Obviously, women make better journalists than men. But I often have trouble proving this argument because one of the things about women is they don't do arguments well; they don't do logic - see Julie Burchill passim; they get too emotional because they care. Men take pride in being cool and lawyerly and arguing both sides of a case and playing devil's advocate, whereas women believe quite rightly that one side - theirs - is right and the other side is wrong, and what's to discuss?
Journalism is still a sexist profession, as you can prove simply by counting the male and female bylines in this or any other newspaper. Is it because the working conditions of journalism are intrinsically unfriendly to women? They certainly were when I entered Fleet Street in the Eighties; nobody ever went home; they lived in the pub or El Vino. Advanced alcoholism wasn't so much an occupational hazard as an occupational precondition.
I survived by working part-time, which meant spending two hours, 10am to noon, in the Sunday Express office, reading the papers, chatting, filling in expenses forms, collecting them - in cash! - from the 'Bank in the Sky' in the lovely old Daily Express building, chatting to some friends on the Evening Standard and setting up lunch, the entire point of the day.
Lunch typically lasted three or four hours. I was always considered a bit of a party-pooper because I had to leave at 3pm (to collect the children from school, though I never told anyone that. You didn't admit to having children). The only time I actually worked - i.e. wrote articles - was secretly at home before breakfast and yet I was considered one of the more productive members of staff.
Dear, dead days, though you can see why they were difficult for women. Everything is different now. Newspaper offices are clean, silent places, as dull as any building society. Nobody drinks; nobody has lunch; they graze out of Tupperware boxes at their desks. Nobody shouts, because there is no clatter of typewriters to shout over; nobody pulls paper out of a typewriter and screws it into a ball and hurls it across the room. Newspaper offices now are positively ladylike, so why have women still not achieved parity in the profession?
Partly, I think, it's because the hierarchy of newspapers was set in stone in the 19th century and remains the same, despite all the evidence that newspapers have got to change or die. News is still considered the most important department, followed by politics, business, sport - all areas traditionally and, to a large extent, still dominated by men.
Women have always had a good footing in features but features have never been taken seriously. Leader writing is almost always an exclusively male preserve, though maybe leader reading is, too. Women can cover politics but I can't think offhand of many who have made a great mark. Julia Langdon, the first woman political editor in Britain, tells a funny story about how, in the Eighties, she and Eleanor Goodman were the only two women in the parliamentary press lobby: 'The men would come up to me and say, "Did you get that letter I was talking to you about yesterday?" I'd look blank and they'd insist that they'd given it to me. And then I'd realise that they'd given it to Eleanor. We looked totally different but to the men, we were interchangeable.'
Even in the Nineties, I found institutional sexism alive and flourishing at the Independent on Sunday. Week after week, 30 or 40 men would cram into the editor's office for conference, with maybe two or, at most, three women among them. Once in a while, when television crews were around, the editor would decide he needed 'decoration' and would summon me, Zoe Heller or Allison Pearson to provide a splash of colour among the grey suits, but our views were never solicited. Once, I remember Peter Wilby popping out of conference to ask me - seriously - 'What do women think about Maastricht?'
Week after week, as sales fell, the market researchers would come back saying the paper needed to attract more women readers, and the conference suits would scratch their heads and ponder 'More fashion? More cookery?' In the end, they conceded a 'real life' page in which women were invited to whinge about all the terrible things that happened to them. In the office, it was known as the Rape Page. And this was on a supposedly liberal upmarket newspaper in the 1990s.
These thoughts have been provoked by reading a new anthology of women's journalism called Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs, edited by journalist Eleanor Mills. It claims to be a collection of the best journalism written by women in the past 100 years (and yes, it includes moi!), but it has several glaring flaws. First and foremost, the terrible patronising title. It is supposed to sum up the dilemma of career versus motherhood, but I have had a career and raised children without ever handling a Kalashnikov or a cupcake or wishing to.
