Compared to women in Italy, we are making progress

Imagine a beautiful young woman between two wizened men. They take off her coat to reveal a low-cut top and then make her say things in her funny foreign accent like a ventriloquist's doll. Now imagine this clip in English on a prime-time BBC news programme. Just imagine. This is what happened in Italy when Rai Uno, the state-owned channel, broadcast this news item on La Donna del Festival earlier this year. Rai thought nothing of broadcasting it at 8pm, never dreaming that any Italian would complain. The channel, led by a female general manager, Lorenza Lei, were wrong. Natascha Fioretti, equal opportunities director at the Associazione Pulitzer, complained and when Rai refused to apologise – saying that the clip was "only a game" – she launched a petition on Facebook. Some 4,000 people have signed so far. Surely this is a sign that feminism in Italy – for so long a dirty word in the era of the lothario-cum-president – is on the rise? My experience last week, on a panel about women and the media at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, suggested not. Instead of a renaissance in the woman's movement following the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi last year, the women I met spoke of their despair at what they describe as a gender backlash since Berlusconi quit. "They say, 'now Berlusconi is gone, women are OK and there are more important things to worry about'," explains Fioretti. Asked whether Italy is a good place to be a woman, Loredana Lipperini, who writes for La Repubblica, snorted: "In the light of this data there's no reason to be optimistic." Much of the focus last week – unsurprising given the nature of the festival – was not the fact that Italy has one of the lowest rates of working women, nor that pay inequality means that women are paid 40% less than men, it is the way they are regularly demeaned or treated as decoration in the media, particularly on screens long dominated by Berlusconi. (The owner of MediaSet could still influence the state-owned broadcaster Rai by making senior appointments). This situation means that I found myself in the slightly unusual position of hearing the UK held up as some sort of role model when it comes to women and the media. Makes a change, eh? Even with page 3, advertising that promotes skeletal children and national TV screens largely devoid of wrinkly women, the strides made to recognise what women think and say rather than just what they look like in the UK is applauded in Italy. So while a classics professor might be forced to defend her long grey hair and lack of makeup, she simply wouldn't be given the gig in Italy. The Leveson inquiry may have moved swiftly on from the complaints made by women's groups about the objectification and treatment of women to deal with corruption at the highest levels of office, but I came away encouraged by the sense that the way women are portrayed in the UK media is improving, if in no way equal to men. I haven't let Italian vino go to my head. The problems talked about in Perugia – the way violence against women is regularly seen as the woman's fault, the double standards meted out to female politicians, the way the word "feminist" is still laden with negative connotations, to name just a few, are all media issues that cross national boundaries – but there has been change. We once thought nothing of watching scantily clad women totter on our prime-time TV screens promising to save the world one furry animal at a time on Miss World. Now we can turn to the web to complain; not always, and not enough, but we should at least be cheered by the opportunity. Perhaps I'm wrong. Has anyone out there got equally egregious examples of sexist TV in the UK? Or the worst bits of the British press? Let me know. It's always good to keep a list.