and ideas. How could they be translated into the day-to-day reality of an office, a job interview, a board meeting or a speaking engagement?
I wanted to use the tools of my own trade of broadcasting to answer that question, especially the pressures and perils of live work. But I was also conscious of the gulf between how people in jobs like mine are generally perceived – unencumbered by doubts about their performance – and my own experience of what it can be like in reality. I worried that when teenagers I spoke to in schools told me ‘You must never get nervous’, that was an assumption that might lead them to conclude that a path like mine could only be for someone blessed from birth with an unshakeable belief in their abilities.
I also knew from my own life how self-doubt can make you baulk at opportunities that – were they presented to anyone else – would be perceived as a no-brainer. When the incoming editor of the Today programme asked if I might be interested in becoming one of its presenters, baulk was exactly what I did. Despite nearly twenty years as a journalist, and a long-held ambition to present one of the BBC’s flagship programmes, I could only think of how hard the job would be – the precision required, the pressure, the scrutiny, the pre-dawn starts. I went home and told my husband it was a nice idea but I couldn’t imagine going for it. He looked incredulous. What would I say, he asked, if any of our children ducked out of a potentially great opportunity by saying it would be too hard?
I knew the answer to that one, and it pushed me to go for it. But for the first three years on Today, I fretted about almost every shift. I could not feel at ease in the role, always worrying about what might go wrong and agonising over everything that I did. But then came a moment of change – a point from which my experience started to feel different. Although an element of apprehension remained about what the working day would bring, that worry started to feel manageable and something I could channel. Looking back, it is easy to see that over time I grew into the role and began to feel more at home in it. Yet to me, at first that outcome was never a given. I find myself wondering now, what if I had bailed sometime before that moment of change? I’d be looking back and probably perceiving my uncertainty as evidence that the job wasn’t right for me. I would never have discovered what I can now appreciate – that the passage of time, perseverance and an increasing familiarity made an immense difference.
Along the way I have learned a lot about how more difficult tasks develop your capabilities, and about scrutiny and resilience. My work is on public display, with the low points as well as the high subject to immediate and sometimes fevered comment. It is often intense, both because of unusual working hours – a regular 3 a.m. alarm call – and the pressure that comes from having to quickly absorb large quantities of information. The end result is all about conveying that information in a form that best serves the audience – getting the most salient and important facts, thoughts and opinions out of interviewees, and being as clear as possible in your own thought and speech.
However much that is at the core of my working life, I have always found it much more difficult to convey information about myself, particularly in the way that is essential in the workplace. It starts with how you present your skills and aptitude at an interview and goes on through promotions and appraisals to getting the senior-most positions. As time went on, I realised I needed to deploy the essential tools of my trade – choice of words, body language, ability to distil information and deploying facts – towards my own career development as well as on the television and radio. In an age where myriad information sources and social media mean that attention spans tend to be short, those messages about yourself need to be ever more instantly understandable and memorable.
Why did I find these conversations and messages trickier than my day-to-day work and shy away from anything that I perceived as showcasing or selling it? I had certainly grown up with a strong motivation to be the best that I possibly could be – largely stemming from being the daughter of immigrants and seeing how my parents had uprooted themselves from all that was familiar, strongly driven by wanting to do their utmost for us children. Both came to the UK from Pakistan – my father as a young doctor and my mother when she married him a few years later. There was never any question of me, as their daughter, being perceived differently from my brother; for both of us, the arrival of school reports sparked a gathering around the dining table where my father would read each entry aloud. As long as we appeared to be doing our best, he was satisfied: ‘Aim high,’ he would say, ‘because if you miss what you are aiming for, you’ll still end up in a good place.’
In both my parents’ families, mine would be the third generation in which women had had educational opportunities comparable to men – back in the 1930s, in what was then British India, my two grandmothers were enrolled on medical and nursing courses respectively. In the 1980s, it was the desire for me to have the best possible education that made my parents opt for an English boarding school rather than have me stay in Saudi Arabia, where we were then living. It was a decision that meant difficult airport goodbyes and long separations. Years later, I discovered that quality of schooling was not the only factor. As a teenage girl in Saudi Arabia I would have had to wear the long black abaya, or cloak, and a headscarf every time I left the house. My parents worried that being subject to those constraints as part of my daily life might fundamentally alter my sense of what I could go on to achieve.
All of this support helped to propel me forward through my teenage years, but sometime during university I think I became less sure of myself and more self-conscious. I would have gained so much more from the experience of university had I been more willing to ask questions, to take risks and to test out arguments in front of my lecturers and fellow students. Instead, I was rather too cautious, apprehensive that I might have misunderstood, misjudged or appear uninformed. Something of that persisted in the first part of my professional life, when I was a producer first at Bloomberg TV and then at the BBC, before getting into presenting at the age of twenty-seven. I would mull over running orders and scripts in search of the ideal turn of phrase or link between one story and the next. I would approach new projects, such as working on the Olympics, almost like an exam – setting aside time for preparation, making extensive notes in advance and trying to cover every base. Working on Today knocked that search for perfection out of me for the most basic of reasons: the shortage of time focused the mind like nothing I had previously experienced, forcing me to trust my instincts and judgements and helping to give me a new-found courage.
I look back now and wish that I had kept hold of my self-belief all along the way. Instead, somewhere between entering the workplace and having to rise to the challenge of a particularly exacting role, it took a back seat. The socialisation of girls and the way they can then end up deferring to their male peers was certainly a factor, but later on it was also hard to hold on to a sense that I could make it into senior roles through the intense periods of pregnancy and early parenthood. The top of my chosen field, as in many others at that time, was one where women were under-represented, and women of colour more so.
Even today, and even in the most progressive nations, too many companies and workplaces can be gender-mapped into a pyramid shape: women and men represented in equal numbers at entry level but the presence of women tailing off dramatically the more senior the role.1 At the beginning of 2018, just seven women were leading FTSE 100 companies, fewer than the number of men called David occupying the same positions.2 A century after the first woman was elected to Parliament at Westminster, around two-thirds of British MPs are men,3 with a similar picture among partners in law firms in England and Wales, where only a third are women.4 On the airwaves, a 2018 study of the UK’s six most prominent broadcast news programmes found 2.2 male experts appearing for every female one.5 In some professions, even the entry level is seriously out of kilter – only around 12 per cent of all engineers in the UK are female.6 After the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the actor Emma Thompson called the lack of women in the film industry a ‘gender dysfunction’, part of a malaise within the system. ‘There are not nearly enough women, particularly in Hollywood, in positions of power. There aren’t enough women at the top of the tree – in the studios – who could perhaps balance everything out. There aren’t enough women on set. This is part of our difficulty.’7
I still find myself in settings that are overwhelmingly male, often at conferences – including the high-profile