Welcome to your shiny new #WFImediawatch blog. A lot has happened since we last posted. Jeremy Corbyn was crowned Labour leader, Nicola Sturgeon & Shami Chakrabartii shared a stage and gave us MAJOR #FeministFriend goals, and David Cameron? He’s *ahem* been a bit quiet of late…
In an ever changing political world there’s one thing you can count on and that’s us crunching the numbers. We missed toting up the scores so much that we’ve got 2 weeks’ worth of figures for you. Those of you hoping that this brave new political dawn would see a systemic shift in the skewed gender balance on current affairs programmes may be a bit disappointed, however.
First up is Scotland 2015. Twitter is quick to throw screen shots our way on the rare occasion where women take up the most seats – ‘’SEE, what are you going to say about this then? You don’t hear men MOANING about be underrepresented though do you?’’ As you can see from this weeks numbers, that is the exception rather than the norm. A rarity actually. Pigs might fly, as the say…
Being a previous recipient of both the Gold Star & the Wooden Spoon, we’re never quite sure what the balance on is going to be. We’ll let the numbers speak for themselves on this one, readers.
Scotland 2015
14th 4 Men 2 Women
15th 3 Men 1 Woman
16th 4 Men 1 Woman
17th 2 Men 1 Woman
21st 4 Men 1 Woman
22nd 3 Men 2 Women
23rd 4 Men 1 Woman
24th 3 Men 2 Women
Total: 27 Men 11 Women
Question Time
24th 3 Men 2 Women
27th 3 Men 2 Women
We’ll hand it to them, Question Time has been pretty good of late. If they are seeking the dizzy heights of #WFImediawatch ‘Gold Star’ fame, however, then getting some of the new female intake of MP’s on could just swing it. Labour’s Angela Rayner & Jess Phillips spring to mind, as does SNP’s Philippa Whitford, but there is a breadth of women MP’s that would make a brilliant contribution.
Sunday Politics Scotland
What’s the collective term for a group of wooden spoons? Google suggests it’s a ‘whirlpool of wooden spoons’ which we quite like. What we *don’t* like is for Scotland’s one-hour-a-week political round-up to have received our booby prize so often. The last couple of weeks have been dismal, quite frankly.
20th 2 Men 1 Woman
27th 5 Men 0 Women
No gold star this week folks - we don’t just give them out willy nilly you know. We’ll be back weekly from now on, so please do get involved - we need volunteers. If there is a TV or Radio current affairs programme that you watch regularly then get in touch with Kirsty on Twitter @Mrsjackdaniels to sign up. For everybody else, tweet using #WFImediawatch and direct our attention to gender balance, good and bad.
See you next week!