Are your stations run by men?

[Charli]

In our recent news post, there was an interesting story about the BBC being accused of having a "culture of sexism".

This was after research by The Guardian, which showed that 84% of reporters and guests on BBC Radio 4's flagship programme were male.

Since this problem is appearing at a national level, we were wondering whether this can also be seen in hospital radios or do they buck this trend? Do you get as many applications from women as men? Are your committees run by a mix of genders?

How does this affect your station? Does voluntary radio buck the trend?

[Jingleman]

On our station, all of our committee positions are currently held by men. This hasn't always been the case though, we have had a female treasurer and a female secretary in recent times. Interestingly we have a very low number of female members right now (only 3 out of a total of 24). Checking the records we have a higher turnover rate in females - I have no idea why this is. We have recently re-introduced a junior membership (16 and 17 year olds) and this has attracted all our current female presenters. I am in contact with the last few female presenters who have had to leave our service and each case they were all working part time and had shift change issues. Are there more females in part time work and therefore they don't the same stability of routine ?? Maybe maybe not.

[Charli]

Hmm that's really interesting because I would have imagined that women in part-time jobs in the younger age bracket would have had more time to volunteer at Hospital radio. (That is based entirely on my own experience at 16 volunteering!)
I wonder if it is due to lack of interest once women get older or whether they just don't have the time to donate. Thank you for replying with that, it's made me go off on a tangent thinking about it!

[simplymu]

The Hospital Radio station I belong to, and help run, tends to be run by men even though we do have two female members on the executive. Whenever we are out fundraising we do tend to be asked about membership more by men than by women and I have no idea why. Having said that, we are working with one of our local FE colleges and of the three students who have become involved with the station through this link, two are female.

[Charli]

That's really interesting, thank you for sharing your experience!

There seems to be a similar trend on journalism courses with a larger proportion of females than males. I wonder why this is?

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