BBC stages Expert Women's Day to boost female pundits in broadcasting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/18/bbc-stages-expert-womens-day

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The BBC on Friday took a significant practical step towards ending the shortage of women experts on news, current affairs and factual programmes. The BBC Academy staged its first free training day for 30 carefully selected women from the spheres of science, history, politics, business, engineering, architecture and technology.

The Expert Women's Day pilot event, co-hosted by industry trade magazine Broadcast, which launched an Expert Women campaign in 2010, was based around coaching and networking with about 50 programme editors, commissioners and agents in attendance, and cost £20,000.

During the day the women, half of them with scientific backgrounds, were included on a panel for a live TV studio discussion based on The One Show, a Start the Week radio round table discussion, as well as training in soundbites, and walking and talking on a specialist subject, to camera.

Those attending the event, at the BBC's White City base in west London, to meet and assess them alongside practical coaches included Ceri Thomas, editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme – the focus of recent criticism about the lack of women on air – and executives from BBC News and Sky News.

Anne Morrison, director of the BBC Academy, said she had been overwhelmed by the number of experts – 2,000 – wishing to participate, after the event was publicised. The rigorous selection procedure to target women in the key problem areas, led by science, had resulted in 450 finalists submitting video demos.

Following the training, the contact details of the first 30, plus YouTube excerpts from their contributions will be posted, with their consent, on a database. Morrison expected that there would be bookings for them from BBC News and Sky News as soon as next week. There is also to be followup session, and a second group of 30 would-be contributors have been told to stand by for a further two Expert Women's Day events.

The training day was a result of frustration within the BBC that its editors and commissioners have been slow to respond to a long-running problem, in part because of the pressures of deadlines. Finding credible new contributors can be time-consuming and women tend to decline invitations more than men.

London City University's School of Journalism has been awarded research funds for a further year to monitor and publish monthly the ratio of male-to-female expert contributors on key programmes.

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