News

I’ve been interested recently to read some media reports by a local branch of the Fawcett Society on the representation of women in the media. They can be found here and here.

By counting the numbers of pictures/mentions of men and women in various media genres and analysing whether they are included because of what they look like or because of their achievements, they provide a snapshot of the very different ways in which the two genders are represented in books, magazines, newspapers and on TV.

Their findings on children’s TV and literature make particularly stark reading, because the culture children are exposed to will help shape their attitudes to themselves and to others as they grow up. The researchers found that, on the sample day, on the CBeebies channel, 100% of story narrators were male, as were a whopping 70% of characters shown. What message does that send out to girls about their importance in society and their right to have their voices heard?

The ratio of female to male characters in both adults’ and children’s TV and literature is something I tend to get very hot under the collar about, particularly the ratio between male and female central or authoritative characters.

I very often get into debates with people about this and am accused of “playing a futile numbers game”. The usual arguments I hear (and I’m sure many of you will be used to hearing these same cracked records, too) are:

(a) Shouldn’t we be focusing on serious problems, like genital mutilation, forced marriage, domestic violence, female infanticide? Isn’t how many female characters there are in a children’s book too trivial to worry about?

To which I would respond, well, no, actually. Men who feel they have the right to subject women to violence and coercion do so because they believe that merely having a Y chromosome makes them intrinsically more valuable and powerful than people without one. They weren’t born with this world view. I’m not suggesting that reading children’s books with a male: female character ration of 3:1 is, on its own, going to make someone abusive to women. But it’s one of the many things that cumulatively teach children to believe that men are “naturally” more important than women.

(b) Surely having one powerful or strong female character in a book is enough? It gives girls a role model and shows that women can achieve?

If it were the 1950s, when real-life female leaders were thin on the ground and school careers advisers counseled girls not to aim for any job more authoritative than a secretary, I might be able to buy that argument. But we are no longer in a position where girls are starved of any role models and anything is better than nothing.

Indeed, literature and TV often lags woefully behind real life in its portrayal of authority figures. For example, one of the clichés of detective stories, in novels and on TV, that most does my head in is the male-female authority sandwich. The female second-in-command, the female sergeant seems to be everywhere in detective series these days, from DS Reid in Taggart, through DS Havers in Inspector Lynley, to DS Clarke in Rebus (and, although they’re not police officers and none of them has a formal rank, arguably Harry-Hermione-Ron in Harry Potter is the ultimate example of the male-female authority sandwich). And what a depressing example of faux feminism that is! I always feel that the female sergeant is being held up as an example of how right-on the author is and how far on society has moved, that we are supposed to be grateful that’s she’s made it to the dizzy heights of the rank of sergeant and isn’t still languishing as a lowly Constable. Shock! Horror! She even has male constables working under her!

But, of course, none of this mitigates the fact that the woman is always stuck in second-in-command, that the inspector whose name is the title of the series is male, that he is the one whose maverick but flawed genius is central to the franchise and that, while she might be allowed to be bright and resourceful and sometimes even hand him the crucial clue without which the case wouldn’t be cracked, his is the central consciousness with which we are invited to identify, to the extent that even his failings and weaknesses are fetishised.

Where fictional female police officers are allowed to reach the rank of inspector or higher (e.g. in the Prime Suspect and The Commander series), the focus is usually on how hard it is being a woman in a man’s world, with her gender being presented as a rarity and a problem.

The fact is, though, that in real life it is nowadays far from unusual to see a woman in the higher echelons of the police service. There are female superintendents, commanders, commissioners and chief constables. Why can’t we see more police inspectors in fiction, as in real life, who just happen to be women?

So, no, I don’t think having one female character in a position of authority or a position of importance in the plot is enough: while it might demonstrate that women can be important, the fact that they are in a minority still reinforces the sense that it is far more likely and normal for men to be leaders, often suggesting that this is less likely and normal than is actually the case in real life.

However, I don’t think it’s always wise to get too hung up on rank and positions of authority. It is not, in my opinion, a good idea to start criticising female characters for “only” being a stay-at-home housewife or for “not being strong enough”. That would reinforce patriarchal notions about paid work outside the home being the only work of importance and set standards of “feistiness” and “strength” that female characters are expected to meet that are higher than those expected of males. Male heroes aren’t always expected to be “strong” – indeed, when they show vulnerability, we often love them even more.

For me, the most important thing is to have more female characters in central roles, more female characters who are presented as the subjects of the stories. I’d love the female sergeant if it were her name in the show title, if the stories were about her problems and concerns and her role in the investigation. She doesn’t have to have a promotion – she just needs to be shown to be important.

(c) But the author didn’t intend the text to say anything about gender or to imply that one sex is superior to the other! That’s just how the characters happened to appear in their head. It would be unjustifiably interfering with their creative control of their work and lead to political correctness gone mad if we insisted that all books/TV shows had to have exactly 50% male and exactly 50% female characters.

I will concede that, in practical terms, it would be impossible to insist, for example, legally, that books and series had to have an even gender split of characters and might make plots and characters seem formulaic and sterile.

The trouble is that it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: while male characters being in the majority is the predominant practice, most authors will subconsciously follow this practice when characters “just happen to appear in their head”, because they are heavily influenced by prior literature. Until we start seeing more books and TV series with as many or more female characters than male in the centre of the action, authors and screenwriters are far more likely to see a male face in their head when they think of the words “hero” and “villain” and a female face when they think of “assistant” or “love interest”. In my opinion, it would be good if writers voluntarily started operating positive discrimination and didn’t just go with the clichéd idea that first pops into their head. And if publishers and commissioning editors didn’t lean on them to follow the status quo.