Equality for women on Australian television is lagging behind the US and Europe both in front of and behind the camera, an industry event has been told.
Leading media executive Nicole Sheffield said it was rare for a woman to be in charge of programming in Australia, and corporate life was inaccessible to many mothers because of the prohibitive cost of childcare.
“When we used to go over for MIP [TV marketplace held in France], it kind of would freak me out,” Sheffield told a Women in TV breakfast in Sydney on Thursday. “We’d run around MIP and we’d meet a lot of the other executives and, especially in Europe, a lot of them are women.”
But in Australia “it’s hard to run into other executives buying programs that are women”.
Now the chief executive of News Corp’s magazine division NewsLifeMedia, Sheffield was a pioneer in subscription television, running the Lifestyle channels on Foxtel, and her career has thrived while she has also brought up four children.
“What is quite unique to Australia is that we lose females from the workforce between the ages of 30 and 40,” Sheffield said.
“And why is that? Because of the cost of childcare. And the challenge that we have in this country is we don’t make it affordable for women to actually stay with their careers.”
Another panellist at the Australian Subscription Television and Radio Australia (Astra) conference, NBC’s Australasian correspondent Sara James, said the US was much more comfortable than Australia with older women on television.
Women in their 60s and 70s continued to appear, she said, including Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters, who has just retired.
“These are women who have incredible journalistic experience,” James said. “Who are absolutely so smart, and just as good at their game as they have ever been, and they are still doing well, and it’s up to them if they want to cash in their chips or start something else.
“I think both the US and Australia still have a long way to go, truthfully, we are still not where we need to be. The chairman of NBC Universal, the news group, is a woman. The president of NBC News is a woman. These are great changes, it is good to see women not just in front of the camera, not just in producing positions but also in leadership positions – that is super, super important. And there could be more of that here in Australia.”
The Foxtel personality and model Deborah Hutton said subscription television was a less male-dominated environment than free-to-air TV, where the same men were still in charge decades later.
As a woman in her 50s, she said, she realised her time as a presenter might be up soon and she had created a new career. “There’s a clock ticking, it’s digital, it’s silent, but it’s still there – but I know that you can’t keep on [presenting].
“I worked for Channel Nine for about 15 years, through different shows. It is a very blokey, still very blokey, environment, very different experience to working to Foxtel,” Hutton said.
The women reminisced about the 1980s when they were getting into the industry and they wore shoulder pads – and even a bow tie – to be more like men.
James said: “We had these big jackets, I mean, go look at an 80s movie and just laugh your head off. But I even had a bow tie. I mean, how sad and tragic! But the whole point was, we thought we had to dress like a man even if we were a woman. And that’s just wrong. That’s just crazy.”
