A matter of merit

The big media news over the weekend was not that Rona Fairhead, a Cambridge and Harvard graduate and former CEO of the Financial Times Group, was slated to become chairman of the BBC Trust, the BBC's governing body; it was the manner in which The Sunday Telegraph treated the news. Its headline read "Mother of three poised to lead the BBC", prompting a social media maelstrom about stereotyping of women, and a stinging commentary in The Guardian by Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, in which she asked: "Ability not fertility: why do we define professional women by their family?".