Why have so few women hosted Have I Got News for You? Ian Hislop said this week that it wasn’t for want of being invited. “On the whole,” he mused, “women are slightly more reticent and think, maybe modestly: ‘I can’t do that.’”
The trouble with this sort of thing is that modesty has a decidedly gendered history. A gentleman who was “modest” (from the Latin root for “moderate”) acted temperately, or didn’t brag about his achievements, but from the late 16th century the word acquired a special meaning for women: “not forward, impudent, or lewd” (OED). In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Eve “yielded with coy submission, modest pride”, which is of course the only acceptable way for a woman to have sex. Women’s clothes were also ideally “modest”, meaning unrevealing – a sense that persists in the recent rise of “modest fashion” or “modest wear” marketed at Muslim women.
Do women really lack the confidence to host HIGNFY? Or do they just not like it very much? Either way, it’s probably better to avoid talk of their “modesty”, since that has so often been something measured and policed by men.
