‘Our perceptions turned out to be completely false’
Q&A with Sam Farah
Head of BBC News Arabic
Sam Farah oversees the 400+ staff that produce the BBC’s output to Arabic speaking audiences around the world, across a large network of 24-hour news, current affairs and documentary programming transmitted via TV, radio and digital channels. After working diligently to increase the percentage of women contributors on a selection of Arabic programs from 10% to 30%, Farah successfully took on the 50:50 Project challenge, to reach 50% representation of women contributors across some of their output.
Reflect Reality: What was it like to take on the 50:50 Challenge?
Farah: In July 2018, we joined the 50:50 Project. We added digital video, and BBC.com/arabic, and started changing the methodology to allow for non-linear output to be measured. We started to see that what we had considered extremely difficult, the 30%, 40% and 50% levels of female contributors to programs, being achieved. I noticed that setting a target focuses the mind. When we reached those targets, it increased our confidence. We thought, ‘if we can do this, who knows what we can do.’
RR: What did you learn as a result of working with the 50:50 Project?
Farah: We realized we were working under a perception that turned out to be false. We had underestimated the number of female experts and pundits, and people who were available to speak on all sorts of issues in the Arab-speaking world.
We began to ask ourselves, ‘are there really not any excellent female experts on military matters in Syria?’ We started realizing there are excellent women experts in all sorts of areas; aviation, security, etc. Our confidence increased. The number of people who said we can do this started increasing. The number of people who thought ‘are we running the risk of putting women on air just to make up the numbers?’ – that number decreased. Those people started to realize that the quality of the guests was still what mattered most, not the gender.
RR: How did your day-to-day work change?
Farah: When we started working with the 50:50 Project teams we were told, ‘this is no longer a nice thing to do, this is absolutely part of the job. If you are setting up an interview, you need to ask yourself, ‘Is there a woman to speak on these matters?’ If the answer was ‘no,’ we would ask, ‘have you tried? Why is there not a woman who can speak to Iraq’s internal security situation, why is there no one to speak on mass surveillance of governance of their people?’ The questions made people think more, and the obstacles were removed.
RR: What challenges did you confront?
Farah: We faced cultural and logistical barriers. There were cultural sensitivities and misguided stereotypes about Arab women. That barrier existed not just in the societies we served, but internally. We had to believe these people [women experts] existed.
There was also a conversation that tended to repeat itself in the early days. It was about the difference between hard political programs and social stories. It is not a secret that some said we can reach those targets [40% and 50% gender parity] in certain topical areas because it is easy to get women to speak about human interest stories. A critical moment we got right, in the beginning, is when we said, ‘absolutely not, we have to have gender diversity across all output, including, and in particular, hard politics and news about conflict areas.’ At first, we were not sure we could get it. The result is that we can find excellent women speakers in all these areas.
There were also a few technical, logistical things we changed too. It proved to be slightly problematic for some women contributors to go to a studio, so we increased the use of skype and video conferencing.
But if there is one point I keep going back to it is how wrong we were in our perceptions. How wrong we were in our stereotyping. A lot of our people come from Arabic-speaking societies, and we were all wrong. I am so pleased that our perceptions turned out to be completely false.
“The journalists know that it is not enough to find a good story, and a strong story, it is the diverse interviews in that story that make it. It is now a part of everything that we do, part of every editorial meeting.”
