Hilary Andersson

The wow factor

The Iraq war was a good war for women war reporters. We were there in force. That's not to say we outnumbered the men – far from it – but our profile was high, and that was no accident. The role of women war reporters has changed significantly. Not only are there more female foreign correspondents now than ever before in high-profile reporting jobs, but women reporting wars seems almost to be a vogue. There is a wellentrenched belief at a high level of media management that audiences want to see and hear women on their screens. If press coverage of media deployments is anything to go by, women reporting wars also has an added “wow” value. In Britain and abroad, the media commented on our attire, our hair, our personal histories, our motives and, oh yes, our abilities.

At the British Divisional Headquarters in southern Iraq the number of male and female reporters was almost evenly divided. Christiane Amanpour for CNN, Emma Hurd for Sky, Caroline Wyatt, Kylie Morris and me for the BBC (the BBC's team of five reporters also included two men), and Cordelia Kretzschmar for GMTV. Only ITN, Channel Four, and The Sun were represented solely by men at the HQ , although ITN and Channel Four had placed female correspondents in other high profile slots. It was to this evenly matched group that the British high command revealed the topsecret war plan on the eve of the ground war.

We were, of course, immersed in the male-dominated world of war. The tens of thousands of soldiers by whom we were surrounded couldn't have been more amazed at our presence had it been the Dark Ages. When we all had to jump into World War I-style trenches and shuffle along, shoulder to shoulder, during a Scud alert in the middle of a general's briefing, the squaddies spluttered with glee and disbelief inside their gasmasks.

But remember, it was only a few decades ago in World War II that women were banned from military press briefings altogether. The doyen of women foreign correspondents, Martha Gellhorn, had to hide in the bathroom of a hospital ship to avoid missing the D-Day landings. In Vietnam, female journalists pushed their way to the front but were often confounded by over-caring commanders refusing to give them access to frontline combat positions.

The success for women correspondents in this most recent conflict does not mean that the fight for equality in war journalism is over, just that it has taken an important stride forward. The question now is whether women will remain a vital part of such journalism when the “wow” value of having them in the front line dies, when the novelty wears off, as it surely will. And, if so, in what numbers? If you dig beneath the surface of Gulf War II, beneath the fact that almost every time you turned on your television a woman was on screen, you will discover we were not actually at the front line. We were visible all right, but that was because we were far enough to the rear of the action to be able to use a satellite dish safely without endangering large numbers of troops by attracting incoming fire. In fact on the real front line, military embed positions were completely dominated by men.

Troops wouldn't like it

In the rear at Divisional Headquarters, Sky's Emma Hurd spent one evening in the crucial run-up to the fall of Basra answering on-air questions, not about the advancing British troops, but about what on earth women were doing reporting wars anyway. The fact is that there are still deeplyentrenched social attitudes, the legacy of humanity's entire male dominated history, that weigh heavily when it comes to levelling the playing field in the arena of war. It is, of course, an arena that epitomises everything male – danger, conflict, dirt, guns and machinery.

The simple fact is that men are protective of women – they fear for our safety far more than they do for that of one another. Many people, men and women alike, cannot figure out why women want to be on the front line in the first place. That's one of the reasons why there is a “wow” value to our presence. That's why women at war make good television. And there lies the essence of the problem. We played a high profile in this war partly because of real social change, but partly, too, because of old fashioned attitudes – attitudes that decree a vast number of viewers will watch us simply because they are amazed we are there.

So again, how many of us will still be reporting from the front line when the novelty of our presence wears off? Will there ever be truly even representation? Many female reporters doubt it. A fundamental problem is becoming increasingly apparent in the field of foreign reporting for both men and women: how to balance family life with work. Even men are under more pressure than ever to put in time at home as society's demands change. A few men turned down high-profile slots in this war because of this. Many others – although they will admit it only privately – considered this course of action. And if this problem of balance is an issue for men, it is a far bigger one for women, illustrated by the fact that most female foreign correspondents don't even have families. There are exceptions, but the vast majority are unmarried and childless. Their male counterparts do far better in terms of maintaining parallel lives in terms of partners and children.

That, surely, is because society still expects women to play the primary child-care role in the home, and because it is still a rare man who will follow a woman around the world and then look after the children while she goes off to war. So for female foreign correspondents it is often a straight and practical choice between job and family – and society's view remains harsh on this one. Mothers who go off to war are likely to be roundly rebuked.

When Yvonne Ridley, the reporter for the Daily Express, was arrested and detained in Afghanistan in 2001, her nine-year-old daughter Daisy's face was plastered all over the British papers. A national debate began about whether she had acted irresponsibly by going into a war zone when she had a young child at home. She was called “daft”, and “glory hunting”; her attempt to get into Afghanistan dressed as a local put down to “heroic idiocy”. But were the papers full of the plaintive faces of the children of any of the male journalists arrested, killed or injured in Iraq last month? No. That's because society still says that men are allowed to take risks because they can handle the situation, whereas women should be accepting their responsibilities at home.

All female war reporters have, at some point, been asked the question: “What's it like for a woman at war? Isn't it more difficult and more dangerous if you're a woman?” In my experience, being a woman offers significant advantages in conflict situations. True, sharing a tiny tent with ten men on an Afghan mountain plain last year presented its challenges, but when it comes to safety I believe it is better to be a woman at war. From Liberia to Afghanistan, from the West Bank to Iraq, I have found that locals with guns perceive women as less of a threat – and that can make an enormous difference to getting through checkpoints and negotiating your way through tricky situations.

In the Middle East, Africa and Asia, where few women hold prominent public positions, we are seen as harmless and unlikely to be spies or aggressors. If we are arrested, as many of us have been, we are more vulnerable to abuse in some ways, but on the other hand our captors are often more gentle with us than they would be with men. In deeply religious societies, we can often appeal to aggressors by asking them to think of us as the same way as they think of their mothers or sisters. This may engender respect. And these are not tricks men can employ – the aggressors are not impressed by the thought of surrogate fathers or brothers. Nor is access for women really a problem. If the arch-Islamic fundamentalist Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, can agree to be interviewed by a woman in a headscarf – me – so can anyone.

Women bring something different

The culture of the business remains the same: be prepared to go anywhere, anytime, for as long as it takes to get the whole story, and for your career to flourish. If media bosses rely purely on society to encourage change in this field, women will continue to creep into war reporting and, as many have, creep out again after being forced to choose between this most hazardous work and a family life. That's a tragedy for journalism. To witness war is to witness the most extreme form of human behaviour, the most primitive side of humanity, but also humanity at its most intense and profound. To keep women out of this is to deny representatives of half the world the chance to comment on, reflect upon and analyse the most extraordinary events of our times.

Hilary Andersson is the BBC's Africa correspondent, based in Johannesburg. She was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Britain, Belgium, Germany, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. Last year she covered the famine in Angola and Malawi, and reported from Tora Bora in Afghanistan at the height of the American bombing.