Woman's Hour Power List

On Tuesday 12th February Eve Pollard, chair of the judging panel, reveals the Woman's Hour Power List in a special programme from the BBC Radio Theatre presented by Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey.

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Follow the Live Blog for updates leading up to Tuesday 12th February 2013 as the Woman's Hour Power List is revealed.

Eve Pollard is the woman who was responsible for delivering our first Power List. She is a journalist, author and former Fleet Street editor and was only the second woman to edit a national newspaper, the Sunday Mirror before she moved on to edit the Sunday Express.  She chaired our panel of judges, which included Priti Patel MP, Dawn O’Porter, Val McDermid, Baroness Oona King and former Woman’s Hour editor Jill Burridge.  Guided by the public nominations and expert witness, sifting through 1,578 suggestions from listeners alone, they chose the women who feature on the list of the 100 most powerful women today.

Jane analyses how the women who have the Power List are broken down by age, ethnicity, education and marital status.

Heather Rabbatts, the first woman director of the Football Association, joins Jane to talk about her place on the Woman’s Hour power list.

Where are the gaps – of the areas and industries – where we don’t find women? And what can be done to increase the numbers of women from more diverse backgrounds reaching the top jobs? At a time when more women than men are going to university and entering professions such as law and medicine, how do we go about getting women from every background better represented at the top table? Joining Jenni to discuss what the list says about where we are now and how we tackle the gaps are: Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue and one of the 100 women who made the Power List; another of the judges, Labour peer Baroness Oona King' and Julia Hobsbawm who runs the media networking company Editorial Intelligence and is Professor of Networking at Cass Business School in London. 

One of the strong themes that emerged during deliberations was how to weigh hard power – money, hire and fire, political power against soft power, culture and influence and especially the soft power represented by social media and Twitter. So is power changing and will that change the women we might see on a Woman’s Hour Power List when we hope to revisit it? Dawn O’Porter joins the panel to discuss, along with Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue; Julia Hobsawm, Editorial intelligence; and Baroness Oona King, Labour Peer.