Angela Henshall

50:50 Equality Project, BBC News

Doubling on-screen female representation in just three years – and ambitious plans to tackle disability and ethnicity inequality next

1st April 2021

Angela Henshall is senior producer of 50:50 The Equality Project. Founded in 2017, the scheme is the BBC’s most significant initiative to date to increase women’s voices in the media. With 70 organisations also signed up worldwide, they have already doubled female representation on-air in just three years. She is also deputy editor of BBC.com, and before this held senior positions at the Wall Street Journal, AFP and Dow Jones. In this in-depth interview, Angela shares with pride the project’s successes, with many shows already achieving a full gender balance – including BBC Breakfast, the Andrew Marr Show and The One Show; discusses the nuts and bolts of how participating organisations report their results, with programme makers acknowledging that the very act of counting and submitting returns helps them recognise their blind spots; and describes their expansion in both scope and scale – with global corporations such as Unilever now taking part, and plans to tackle under-representation regarding ethnicity and disability too.

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