It is taken from a self-publicising essay by Christina Lamb, Sunday Times foreign correspondent (foreign correspondents are always the worst), who boasts about how she has never attended a parents' evening and how she left her newborn, premature baby in intensive care while she went to interview General Pinochet.
Actually, all articles about 'juggling' career and motherhood are pretty nauseating; they invariably consist of boasting about the career while glossing over all the juggled babies crashing to the floor.
The other problem with Eleanor Mills's anthology is that she hasn't decided whether she is really promoting the best examples of journalism by women or merely providing fodder for wimmin's studies. She includes an awful lot of feminist polemic - Betty Friedan, Joreen Freeman, et tedious al - that hardly deserves the name of reading matter, let alone journalism. She also favours all those victim topics - fatness, bulimia, anorexia, rape - that are the peculiarly gloomy province of women. Does anyone enjoy reading them? Does anyone pick up a paper and think: 'Oh goody! Another account of gang rape'? Apparently Mills does.
But despite these caveats, there are enough great articles in the book to support the case that women are actually better journalists than men. First, they are great reporters because they are observant and are not afraid to note the trivial details that are often the most telling. Marie Colvin, in a brilliant memoir called 'The Arafat I Knew', notes that Yasser Arafat was bald under his keffiyeh, put tea on his cornflakes, and obtained his peculiar uniforms by sending his bodyguards to buy them at army surplus stores all over the world. I doubt that many male journalists would even have queried his uniforms, let alone bothered to discover how he acquired them.
Second, women are not afraid to be subjective. This was considered a dreadful handicap when I started in journalism in the Eighties: the great goal was 'objective' reporting, which meant writing in the third person with the maximum of facts and the minimum of emotion. I believed then, and believe still, that all reporting is subjective, in that it is the reporter who chooses what to report and that, often, it is better to have this subjectivity out in the open.
When I first tried to insert an 'I' into one of my interviews, with Bob Guccione in l985, it led to a great argument with my editor. I contended that, because I had worked for Guccione for years and knew him well before I interviewed him, it would be wasteful - and misleading - to withhold this background knowledge from the reader. Luckily, I prevailed and was allowed to write in the first person from then on. Nowadays, it feels quite peculiar to read an interview in which the interviewer is not present or hides behind one of those fusty locutions - 'your reporter' or 'the present writer' - that served as cumbrous camouflage for 'I' right up to the 1980s.
Third, women are less pompous than men. They don't try to persuade themselves they are writing 'the first draft of history'; instead, they're content to be sketch writers, observers of the passing scene. The most brilliant example of this in Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs is an essay about Vietnam by Mary McCarthy, published in 1967. Most male reporters sent to Vietnam headed straight for the war zone and started describing helicopters and writing incomprehensible military jargon. McCarthy was content to spend some time hanging round Saigon, noting its 'inert, listless, bored' atmosphere and its profiteering economy.
War, she observes, is 'a cheap form of mass tourism [which] opens the mind to business opportunities'. When she finally attends an official briefing, she stares at the meaningless charts on the walls while an officer tells her: 'First, we organised it vertically. Now we've organised it horizontally!' By concentrating on everyday life in Saigon rather than the war, she goes much further than most American journalists of the time in answering the question: why are we in Vietnam?
Of course, it would be insane to pretend that all women's journalism is as good as this. After all, it is still predominantly women who write all that unconscionable bilge about 'essential' lip glosses and 'must-have' handbags. Even the most moisturiser-saturated men's magazines still don't suggest their readers should 'pamper themselves' with a seaweed footbath.
There is much evidence from university exams that boys produce both the best and worst results, the firsts and the fails, whereas girls produce a steady mediocrity. With journalism, I would say the reverse is true: men are more consistently 'professional' (which means conventional which means unsurprising), whereas women either amaze you with their awfulness or with their brilliance. When they are good, they are very, very good and when they are bad, they are horrid.
