Can you describe your career in media, and what are the specific challenges you faced as a woman journalist?
I joined journalism over 30 years ago. I had just come back from Oxford University and joined The Times of India as a junior assistant editor and correspondent. At that time, the newspaper was a very different place from what it is today. Journalism was very male-dominated. The men did the "hard subjects"—like defence, foreign affairs and home affairs. Women journalists were supposed to cover beats like education and social issues, which were seen as soft subjects, though they are not. They suffered from not being considered for the same stories as men and not being able to spend the same time as men in the newsroom. But I was fortunate because I had very good bosses, like Dilip Padgaonkar in The Times of India, Vinod Mehta in Outlook and Shekhar Gupta in The Indian Express.
I think the real change in gender-defined stereotypes in journalism came with the advent of television. A lot of women journalists got the opportunity to go into the field with their cameras, because television is a hungry beast. You have to keep feeding it with news. So you can't afford to discriminate between men and women. The structured gender inequalities that existed in the 1990s in newspapers didn't exist in television, simply because it was too fast, too big, too quick.
You once narrated an account of your first editor discriminating between you and your male colleague.
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