When Kate Adie became a household name in 1980, she was the only woman reporting abroad for the BBC. Today, women lead its coverage of wars and world affairs, and former BBC journalist Colleen Murrell has captured that transformation in a new book telling the story in the correspondents’ own words.
Colleen Murrell, Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University, was speaking to Monaco Life at the Princess Grace Irish Library, where she presented BBC Women Reporting the World: Conversations with Foreign Correspondents. Published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025, it brings together the experiences of 10 BBC foreign correspondents, including Kate Adie, Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin and Shaimaa Khalil, women who broke into one of journalism’s most prestigious and historically male-dominated fields.
A former reporter for the BBC, ITN and Associated Press, Murrell traces how quickly that world has changed, and why the lessons still matter as journalists face new pressures, from online abuse to the battle for trust in the age of artificial intelligence.
“I think that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write this – it’s not very long ago that this was the case,” she says. “I’ve got two girls in their 20s – one of whom is studying journalism – and they have no idea how hard it was before.”
When marriage meant the end of a career
In its early years, the BBC was a relatively progressive employer, offering roles to the first generations of women graduating from university, some of whom rose to senior positions behind the microphone. That changed in 1932, when the broadcaster introduced a marriage bar.
“So any woman who married had to leave the BBC,” Murrell explains. “Some of those women were quite high up in the organisation and still had to leave because they’d got married.”
The bar was lifted in 1944, when wartime staff shortages meant the BBC needed women in its workforce. That same year, Audrey Russell became the first accredited female war reporter, travelling to mainland Europe shortly after the D-Day landings. Yet after her, four decades passed before the BBC appointed a woman to a permanent foreign posting.
Women had to fight even to be heard on air, facing prejudice about their voices and their competence. Some were allowed to present or report from home, but foreign correspondence remained a male preserve.
“The excuses were always, ‘It’s too dangerous for them’, or ‘We have to take care of them’, or ‘Oh, I don’t think they even want to do it’, which wasn’t true,” Murrell says.
Kate Adie and the empty space behind her
Kate Adie’s coverage of the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980 made her one of the most recognisable faces on British television. But her prominence, Murrell argues, disguised just how isolated she was.
“I was a teenager when Kate Adie was all over the television, and in a way, she was a sort of queen bee, because we didn’t realise that there was nobody behind her,” she says. “She was the only one, in fact. She sort of had it to herself, really, and we didn’t notice that there were all these other positions missing.”
It was not until 1986 that the BBC posted women to overseas bureaux, sending New Zealand-born Diana Goodman to Bonn as its first female foreign correspondent and Liz Blunt to West Africa. The appointments made headlines in their own right.
The resistance had sometimes been extraordinary. When Goodman reported from Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war in 1984, members of the public wrote to the BBC and to newspapers arguing she should not be there, partly because male colleagues might put themselves in danger trying to protect her.
“Diana just kind of went, ‘Oh, what nonsense’,” Murrell recalls.
Blunt went on to report from the front lines of Liberia’s civil war, and was inside the port authority building in Monrovia during the shootout in September 1990 when President Samuel Doe was captured, before being killed by rebels. Two schools in Liberia now bear her name.
The price women paid for their careers
Professional recognition was only part of the struggle. Of the 10 correspondents in Murrell’s book, only three have children. “The thing is, you had to choose back then,” she says. “It was one or the other.”
Murrell faced that choice herself. She turned down a senior role at Australia’s ABC after being told the job would demand “the hours that it takes”, and later moved into academia to raise her two daughters. Earlier in her career, at AP, she had seen others make that decision on women’s behalf.
“People didn’t want to send women abroad because they were thinking, ‘why on earth would they want to? For goodness’ sake, they’ve got children’,” she says. “People were making assumptions all the time.”
Today, correspondents such as Katya Adler and Anna Foster combine motherhood with senior international roles. For Murrell, the shift became clear at the start of the war in Ukraine, when she watched BBC bulletins in which female presenters crossed to female editors and correspondents, one after another.
“It was women talking to women, passing back to other women in the BBC studio, and it feels like, now, there’s a step change from back then,” she says.
Equal pay: a battle across generations
Equal pay has taken longer. Murrell traces the fight back to Audrey Russell, who she says challenged the BBC on discovering she earned less than the men. Generations later, women were still in the dark.
“It was not a conversation they had with their colleagues,” Murrell says. “And then one day, the highest salaries were published in the paper, and women found out that they weren’t being paid as much as their equal male colleagues. That went down very badly.”
Among them was China editor Carrie Gracie, who discovered in 2017 that North America editor Jon Sopel was earning up to £249,999 to her £135,000. She resigned from the post in protest, won an apology and back pay from the BBC, and gave every penny to charities championing equal pay.
“Nobody’s really shocked anymore”
Just as women have won their place on the front line, in the newsroom and, increasingly, on the payroll, the most powerful man in the world is openly belittling them. US President Donald Trump notoriously told Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey “Quiet, piggy” aboard Air Force One, has repeatedly told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to “smile more”, and in September barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico journalists from the White House.
It is the kind of behaviour that, a generation ago, might have ended a political career. For Murrell, what is most alarming is how little reaction it now provokes.
“I think it’s staggering that it has become normalised and that nobody is really shocked anymore,” she says. “There is always an undercurrent against women, and it shouldn’t be happening in the United States, which is meant to be one of the most enlightened democracies.”
Can journalism survive AI and the collapse of trust?
With anyone with a smartphone now able to document and share events instantly, and artificial intelligence producing content, what role is left for professional journalists?
“I think it is the truth teller,” she says. “Of course, if you’re dealing with Trump, he simply decides there are no truth tellers. The most remarkable brand he ever coined was ‘fake news’, which can be used to dispute anything anybody says.”
She believes readers will still turn to journalists who know their subject, put events in context and explain them clearly, so that people can trust that what they are reading “is the truth as far as it can be established”.
She also urges readers to question who is paying for the information they consume.
“You have to ask yourself, where has the money come from? Who is backing this? And how much of it, especially at election time, is being driven by other countries?” she says.
Advice for the next generation
Murrell’s own daughter has just completed a master’s in international journalism, “exactly the same one I did at City all those years ago”. She is entering a profession that, thanks in part to the women in her mother’s book, is no longer the male preserve it once was, but which is changing faster than ever.
For her daughter, her students and anyone hoping to follow them, Murrell’s first piece of advice is to specialise before studying journalism.
“I often think the best way into journalism is to study something else first, and then do a master’s in journalism, because it gives you a specialism,” she says. “Finance, for example. We desperately need financial journalists. Hardly anybody is numerate.”
Politics, international relations and languages can give young reporters the same edge, she adds. Many of the correspondents in her book studied languages and built their careers around a single country or region.
Her second piece of advice is to learn every practical skill possible, because today’s reporters are expected to write, film, record and edit their own work.
Third, she urges young journalists to decide early what kind of journalist they want to be. Many of her students lean towards activism. For them, she suggests working for campaigning organisations or NGOs, rather than newsrooms built on impartial reporting.
The fight for journalism’s future
For Murrell, the progress made by women in journalism is worth celebrating, but it is no reason for complacency. The barriers that once kept women out of foreign bureaux and war zones have largely fallen, yet the profession now faces new challenges, from political pressure and attacks on press freedom to misinformation and artificial intelligence. And while the tools and opportunities may have changed beyond recognition, the responsibility of journalists to report independently, challenge those in power and establish the truth remains as important as ever.
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Main photo credit: Cassandra Tanti
