How my Twitter plea for women writers opened the floodgates

An unscientific review of the pitches I receive suggests women are more uncertain about their qualification to comment

As comment editor, one of my first jobs when I start work at 7am is to secure a writer to respond to each of the main breaking news stories that day.

Their job as columnists is to provide context, colour, insight and analysis; to give us a new perspective on the issues we thought we already understood. Part of my job as an editor – if we want that perspective to reflect our readership – is to make sure we hear from as many women as men.

Achieving that gender balance is more difficult than it sounds. Although we have both male and female journalists on staff as columnists, we also commission comment from a wide range of other voices – students, activists, freelance writers, experts in other fields, citizens on the ground living through the stories we cover.

Each morning my inbox is flooded with messages from these writers with pitches for comment and analysis. Each morning I feel a rising despair as I realise that the vast majority of these potential writers is male.

Why is it that so few women pitch compared to men? I raised this question on Twitter yesterday, in an impassioned plea to women to stop overthinking their ideas and just get in touch. The tweet went viral, and hundreds of female writers shared their experiences.

There are, I think, a lot of reasons for the gender imbalance among talking heads. The first is economic: women are more likely to have caring and other responsibilities, and often cannot make themselves available on a whim to give their take on whatever issue is setting Westminster alight. At 7am, they are more likely than men – statistically, of course – to be busy dealing with a family breakfast and the school run to be allowing themselves time to deliver an original view on the talking points of the day.

Secondly, an unscientific review of the pitches I receive suggests women can be uncertain about their qualification to comment. They tend to hold off getting in touch until they are sure their idea is perfectly honed. But by then we’ve likely already commissioned another writer (often male) who got in touch earlier with a good idea.

It was this tendency to hold back that I took to Twitter to urge women to overcome. Get in touch and share your thoughts, I said. If the concept is exciting, that is often enough to secure the commission.

Finally, women are more likely than men to be attacked and abused on social media when they are bold enough to have both a public profile and – the shock! The horror! – an opinion.

This is understandably offputting. The vitriol hurled at even the most mild-mouthed columnists is enough to turn the strident into the shy – not least because this abuse more often refers to a writer’s appearance, race, personal beliefs or social-economic background than the content of the column they have authored.

We cannot remove these barriers to equality altogether, but as editors we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to see balance and breadth of opinion in our comment section. I take this responsibility very seriously and it is the first question I ask of my own work every day.

How can you help me? If you’re a woman and you write, just get in touch.

Yours,

Hannah Fearn

Voices editor