I’m a guest, and my talk with Jane Caro is presented in Richard Fidler’s regular spot, Conversations, at 2pm.

The Tele declared the ABC “will boot all of its male television and radio hosts off air tomorrow in a bizarre and patronising bid to promote ‘gender equality’,” and “high-profile presenters” like Mark Colvin and Fidler would be replaced by un-named “fill-in” women presenting “programs about equality of the sexes”.

Let’s look at it another way, and without the confected outrage.

The all-female line-up sends a message to those men who need to hear it – this is what it feels like when women are confronted by all-male line-ups in any number of situations in society, even today. 

By 2016 the Australian Stock Exchange’s top 200 companies still featured 20 with no female directors. In 2009 only 9 per cent of companies had any female board members.

In 2013 Tony Abbott presented a wall of suits for his first Cabinet, with Julie Bishop the only woman not just “knocking on the door”, but able to force her way through. There are a few more women in Cabinet today, but the Coalition is actually going backward in female representation. There are just 13 Coalition women in the Lower House, and 63 men. That’s five fewer women than in the Abbott government. 

Take a look at sports coverage of any media outlet in the country, on any day of the week, and often the only female you’re likely to see is a mare. Try this experiment if you’d like to know what that feels like, day in, day out: find a picture of a woman’s head, copy it, and stick it over all the male figures you see, and do it for a week. Now see how included, how valued, you feel.

Where is the Tele outrage over another media outlet’s year-round, almost exclusively male line-up? Go to radio 2GB’s website, hit “Shows”, and it’s wall to wall male presenters. Women are featured guests, but the top gigs all go to men.

Try churches and religions. The Catholics, of course, prefer women a long way down the food chain. The Anglican Church in Australia is trying to elect female bishops, but it’s still regarded as revolutionary. Watch coverage of any major religious event in Australia today and it’s dominated by male leaders.

It’s 2017, not 1923. How much more research is needed to show that women business leaders improve outcomes; that women’s perspectives are needed in politics because we’re half the population.

Which Australian Catholic diocese had a significantly lower rate of child sexual abuse over decades than any other? The one with women in true leadership positions.   

My talk with Caro is about how a middle-aged woman from a regional newspaper came to write about child sexual abuse in churches to the extent that I did, and still do. It’s not about “equality of the sexes”.

I needed a woman’s viewpoint to recognise child sexual abuse as, first and foremost, an abuse of power. Women my age are particularly familiar with a certain kind of authoritarian, top down, do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do male power junkie, and the subtleties of both the abuses of power, and how those men respond when they’re caught.

I wish none of it had occurred. I also long for the day when we don’t need a 24-hour female line-up to make a point.