A report asserts that UK front pages are still male-dominated and sexist but feminist impatience is a manifestation of success
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Richard Desmond, owner of Express Newspapers. The WiJ report suggests that the Express's employment of more women writers might explain its high female readership. Photograph: Tom Stoddart/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
In recent days I've been fighting a rearguard action against a disaffected Guardian reader in the north of England who keeps telling me he's going to end 35 years of loyal reading. Since he's been complaining that this "man-hating" paper now has "zero interest in male readers" (except for football), he obviously didn't enjoy Amelia Hill's front-page report on Monday, the one whose headline asserts: "Front pages still male-dominated and sexist".
Look on the bright side, I say. At least Matey is still reading because he emailed me before dawn to complain about Amelia's article, one which reports the findings of a splendid organisation called Women in Journalism (WiJ), or "Whinge" as some of my women colleagues call it, the brutes.
My patient response has been to concede Matey some of the other points he makes. Fleet St newspapers are all too London-focused (most retreated from proper Scottish coverage long before Alex Salmond abandoned England) and, I agreed, we were late in addressing inconvenient challenges to climate change orthodoxy.
But on the feminist perspective, I accused Matey of showing signs of his age (he's 48). I wrote: "I agree that the paper is more feminised, but surely that reflects the growing – and welcome – emancipation of women in most societies and in senior positions. Alas, the downside is a bit humourless and po-faced at times. We'll get used to it, as we got used to doing the washing up."
In the hope of making him feel less isolated, I also confessed to counting the reporters' bylines on the home pages the other Saturday. The Saturday paper is the most feminised of the week – that's my impression – and there were so many women's bylines at the front of the paper that I wondered if they'd achieved an historic majority. But no, by my count it was an impressive 12 female to 23 male. Breathe again, boys!
I'm only half-persuaded by the WiJ report, which makes some valid points but also smacks of special pleading and a degree of self-absorption which teeters on the edge of comic. Of course, Angela Merkel is currently portrayed in newspapers as looking distressed. She is the central player in the greatest economic crisis of her generation, even more important than Christine Lagarde of the IMF, who is not a bloke either.
Merkel is right to look distressed and be portrayed as such. Why not rejoice that she and Lagarde are women of power rather than complain that they are portrayed as men would be in the same situation, albeit probably not as cruelly? Residual gallantry persists.
We all know the direction of travel in most parts of the world – it's towards greater economic, political and social power for women, much of it at the expense of disadvantaged men. So it should be, it's one of the crucial tests of modernity. But, as with much else in life, there will be an upside to progress, also a downside.
It's understandable that some women are impatient about the pace of change and about persistently chauvinistic attitudes among men. We see plenty of evidence of that, don't we, though older blokes know that older feminists sometimes give the impression that some of the younger sisters are crybabies who don't know how lucky they are.
But feminist impatience is a manifestation of growing success, a revolution of rising expectations.
Myself, I cheerfully plead guilty to a bubbling trickle of politically incorrect thoughts (it can be such fun, like making jokes about Stalin in the old USSR), though that doesn't make me a loutish Jeremy Clarkson petrolhead, nor put me in the predatory "Uncle Jimmy" Savile camp either. But I wouldn't exclude Margaret Thatcher from my list of high-achieving British women, as Harriet Harman once did in government.
In matters of progress women can – as many ruefully admit – be their own worst enemies. The excellent Helen Pidd's G2 report on the fallout with George Galloway in Bradford West allows me to come out from my bunker and say how impressed I was at the way George cleverly courted the hijabi vote in the March byelection – and how surprised I was that they fell for him.
Never mind. The success of the Daily Mail – one of my regular must-reads – rests in significant measure on the cat-and-mouse game it plays with its many women readers. Build 'em up, knock 'em down. Show them powerful, show them fat. Show them looking gorgeous, then put the same photo next to a post-hangover shot of them at the supermarket in ill-fitting jeans.
It's great sport and it feeds on a certain type of masochistic insecurity. Try the Mail's brilliant Femail pages if you don't believe me (or its health pages), try one of its regular "then the bastard left me for a floozy" interviews. One of the paper's most famous victims was not Princess Di or the Duchess of Cambridge, but clever and successful Cherie Blair: they made her anxious about her appearance, then abused her style adviser, Carole Caplin, whose conman boyfriend (don't ask) shopped Cherie over his phoney role in her flat-buying venture. Who led the pack? The Mail. Go figure that one out.
Yet the WiJ report solemnly reports that the Mail and Express's employment of more women writers on the front page and elsewhere might explain their high female readership levels. Hmmm. As for porn merchant Richard Desmond's Express having a 50% female byline count, there is an economic explanation for that which is so obvious I am not going to spell it out. But Dirty Dick is not a good sister.
Before wishing the WiJ team all the best, I'll make two familiar points. One is that the advance of women to equal status (cries of "superior" from more ardent partisans on both sides) is impeded by profound, unresolved ambiguity about women's attitudes towards motherhood.
My impression – reinforced by conversations with women and the observation of children every day – is that the desire to have and nurture children is not merely a function of social conditioning. However we resolve the allocation of parental responsibilities and duties (still a way to go, I agree), let alone boardroom power (women would be more risk-averse, less macho, which is mostly good), the maternal instinct will often prove stronger than mere testosterone-fuelled ambition. Remember Pepsi's Brenda Barnes, who quit as CEO to raise her kids – she always sounds pretty sane and smart.
My other point is also a familiar one. Delete "women" in the WiJ report's list of the disempowered and substitute "working class" or "black" – or even "white working class" – and you will probably produce a similar impression of exclusion. We can all play that game quite easily. I didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge. Am I aware of it in my working life? Oh yes. Get over it, Mike. Get over it too, David Cameron. It's not your fault you're a toff and thus fair game.
How about "Muslim" (that's an easy one) though Jews often feel ill-used too, particularly in the Guardian (it's an old love-hate thing). Then, there's "Scot" or "Northerner". But why stop there? People who don't live in north London, let alone in Bradford, or don't work in the media, often feel excluded by much of the self-absorbed metropolitan media in 2012.
We should all try harder to be sensitive to the feelings of others. But it's not just about you or me. Modern women have much to celebrate.