, writer, and publisher. My primary focus is leading the political party I launched in 2013, Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them). I still work actively on two campaigns I launched in early 2012, Campaign for Merit in Business and the Anti-Feminism League. In 2014 I launched The Alternative Sexism Project, aiming to raise public understanding that the sexism faced by men and boys has far more grievous consequences than the sexism faced by women and girls.
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  • realize this isn’t about women but about postmodernism, about the backwarding pseudological LIES femini$$m-samesexuality-atheism.

  • vadark

    The BBC are getting worse and this is having a knock-on effect with other channels but in actual fact I reckon feminised TV has been going on for at least two or three decades. I can hardly bare to watch TV any more; it’s so full of double-standards. Women are afforded far more thought, concern and overall protection in terms of safety, sexualisation and nudity, decency and dignity, political policies, health, news coverage. The list goes on and on…. one can’t watch 5 mins of TV these days without some kind of double-standard smacking you in the face. I was watching a TV programme just the other day and couldn’t help wondering why the female face was blanked out here from 25 mins…:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03wz87k/Caught_Red_Handed_Series_2_Episode_14/

    • Agreed. Channel 4 News is TERRIBLE in this area. There was a piece on the treatment of rape allegations last night. The interviewer was Cathy Newman (feminist), the interviewee a feminist professor attached to the Metropolitan Police. A hapless male police officer all but waved a white flag in the face of a torrent of feminist BS. It got me so angry that I decided not to post a link to it on this blog, lest viewers put an axe through their computers!

      • tamerlame

        Females are oppressed, so feminists are attached to the police? I thought the state didn’t pay attention to oppressed groups? The amount of feminists attached to the government shows clearly that feminist theories about female oppression are nonsense.

  • Note how the BBC did everything in their power to try to silence to Harman / Hewitt PIE story. Finally the story became so huge that their silence became untenable and so they were basically forced to start doing their job.

    Even when they did begin coverage, they framed the story in terms of Harman’s response and Milliband’s support. This would have been fine as a follow up, but such reports were actually the very first time they’d touched the issue in almost 40 years.

    If you look at the BBC newspaper reviews there were 3 or 4 days when this story got going where they pretended the Daily Mail didn’t exist!

    • Thanks for this. And of course it only got onto the BBC because of the Daily Mail, as Harman admitted at the start of her interview with Laura Kuenssberg.

  • Mike Porter

    I worked for the bbc for thirty years, and it did tend to become more female friendly over time. I remember in the latter nineties they held ‘bring your daughters to work’ days. Luckily, I did not have to provide any input, as they wanted female role models.

    Mykter

  • Here , here Mike! Maybe it’s also safe to assume TV is made with women in mind because they are its main consumers as men work harder and longer hours. Not to mention that this type of TV is easy to consume and will no doubt appeal as it is not challenging to women in any way. There is too much tripe out there to distract them. Loose Women is the perfect example, clearly shown at a time of day when only women who choose not to work can watch it, yet at the same time it fires them up about how awful men are (the same men who are out to work to fund their stay at home lives either as partners or as tax payers for single mothers) and tells women about ‘their rights’. If they can’t be bothered to work, why exactly should they have rights!

  • Mike, these stats are invaluable. Well done. Can you at one stage, accumulate the gender imbalance into a table i.e. keep aggregating this data, it’s incredible that they would wish to maintain the position that women are not represented in managerial hierarchies, when in the media they predominate.

  • The BBC is so female friendly because the mainstream media promotes its own political agenda. It just so happens that feminist have obtained many positions within the western media and so therefore promoting feminism has become part of its political agenda.

  • tamerlame

    BBC don’t do any decent male TV. No decent Sci Fi shows, no shows covering male interests like computer games etc….

    Good thing I don’t have a TV any more, so I don’t have to pay my tv license.

    I have caught the BBC out lying before just by switching to another news channel. There was this person beaten up by the police, the BBC article implied that he was beaten up by the police because he was violent. I then switched over to ITV and they covered the same story, the story showed clearly that the police attacked him in a case of mistaken identity.

    If the BBC lies so badly about that, it shows you that they can’t be trusted at all. BBC are a arm of the government, how can you trust them to be impartial?

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