Did you know that at the current rate, women won’t reach pay parity with men until 2158? Or that 40% of countries have seen gender equality stagnate or even reverse since 2018? The truth is, we’re far from achieving true gender equality, and in some ways, we’re moving backwards.

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Full Transcript

Heather Blundell: Welcome to the Grayling Vantage Point podcast. I’m Heather Blundell, UK CEO of Grayling, and I’m delighted to be hosting a special podcast today for International Women’s Day, and I’m thrilled to be joined by two amazing women. Lucie Cave, from ITV and Bauer Media. Lucie is an award-winning editor and journalist with over 15 years’ experience in the media. She has been at the forefront of era-defining moments in pop culture, including helping launch James Corden’s early fame when she was editor of Heat magazine, she persuaded him to strip naked as David Beckham back in 2008. Lucie is now chief creative officer at Bauer Media. She’s responsible for building and launching incredibly successful content and some of the top performing podcasts in the UK.

I’m also joined by Rebecca Holman, who has been digital director at Grazia for the last five years. Rebecca has written about dating, relationships, work, parenting, pop culture, and feminism for Grazia, Stella, The Sunday Times, Style, Red, and many more. Her book, Quiet Girls Can Run the World, is available to buy now. Today we will discuss the transition from traditional to digital media, the challenges and opportunities for women in the industry and the role of media in shaping gender equality narratives. Thank you both so much for joining me.

Lucie Cave: Thank you for the introduction.

Heather Blundell: Opening question to both of you. What does International Women’s Day mean to you? And do you still think it’s helpful?

Lucie Cave: It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because there are so many people looking online at the views around international women, some people are saying, ohh, we’re done, some people are actually saying we don’t need it anymore. Job done. Yes, we’ve had progress, but there is so much more that needs to be done. I mean I, I get it when it comes to, as what they call it, is it pink washing where you look online on International Women’s Day and it’s pretty hideous really how many marketers jump on it and start selling things, saying that it’s for International Women’s Day, vibrators, for example. You might need one if you’re if you’re a woman. There’s a bit of a confusion now around International Women’s Day and what it’s there for. But it’s it’s really important and it shouldn’t be one day. I think that’s the same with anything really. It really does allow women to champion other women, and shine a light on the inequalities that are still fiercely there now.

Rebecca Holman: Yeah. I mean, the idea that we don’t need International Women’s Day anymore is for the birds. I was looking up some stats for something else I’m working on for this. And on the current trajectory, women won’t reach pay parity with men until 2158. So we’re we’ve got a way to go. And 40% of countries in the world seeing gender equality stagnate or go backwards since 2018, so we’re not. We’re not there. We’re not even close to being there. And in some ways we’re going backwards, and we’ve seen huge companies moving away from D&I. We’ve seen some governments moving away from D&I. And cuts to aid spending. All of these things, all this context, means that this International Women’s Day is probably more important than it’s been in a long time.

Heather Blundell: Absolutely. And that moves away from D&I and we’re navigating that space with a lot of our clients. What’s your personal response to that? How how does it make you feel? And what do you think our collective response should be?

Rebecca Holman: I personally do a lot of D&I work. I I help run the gender equality pillar at power and actually anyone who thinks we don’t need D&I, I would love to find the person who says they don’t need D&I in their business, who has a perfectly balanced team. Of course, we need it because we still have a pay gap. Many places still have an ethnicity pay gap. There’s so many things that we’re not getting right and so many ways in which business isn’t representative, so of course we need D&I.

Lucie Cave: It’s ridiculous really, because we were talking about it before, International Women’s Day is something that a lot of businesses  champion and rightly so, and they’ll be a time to reflect. You’ll often have a key speaker, talking about issues that are going to really resonate with women and you come away, from your workplace, feeling really empowered. But it’s like, who’s organising. The Women. And it’s another full time job on top of what you’re doing. Do you know what I mean? And it’s always the people that step forward, mainly women, because they feel passionate about how important it is. There’s very rarely men that do anything on International Women’s Day.

Rebecca Holman: I think we’ve got a few to help us out this week. But but I’ve just been bemoaning the fact that International Women’s Day also falls on the same week as World Book Week, which feels like it’s unpaid labour Week for women.

Heather Blundell: Think I’ve wondered whether it almost needs some reframing and it’s become a bit like sustainability and ESG, and whether D&I has become a sort of swear word. If you look at our business, just to name a few clients at the top of my head, we’ve got Birmingham City Football Club, we’ve got Grinder, we’ve got HSBC and am I honestly going to put the same people across all of those accounts, of course not. I think of diversity in terms of thought and experience. And so of course I need different types of people to work on different types of accounts. I need a diverse workforce. Otherwise it we are never going to be able to reach the end goal and the audience that we want to reach with those clients. If I position that and frame it that way until clients and everyone will agree. But if we say D&I should be at the forefront of our business, not everyone agrees with that. So I think it’s almost right framing the actual positioning of it within business as well.

