Harriet Harman, who, those of you who don't know, is currently Equality minister, has said that the BBC aren't giving the necessary support to older female news anchors. So it's sexism as well as ageism, in fact.

Harman told the BBC's 'World This Weekend': "A former senior BBC executive said to me: 'the thing is, the way we saw it was that as male presenters got older they become an authority and as female presenters got older they became a problem'. To be a BBC news presenter as a woman you have to be 10 years younger than the men. They should be very careful about it and I think they should be anxious and worried about it... and I think they're wasting a lot of talent and annoying a lot of viewers".

The minister continued: "It's essentially an old-fashioned attitude that thinks you can't value the experience and wisdom of an older woman. I think that the broadcast media finds it possible to value the older man but I don't think they find it possible to value the older woman".

The BBC have this to say about the issue: "Our programmes always strive to reflect as broad a range of diversity as possible to ensure we represent the BBC's audience. Kirsty Wark, Maxine Mawhinney and Martha Kearney regularly feature on BBC television and radio, as well as presenters including Gloria Hunniford, Jennie Bond, Angela Rippon and Annie Nightingale".

Of course, the problem is not the head count, but the context. In American news programmes, it's long been the fashion to have a mature male news anchor accompanied by a significantly younger female colleague, who will be ditched once she's deemed to have lost her looks. There seemed to be quite a few older-male-younger-female pairings on News 24 last time I looked.