* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Melissa Cole is the UK’s leading female beer writer. The opinions expressed are her own.
A passionate advocate for all things brewed, she is renowned for her fun and accessible approach to chatting about her subject.
However, between the beer market and her own profession of journalism, she finds the consistent ‘niching’ of female writers as only being qualified to comment on their own gender worrying, but not as frightening as the level of vitriol often aimed at them by Internet trolls and, even worse, their human contemporaries.
On a day-to-day basis my gender rarely crosses my mind when I’m working. If I’m judging a beer competition for example, I’m not relegated to fruit beers and low-alcohol products lest I am over-challenged -- and I am generally on the top-flight panels because, quite simply, I’ve earned my right to be there by being good at what I do.
But increasingly I’m beginning to wonder if that’s enough?
I say this because we seem to be on a path of no return to vicious sexism disguised as pop culture, ‘what the public wants’ and, even more insidiously, humour.
If I had been making beer 250 years ago no one would have batted an eyelid. it was actually one of the only jobs a woman who was divorced, widowed or cast off could take and earn money whilst still vertical!
But fast forward 250 years and we seem to have gone backwards because nearly every time I am interviewed, or when I’m trying to pitch articles, all most people want to talk about is how ‘unusual’ it is that I’m a woman talking about beer and wouldn’t I like to just stick to commenting on my own gender issues in the beer industry?
Now, I am not going to pretend that being unusual in my field hasn’t occasionally served me well, because I’d be lying, but I’ve been generally pretty careful not to play on it.
I took three years of immersing myself in my subject before I even pitched my first beer-specific article, I waited 10 years before I formed a women’s beer club called Barleys Angels and, this year, I will be launching something called Pink Boots Society UK, designed to promote strong female role models within the industry.
But do you know what? The fact that I’m doing this depresses me – a lot - and I’m genuinely concerned that the media is playing a strange and frightening role in all our need to constantly fight our corners as professional women, and I don’t think I’m alone.
As just one example, top chef Angela Hartnett has set out a plan to tackle the fact that only 20 percent of British chefs are women and there is constant noise about how to increase the number of women on the boards of major corporations, and should there be a quota system?
A quota system is not something I’m a fan of by the way because I don’t think it tackles the core problem of sexist attitudes.
There’s always been that arched eyebrow approach to women who choose to do something a little different… female war correspondents are regularly labelled with ‘keeping the troops happy’, women motoring correspondents just want to ‘handle a big stick’ and female football correspondents must have ‘seen a lot of tackle’ and, as a beer writer, I've had some particularly choice comments sent my way over the years.
Insults like 'bruiser chick' are fairly standard but I’ve been also been widely accused of being gay because, not only do I dare air views on beer AND drink pints, I also play cricket and go fishing to chill out.
This, I have been assured by many vocal (yet anonymous) visitors to my blog and on various national newspaper sites, hands me immediate “dyke” credentials – always nice to have these things bought to your attention; I should probably file for divorce immediately and stop leading my poor husband on!
I’ve never been sure why the hell it should matter what my sexuality is, but it speaks to not only the external malice from small-minded individuals but also to the major issue that exists within our media.
One of the biggest drivers of this dreadful attitude is that some of the women commissioned by the papers are employed because they cause conversation and coronaries in equal measure, and therefore continue to get column inches.
And what worries me even more is that editors seem increasingly happy for their sperm-stealing female columnists to turn themselves into these villified figures in the battle for ratings.
And that’s before we even address the entire dumbing down of the media agenda to consistently pander to a generation of readers whose most burning desire is to read about, and possibly emulate, some bunch of people who are famous for being only vaguely famous.
My major issue is that every time an editor allows these columns to appear, they drag down the collective intellectual image of 51 percent of the population and to that I take very great personal and professional exception.
Whatever happened to journalists of any shape or creed wanting to become the next Kate Adie? Or emulating Moira Stewart’s authoritative calm or evenAngela Rippon, a woman who managed to combine sexy high-kicking on a comedy show with total professional aplomb when delivering the headlines? Or even going all the way back to Nellie Bly in the late 1800s exposing the awful practices of mental hospitals in the United States?
Or have we seen the end of this kind of pioneering and high-quality work? Well, there are certainly some women who still have my professional respect, Alex Crawford for Sky, Victoria Coren and the late and much-mourned Marie Colvin are names that spring immediately to mind - as well as pioneering small-business journalists like Cate Sevilla with Pophive (www.pophive.tv), who manages to combine witty pop culture commentary with championing coolly competent women.
These are all women who have had to overcome the odds, carved their own path and work very hard to become excellent at what they do, and is something to which I relate.
But there are days when I see pitches that I’ve sent to papers appear under the name of my male contemporaries, or times when I get four emails from public relations reps in a row saying “we thought you’d like to take this ‘female’ angle on this subject” that I could literally tear my hair out.
So, what do we do? I wish I had the answer, I really do.
All I can ask is that the media takes a long hard look at its role in portraying women and, also, to advocate that more women stand up and say “judge me on my abilities, not on my boobs” then maybe, just maybe, we will have a slightly better world for the next generation of budding professionals.