Lucie Cave: Yeah. And it’s got to permeate through the whole business, right? So it’s got to not be a badge or box. It’s got to be there implicitly, but it is. But it isn’t. How do you get there? And and often, the voices who champion it aren’t necessarily the ones that have the “power”, it is the wrong word, but the ability to actually do something about it.

Rebecca Holman: Yeah. If you don’t embrace these things, what do you see? You see the pay gap widening. You see women dropping out of the workforce at a certain time. As a woman in her 40s with two young children, I can totally see how, if you don’t have decent D&I policies, if you don’t have decent maternity policies or flexible working, then half your workforce can’t afford to stay there anymore, and that’s a ridiculous situation to be in, and it’s supposed to be boosting productivity.

Heather Blundell: Taking a bit of a step back and thinking about the wider industry and your career, Lucie. You see storytelling across multiple platforms. How do you ensure women’s voices are amplified in the stories that you tell?

Lucie Cave: My role in media is has evolved. So it was in magazines and obviously worked really closely with Rebecca, who’s across Grazia. Rebecca is probably one of the leading women’s media brands. I worked at Heat. I guess it’s quite interesting when you look at the evolution of magazines from that perspective and how how women you know were represented in media and Heat. You look at some of the celebrities like Spice Girls, they were at the forefront of girl power. I remember being a Heat at that time and actually, it was a real. It felt like a real gamechanger and it was women just doing what they wanted and actually speaking up and rather than bands or solo artists, who are potentially masterminded by men, behind the scenes in the music industry there. There was this band, the Spice Girls who ditched their male manager, decided to do what they wanted. That was a really exciting time. In terms of how women have been represented in the media and from my career, I’ve ended up working in podcasts now, and actually inadvertently, I’ve got a whole team of women. I never said, I only want women. But I’ve just picked the best and they’ve ended up being women. I didn’t realise until I was on this team call with a male celebrity who we were talking to about doing a podcast. And he was like “ohh there’s only women here” and I just thought. Yes! He said it as if it was a surprise. And that’s been brilliant because everyone has just been amazing and really stepped into their power. I’ve ended up commissioning or producing podcasts that have been women. Olivia Attwood’s. Podcast So Wrong. It’s Right. It’s probably our most successful podcast. I remember that went to the top of the charts and Elizabeth Day actually said, it’s great to see a woman at the top of the podcast charts because it’s so white middle-aged men talking about politics. We’ve got Gemma Atkinson, and I’ve got a podcast coming out with Katherine Ryan. So it’s weird. It’s not like I’ve deliberately done it, but these are the voices and the stories that I’ve wanted to champion.

Heather Blundell: Yeah, absolutely. Rebecca, you’re navigating a very fast changing media landscape. How do you approach covering women’s issues in a way that resonates with today’s audiences?

Rebecca Holman: I think the issues is when we’re thinking about how we cover a story online, we don’t cover it in any different way to how we would in print, but it is very much about format. So for us now it’s just thinking about where is that story going to be. So on Instagram, we would do something completely different to a piece we would do for Apple News, and then in print it would be done in a slightly different way, so I think it’s just finding that thread for an issue or a campaign and making it run in different formats. Actually, a really nice example is probably something like we ran a big campaign on maternal mental health with the Maternal Mental Health Alliance last year and we ran that primarily on The Juggle, which is our parenting Instagram. Then we had a page in the print magazine talking about that, but then we actually asked all the women who were collaborating with us to share their post. We run every single one on The Juggle and pointed to it from our main account, which has parents and non parents following it. They don’t necessarily want to be bombarded with loads of messages about this and it was a great. It was such a nice campaign because we got everyone to be really honest, candid and open. They all posted to their audiences. It got really shared. Loads of comments from people talking about how they felt and it was just asking all these women be a bit vulnerable and share a bit about how they felt and how they struggled with early motherhood. That was using the power of the brand and we had the editor literally messaging people and asking them to take part because she was really passionate about this campaign, but then using different platforms and different ways to elevate that.

Lucie Cave: I think the juggle is a really good example of kind of what you’ve done, you know, for women in a different area, because that was massively powerful. That was launched, was it just after just it COVID wasn’t it?

Rebecca Holman: Yeah. So that was an interesting one. We’ve been talking for ages about half of our audience had children living at home and that we sort of still do. We’ve just done some research around Grazia turns 20 this year. So we’ve just done some new research around our audience and we know half of them have children living at home and lockdown really amplified and highlighted how much that audience needed content. They needed a place to vent. They needed a place to get advice and chat, commiserate, but the rest of our audience didn’t necessarily want all that content. So in mid of lockdown, whenever we were all working from home and balancing that.

