My Mentor: Eve Pollard on Felicity Green

It was unusual to have a woman who was assistant editor of a newspaper but she was very wise. She knew that women were outnumbered by men by a factor of a zillion at that time, and she understood about newspapers where women had to be very careful about how loud and noisy we were.

She was very ambitious but keen and sensible. What she would do is very quietly put the point, and she persuaded the Mirror they needed to look at things from a woman's point of view. This was the flowering of women's pages and we did health features and all sorts of things - it's women's pages that really educated women about health in this country; contraception, the Pill, abortion and all the rest of it. I was very young and wanted to change the world and she helped me do that within a structure. She would always warn me about the fact we were a minority group as women and she often told me about how you can do things subtly. The way that she operated was calm and considered which I found particularly useful.

I left the Daily Mirror to go to the Observer magazine but I continued to see her. When there was a job going as women's editor of the Sunday Mirror they hired me, I think after talking to Felicity, even though I was pregnant.

She was a mentor for lots of us and felt it was part of her role to help young people get on. She was a great influence on the Mirror. At a time when newspapers had all-male conferences, to see conference start and see Felicity go in made you think a woman could.

Eve Pollard is a founder member of Women In Journalism and former editor of the 'Sunday Express'