Tag: Steve Paikin

“Where, oh where, are all the female guests?”

Posted on by Meredith Dault

Most parents agree on at least one thing: they’d do almost anything for their children. For Steve Paikin, that means promoting a more gender-equitable media landscape.

Many know Paikin as the host of The Agenda, TVO’s flagship current affairs program which airs in Ontario on weeknight evenings. Others may be familiar with his work moderating federal and provincial election debates.

But what many will not know is that Paikin’s 13-year-old daughter has profoundly shaped his views, particularly around gender representation.

“I don’t want her growing up in a world where she thinks wisdom only comes in a male package – where it’s only men who know stuff,” he said recently. “That’s why I care about this.”

An incident in his own home first gave him pause. Paikin and his wife had invited some friends over for dinner. Introducing his then-8-year-old daughter to two just-arrived guests (a man and a woman), Paikin mentioned that one of them was a former Ontario cabinet minister. Before he had even finished his sentence, however, his daughter had walked over to the male guest with her hand out.

“Here’s an 8-year-old girl who somehow thinks that when I introduce her to a person of authority, it must be a man,” he explained with palpable frustration. “She was getting these cues from somewhere. It reinforced the notion that we need to do everything we can [to change things].”

For Paikin, it meant taking the issue back to his own newsroom, encouraging his colleagues and challenging himself to do better at recruiting female guests for his program.

It wasn’t as easy as he had hoped.

And so in March of 2014, Paikin vented his frustration in a blog post about not being able to find enough expert women.

“Where, oh where, are all the female guests?” he asked in exasperation.

Most of those who responded to him at the time were furious, blasting Paikin for not trying hard enough to find qualified women, and for dismissing some of their legitimate reasons for declining requests. [Informed Opinions’ own Shari Graydon provided context for this, based on survey responses from hundreds of women.]

“It was not meant as an accusatory polemic!” he laughs, thinking back on trying to book a program on provincial affairs for which he wanted to feature only female guests.

“I probably contacted 25 women to try and book five female guests and got no from all of them,” he says. He finally gave up and called some male experts. “All of the men within a matter of minutes, got back to me and said ‘I’m in’.”

That’s one of the reasons we’re building expertwomen.dev/FemmesExpertes.ca – a database of women with informed opinions who are willing and able to say “yes” when journalists call. Our goal: to make “but we couldn’t find any expert women” obsolete! (Contact us if you’d like to be listed.)

As for Paikin, he and his team, which includes Executive Producer Stacey Dunseath, are pleased to report that The Agenda is now leading the pack when it comes to including women’s voices and expert opinions: between 43 and 46 per cent of the program’s guests are female, making it one of the country’s best when it comes to representing the audience it serves.

“Despite the obstacles, we’re doing what we can to make that happen,” Paikin says. “And the good news is, we’re winning.”

The Agenda producers prove gender parity is possible

Posted on by Shari Graydon

A year ago, when veteran journalist and host of TVO’s The Agenda blogged, “Where, oh where, are all the women?” he ignited a firestorm of protest.

Ironically, Steve Paikin’s show already had a much higher percentage of female guests than any other broadcast program studied by Informed Opinions over the past five years. (When we monitored the Agenda in January-February 2011, we found that 38% of the experts featured were women. This contrasted with CBC Radio’s The Current, featuring 31% female guests, and CTV’s Power Play, which included only one woman out of 27 guests during the two-week period in which we watched all three programs.)

So TVO’s The Agenda was already ahead of the pack. But as a result of the controversy that greeted Paikin’s online comments about some of the reasons women decline interview requests, the good people at TVO’s flagship show made a concerted effort to do better. And they’ve succeeded.

When I ran into Paikin at a recent Canadian Journalism Foundation event in Toronto, he told me that he and his colleagues were tracking the number of women guests and had topped 45%. Indeed, data provided by broadcast series producer Stacey Dunseath for the program’s last six months revealed a peak of 48% in January, and an average of more than 43% female guests since September. And this, Dunseath says, occurred without deliberately shifting the subject focus.

“The Agenda’s feat offers a reminder to producers elsewhere:
it’s possible to deliver good programming that draws on qualified experts without excluding half the population. “

In fact, Dunseath spoke enthusiastically about a couple of recent female guests who’d never done TV interviews before, and were, like many of the women we’ve trained, initially reticent to to appear. But, she said, both of them “brought incredible context, gave thoughtful answers,” and “knocked it out of the park”.

Which is not to deny that achieving better gender balance requires effort. The Agenda’s strategies have included:

  • Soliciting advice from female “friends” of the show (including me) regarding strategies that would help TVO connect with expert women in a range of fields;
  • Deputizing guests to identify women in their circles who could contribute;
  • Sending producers to business and social events to network with and recruit previously unknown experts;
  • Making a point of mentioning the availability of hair and make-up support for those concerned about not being camera-ready on the day they’re called;
  • Reinforcing to new guests the value their perspective adds; and
  • Telling everyone who pitches the show on a program topic that including women’s perspectives is a priority.

Paikin himself deserves some credit for immediately embracing his critics last year, inviting half a dozen of us on air for a lively discussion of how chronically under-represented female voices are in public discourse generally. Dunseath believes that women who became aware of the issue as a result felt an obligation to step up in a way they hadn’t previously;

She also said that she and her producer colleagues have employed a handy tool that Informed Opinions developed a few years ago.

It’s a postcard we jokingly called “Countering Female Source Reluctance”, and it features a sample conversation between a journalist and a potential source:

TVO producers have this Informed Opinions’ postcard useful in recruiting female guests. The flip side refers journalists to our experts database, soon to be significantly upgraded to a new platform at ExpertWomen.ca

Dunseath says that drawing on our tips has proven to be very effective at encouraging women to reconsider their “thanks, but no thanks” response.

And we all benefit from that. The more diverse the perspectives informing our public conversations, the richer and more fruitful they will be. A growing body of research in business and science makes this clear: the inclusion of women’s voices increases profits, ethical performance, scientific innovation and the quality of workplaces themselves.

In an increasingly competitive global society, we can’t afford not to take advantage of such advantages in every arena.

Stay tuned for news about ExpertWomen.ca/Femmes Expertes.ca, our plan to significantly upgrade our existing Experts Database in the coming weeks.