Lucie Cave: Was awful, just remembering that children crawling all over. I mean, everyone saw everyone’s child. They didn’t. They observe it kind of was.

Rebecca Holman: No children are home. All of those you know? Yeah.

Lucie Cave: Bit more bit of a leveller.

Rebecca Holman: It was absolutely chaotic and then we’re like, why don’t we just launch a new brand in the middle of this? Why not? And we launched it, I think the day that the January lockdown hit, when Boris Johnson was like, yeah, we’re gonna close the schools again. Yeah. I think that was the day we launched The Juggle. And it’s been so fantastic. It’s powered by Grazia. And you can tell it’s from Grazia, but it’s very much around parenting.

Heather Blundell: Sheer coincidence? Yeah.

Rebecca Holman: Focuses on working parents as The Juggle, so you’re trying to do both things all the time, and that’s. Yeah, it’s been a really powerful tool for us because they’re a slightly smaller audience, but they’re incredibly engaged. They comment loads. They share a lot. We run a regular piece on the cost of childcare, those people to share their childcare juggles, and we post those every week and we get dozens and dozens of people writing in every single week.

Lucie Cave: Yeah, I mean that’s because, often, people, women who choose to go back to work, there are often women who are actually not getting any more money.

Heather Blundell: Rebecca, your book highlights the power that quiet women can bring to the workplace. What has been your experience of being a woman in a leadership position in your career? When I was reading your book, I was reminded of that poem, The too much women. So we’re we’re too aggressive. We’re too emotional. You know, we can never ever get it right. And does that does that resonate, what has your experience been in terms of the workplace and position?

Rebecca Holman: I thought, once I’d written that book, I was like ohh, I’m just really comfortable with being beta. And that isn’t what happened. You have these moments where you think, oh God, I need to speak up or I need to do XYZ. You’ll always have these little blips. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I will never feel comfortable in my skin all the time at work, because that’s not how it works. Certainly not if you’re pushing yourself. I think I’ve been at Bauer for about 11 years now, so I’ve certainly got comfortable with my position there and I’m now comfortable to say what I don’t know and to ask stupid questions or what I think are stupid questions. And sometimes they’re not. And also I I think I’m happier now I understand what my strengths are and not sweat the stuff I don’t know.

I think some of the most successful people just do what they do really well. They don’t stress about all the things they can’t do, whereas my slightly better, flappy-like response is to try and do everything. I end up doing it slightly badly and then feel bad about it.

Lucie Cave: If you look at the most successful editors or TV, they will bring people in around them to do the jobs that they can’t do. It’s as much about networking and understanding people’s strengths and weaknesses as it is about you trying to do it all, isn’t it?

Rebecca Holman: Yeah, and that’s a much more powerful position because I do the other thing which is feel like I need to please everyone and get it all right and beat myself up, and I don’t bitch.

Heather Blundell: Do you think because we’re so wired not to show that vulnerability because we’ve got to be as strong as the men. Have you had experiences of working with female leadership being quite tough? I think you can often learn the kind of leader you don’t want to be by having some difficult experiences as well, right?

Lucie Cave

You mean difficult women? Yeah, I do. You think that’s the frustrating thing really. There’s some brilliant women and some fantastic role models that I’ve worked with and peers that we build each other up constantly, and you know that you really value their support, you really respect them. But I’ve certainly had women who were bosses that haven’t done that, and that I felt a lesser person because you’re not being as tough as them. Do you know what I mean? I’ve always been someone who’s pretty resilient or felt like I had to be resilient and just got on with it.

Heather Blundell: Yeah, absolutely.

Lucie Cave: I was in a work meeting, a big leadership meeting. It’s not that we hung out all together all the time or really massively connected. But it was a coaching session and and I don’t know what it was, but the way the coach had asked everyone to say something about how they were feeling, how they wanted people in the room to feel and what they wanted people to take from it, a bit personal, but also about your year and your work stresses, and a few of us cried. I’ve never done that in a meeting before and I’ve felt that actually I came out of it and thought, do you know what? I’m really glad that I did because actually it showed the vulnerability that I’ve not shown before and loads of people were like, “oh, I didn’t know you felt like that”. And I didn’t see it as a weakness. I actually found I found it at strength. But I just didn’t expect it to come, I’ve never done that in a meeting before.

Heather Blundell: Lucy sticking with you, who have been some of the women who have inspired you in your career?

Lucie Cave: There’s people on the outside that I don’t know, but I think God, they’re amazing and, you know, people like Reese Witherspoon, I think is incredible. The stuff that works, she’s doing, to champion women in media and representing women on screen and off screen with Hello Sunshine. I think that’s incredible. Then, I’ve got peers who still work with me. Now that you know, there’s a brilliant woman called Rebecca Frank who runs Kiss, who I just adore, and we are constantly building each other up. I really respect her, she’s just someone that you could turn to on every level. And then, I’ve had different people that I’ve worked with across the years and people that I’ve seen from afar. I think people like Vic Harper, who used to work at Grazia is amazing. She now works at The Independent. And then you’ve got people like Briony Gordon, who I think has actually risen through social media and been given more of a voice that way, even though she’s been a massively successful columnist for a long time and she’s managed to connect with a lot more people through through social than she did necessarily through print. But yeah, there’s a lot of women who I admire for different things. And then people that I turn to on a day-to-day basis.

