The Skills. Mishal Husain
journalists or conference staff. It can be intimidating to look around the room and become conscious of being one of a small minority. Or you can see it as a galvanising moment. At Davos, I was once in an off-the-record media session with the Iranian president when, as the questions began, I debated whether I had one worthy of asking. And then I realised that as there were only about ten women in a gathering of well over a hundred people, if I didn’t speak up, the session might well end without a female voice being heard at all. Suddenly, the principle of participation seemed far more important than the actual question. I stuck up my hand and spoke.
We are in a time of increased awareness about the importance of representation across so many groups, but when I hear people say confidently that their daughters won’t experience the same realities and the same barriers, I am not convinced. My generation has had opportunities that most of our mothers did not, but we’ve also come up against obstacles that many of us expected would be gone by now. Work and childcare remain a difficult balancing act for too many women, and the bulk of home responsibilities are also mostly ours. Gender pay gaps illustrate the paucity of women in higher-paid roles, while equal pay claims raise questions about how women are perceived and valued in comparison with their male colleagues. Those gaps can be there even when women are in the most pre-eminent positions – such as Claire Foy in the lead role of Queen Elizabeth in The Crown, who was paid less than the male actor in the supporting role of her husband Prince Philip.
It seems to me that men set off on their careers with an expectation of advancement, unburdened by the questions or worries that can dog women – especially what may lie ahead of them in terms of juggling a career and family life. Bearing the weight of childcare responsibilities can reduce the ability to take advantage of salary-boosting job offers, because women are more tied to their commute, working hours and keeping their routine unchanged. And when they take up part-time and flexible working options the result can be a disproportionate wage penalty, a promotion penalty or simply a perception that their priorities now lie elsewhere. Ellen Kullman, who was one of the most powerful women in American business when she was running the corporate giant DuPont, has said that during her time in that company, women were being promoted every 30–36 months, while men were moving on every 18–24 months. The women seemed to be regarded as needing longer to show their capability.8
Perceptions can also be a barrier to women’s own sense of their potential. I know that when I close my eyes and conjure up an image of someone at the top of my chosen profession – a main presenter or a prominent interviewer – I see a man. I see a white man, as it happens. This reflects the reality of the world that has surrounded me in my time in broadcasting, but there is an internal effect, too, which makes it harder to imagine yourself in those pole positions one day. Early on in my career, there were times when I felt my suggestions weren’t taken as seriously as a man’s might have been (‘Stick to what you’re good at’ was one comment from a manager when I offered an opinion beyond my core brief). And even now, there are times when a prominent contributor walks into the studio and looks across at my co-presenter, and I imagine them wishing he was doing the interview with them rather than me.
It has taken me a while to feel I have a right to be in that room, in a position that allows me to question some of the most powerful people in the land. It’s what I think of as the third phase of my career. During the first, when I got a foot in the door of the news industry, I felt an immense thrill – although there was also a period on overnight shifts when it was hard to feel energised about anything at all. I certainly didn’t think about a future as a presenter, which was a world away from my life at that time. However, the business programme I was working on at the BBC sometimes got producers to do short on-camera wraps of the day on the financial markets. After doing this a few times I was offered some reporting shifts. Then, one week, there was a gap in the business presenters’ rota and I was asked to fill in, my knees shaking under the studio desk as I did so. I never went back to being a producer and in the next few years the opportunities came thick and fast – I had a stint based in Singapore and one in Washington, by which time I was with the international channel BBC World News.
Then came what I now think of as the middle phase of my career, coinciding with an intense period in my personal life – twenty months after the birth of my first son, I had twin boys. Returning to work after my second maternity leave was all about keeping the show on the road – life needed to be as simple and manageable as possible, in order to meet the needs of the family and keep my hand in at work. As the domestic rhythm became a little more settled and just a little less intense, however, I started to wonder what the next stage of my career could involve. Radio 4 had been a companion to my life from the age of seventeen – when a wise person advised me that listening to it would be good preparation for university interviews – and I knew I would love to work there one day. But I had no experience in radio production or reporting, let alone presenting on this medium. The only way I could gain valuable experience and get my voice on air would be to use my days off to do occasional shifts, filling in on news and other factual programmes in the hope that it might stand me in good stead for any future opportunities.
None appeared to be forthcoming, though, and this was an odd and often disheartening time – making ad-hoc appearances on unfamiliar programmes, wondering if I was in danger of becoming a jack-of-all-trades. What motivated me to keep going was the strong sense that I had but one life to see how far I might progress – I didn’t want to look back later and wish I had tried a bit harder. I realised, however, that the speed with which my career had taken off when I started presenting on television meant that opportunities had come my way without me having to push for them. I had got used to that, and I was now lacking an essential skill: being able to make a pitch for myself. I went to see one BBC editor after another, asking if they might try me out, but I found myself struggling with straightforward questions about what I wanted to do. In my quest not to come across as unrealistic or full of myself, I failed to have compelling answers that were true to who I was and where I wanted to go in my career.
Over time, there were some valuable lessons: I learned to hone in advance exactly how I wanted to use each meeting and be clear about what I was asking for; to be ready to turn my energies towards a new avenue if the first one didn’t work out; to keep an open mind and explore multiple options, even though that sometimes felt overwhelming; to do my best to express my hopes and ambitions without apology or diffidence – even if it felt excruciating at some moments and pushy at others. From there I started to think about nurturing a set of skills that might be relevant to career troughs as well as peaks, adaptable to different settings and transferable even in the event of a complete career change. Every projection about the future of work suggests that mobility will be increasingly important – perhaps the disruption will even bridge some of the workplace gender gaps we see today, if it becomes more common for men and women to shift gear, go part-time or take time out for family reasons.
Today, when I contrast my experience of working life with that of my mother, I feel a deep gratitude. For all the emphasis on education in my family, the idea that it could be used to forge a career and for that career to exist alongside motherhood, is a novel one. My mother gained two degrees in Pakistan and became a producer at Pakistan Television when it was first set up in the 1960s. But all around her it was accepted that marriage and motherhood were more than likely to bring a career to an end. After her marriage brought her to the UK in 1972, I was born in 1973 and became her full-time job. She told me years later that there were times when she would watch the Asian programming coming out of the BBC in Birmingham and long to be a part of it, to use her experience and have an identity in this new country beyond that of wife and mother. It was never going to be possible; my father was working long hours as an NHS doctor in Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire and any family members who might have helped out were far away. Childcare and travel costs would have been an unjustifiable addition to an already tight household budget.
It is not in my mother’s nature to be bitter about what might have been, but her experience reminds me not to lose an appreciation of the doors that have been open to me, one generation on. Changed attitudes to women and to ethnic minorities have both played a key role in my life chances – not so long ago it would have been hard to imagine someone with a name like mine fronting a national news programme. That is not to say that I find my own combination of motherhood, marriage and work easy – or even always manageable.