Emmerdale's pseudo-feminist stunt will achieve nothing for gender equality

ITV soap Emmerdale today announced that it will air a one-off special episode to celebrate International Women’s Day next year. The episode will be written, directed and produced by women and will feature an all-female cast. It will be screened, ITV says, “in recognition of the global event celebrating women’s rights”. Well spit on my placard and tear up my ballot paper, I think feminism’s job is done.

Celebrated annually on 8 March since 1975 when the United Nations adopted it as an official day, International Women’s Day is the single event in the calendar that globally recognises women’s historic plight and continuing achievements and often sees protests take place in the name of enduring inequality.

The theme for International Women’s Day 2019 has not yet been announced, but this year’s theme was Push for Progress. Push for progress so that one day, one in nine girls in the developing world are no longer married off before the age of fifteen, FGM is no longer practised in 19 countries worldwide and two women a week in England and Wales are no longer killed by a current or former partner. Yes, an all-female episode of Emmerdale will really help with those, won’t it?

Even the language used to announce the episode was tone deaf. Chest puffed out, gold star book at the ready, ITV revealed the episode would have an “almost entirely female crew”, (whatever almost means), and that it would also be “produced by a female, written by a female, directed by a female”. “Female: a species of human to which we shall dedicate an episode.” Have you ever heard a man described as “a male” in such a way?

It’s not the first programme to announce such a shamelessly transparent way of attempting to tackle dwindling viewing figures amid the threat posed by streaming services such as Netflix, Now TV and Amazon Prime. Earlier this year, to commemorate the centenary of (property-owning, 30-plus) women getting the vote, Celebrity Big Brother announced their own all-female show.

Yes, 100 years since women went on hunger strike for the vote, since they were force fed in prison cells, beaten by police and since Emily Wilding Davison was killed by the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby as she tried to place two suffragette flags on the course, Channel 5 thought that a flash-in-the-pan all-female cast would be an appropriate way to commemorate that. Promoted as Celebrity Big Brother: The Year of The Woman, the reality TV show actually invited men into the house after just three days of the “all-female” house. The Year of the Woman and they couldn’t even bear to make it a women-only affair.

It seems curious that Emmerdale would even want to emulate a desperate PR move like that at all, considering the level of derision it was met with at the time.

Trying to piggyback on someone else’s weak PR stunt is rather sad, but replacing mixed-gender or male roles with women is more than that. It’s tokenistic virtue signalling.

The all-female Ghostbusters was a bad film and so served only to weaken the cause, an all-female Ocean’s movie somehow warranted only eight women, compared to the titular 11, 12, and 13 men who starred in the originals. As for the discussion on whether or not we should make the chauvinistic James Bond a woman – that’s quite frankly insulting. The idea of switching out men for women misses so many points. But at least Ocean’s, Ghostbusters and Lord of the Flies don’t claim to be doing it in the name of celebrating International Women’s Day.

Television seems to be the area in which the entertainment industry is faring best when it comes to gender balance. In 2017, women comprised 40 per cent of all speaking characters in mainstream British TV. That’s an improvement on the 32 per cent in Hollywood during the same year. This month alone has seen social media alight with the excitement on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve and Jed Mercurio’s Bodyguard that saw women in a number of prominent positions of power.

The majority of TV shows (68 per cent) still have more men than women in them and we still see men identified by their occupational status more than woman are, while women are identified as mothers and lovers. It needs to be better, but women’s visibility in television is making progress. So why throw in this all-female cast nonsense to throw it all off kilter? What, moreover, happens after this “special” all-female episode has aired? How many women will be in front of – and behind – the Emmerdale cameras then?

This vacuous virtue signalling has got to stop. It would serve women better if tone deaf organisations stopped trying to shoehorn them in but rather did simple diversity audits. When I contacted Emmerdale they simply told me that finding out their male to female staff ratio on the show “could take a while”. You’d think they might bother finding that out before making such an arrogant announcement. A female cast achieves nothing. Let’s see a continued dedication to gender diversity and then we’ll listen up.