Heather Blundell: Yeah, absolutely. Rebecca, do you think social media has helped or hindered progress in how women are portrayed to the media?

Rebecca Holman: So I think the complicated answer is it’s a bit of both. When Twitter was still Twitter in its heyday, it was always seen as a place that gave women a voice and a platform, but certainly outside of that, really male dominated world of papers. Equally Instagram, where we know our audience still spend a huge amount of time and it’s a great platform for us to share our best content to find out what our audience thinks. It’s always been a really important campaigning tool for us, which I’ve talked about. My frustration, however, is that as a brand, we’re quite beholden to an algorithm. The content that Instagram thinks our audience will want, get shared the most. My worry is that I don’t want to start trying to gamify our content and water down what we want, and lose sight of what we think is important. I think Instagram in particular, and again, this is maybe specific to us, congrats you as a brand. It likes it if you’re only about one thing as a brand. We’re as broad as our audiences’ lives are. We released special covers to mark the war in Ukraine three years. To go straight after our big fashion issue, it’s that mix, it reflects the colour and variety in our audiences’ lives and I think you can lose some of that and you can lose some of the nuance around your content on a platform that likes to know in really black and white robot terms, what you’re about.

Heather Blundell: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Lucy, you obviously oversee content across multiple platforms. How do you think legacy Media brands can stay relevant in this changing landscape?

Lucie Cave: I think for me I can only really speak for me on this content that we’re working on at the minute from a podcast perspective. But I think talent is big. It’s really important for us in terms of picking the right voices and the right people who resonate. I would say someone like Olivia Attwood, who I’ve mentioned already. I think she’s super smart and she’s really funny, she’s really hard working. She really doesn’t give a **** what anyone thinks about her. She really knows who she is. So it’s almost like if you’re thinking about the who or what the perfect brand would be. She’s very curious. She’s got a wide range of skills. She came out of Love Island, but she’s now a documentary maker. I don’t know if you’ve seen Getting Filthy Rich on her documentary on ITV, but the content creators that she comes up against. Her eye watering in terms of what they’re doing and she is just so she’s non judgmental. You know what I mean? There’s real power in working with the right people and those people become your brand in a way. That’s really, for me, what’s been happening in the evolution of podcast. Getting the right talent married with the right format, an idea that they become a brand in themselves. It’s working with people that you respect and who know who they are and what they stand for.

Heather Blundell: Yeah, absolutely. OK. So looking forward, Rebecca, what do you still think needs to change in the media industry for true gender equality to be achieved. Small question to finish on.

Rebecca Holman: It depends what you mean by gender equality. If you mean pay parity, my personal perspective is that publishers need to start getting really creative in terms of what they mean when they talk about flexible working. How can you really trust people to go off and get the job done when they are balancing care and responsibilities? How can you turn it into output rather than hours worked in a really meaningful way? How can part-time work still be a valued place for promotion and progression? Because I think we forget that there’s a huge way that people who are working three days a week and they just get stuck there.

Heather Blundell: So final question on International Women’s Day, if you could go back and give your younger self. Some advice in terms of your career, what would it be.

Lucie Cave: Do you know what, I actually quite admire my younger, ballsy self, and I would say just carry on because at one point when I first started out in the media, I think I went for work experience at a kids channel called Trouble TV, which doesn’t exist anymore. And I went up to the CEO and I said. I’d like to have a screen test to be a presenter, but I also want to work behind the scenes and she was like, well, you need to decide what do you want to do. I went well, why can’t I do both? And actually the me now would never say anything like that. I was quite ballsy. Yeah. So I would say keep those balls and continue swinging them.

Heather Blundell: Do you think anyone tried to tough it out of you?

Lucie Cave: You get told so many times, like her saying, you can’t do both. It’s like, well, why? Why can’t I do both? And I I just didn’t genuinely understand why I couldn’t because I could work. You look at people, there’s people on screen, they still are producers off screen. Why do you have to choose? But eventually it does get worn out of you because that’s just how it is.

Heather Blundell: Yeah. OK.

Lucie Cave’: I would say those balls are growing. Make sure that they grow a bit bigger.

Rebecca Holman: But I would say learn how to use spreadsheets, embrace the data, and don’t let other people, men, gatekeep all the technical stuff.

Heather Blundell: Thank you so much for joining us on International Women’s Day. I’ve so appreciated your time. Thank you.