Have you ever noticed how few and far between female presenters are on UK radio? A quick cursory glance at the presenter list of many of the country’s best-loved, widely heard radio stations shows a stark and saddening truth that, in many cases, male presenters represent far more than half of the solo shows – especially during prime-time radio hours, like the morning shows and drive-time.
So why is this? For some reason radio has always been a male dominated field, and it’s not just me that thinks so – new organisation Sound Women, which has only come into fruition in the past week or so, holds a roster of female presenters such as DJ Annie Mac, Lauren Laverne, Sarah Montague, Annie Nightingale and Zoe Ball to name but a few, all of whom are supporting the notion that women’s interest are largely ignored.
To appease the rampant anti-feminists: I am not, I repeat, not in favour of positive discrimination. If a woman is doing a shitty job of something I would not expect her to be kept on, exactly how I would expect a man to be treated also. With the entertainment industry, however, I firmly believe that our presenters, TV characters etc should be representative of their audience – to sway the balance too far one way or the other creates a skewed view of things, and whilst I’m not suggesting there be every type of person represented (which would be impossible, unless you were Robin Williams), representing men and women should be a fairly simple task. A radio station’s presenters should reflect their listeners, if only in the loosest sense of the word, and stop treating female presenters like strange oddities that can barely be trusted as the man’s sidekick (so many breakfast shows use this tiring trick that it makes me nauseous), never mind left to do a show themselves. Women in radio are not given the chance to excel on their own.
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