You can't win as a woman in broadcasting Getting on Air: the Female Pioneers (Radio 4, all week) is probably getting up quite a few noses. Jane Garvey, the presenter, is recounting five steps across nine decades towards equality of opportunity for women in broadcasting. Garvey, who came to Woman's Hour from Radio 5 Live in 2007 is a professional journalist, a fine broadcaster, a great team player and a working single mother. She hasn't much of a personal axe to grind in this series, being a success in her profession and knowing, from people she works among daily, how much harder it was for previous generations. That won't stop listeners, many of them women, complaining. They may, even now, be dashing off missives to Feedback, about her voice, her tone, the number of times they hear her in a week. Most of them, I bet, will not admit even to themselves that they are jealous, the "why her and not me" syndrome. How do I know? Because I've been through it, and both ways too. I have been on TV and radio since 1964, had my own "hate the voice" letters and the "who do you think you are?" phone calls. But I also listen every week to Radio 4"s Saturday Review and grind my teeth at never having been asked to be on it (me, the first woman to chair Radio 3"s Critics" Forum!). Both ways, as I said. What about this series, then? It's good. The style is clear, the tone is even, the subject addressed accurately and dispassionately, quite an achievement when you consider the amount of hoot-worthy stuff it has unearthed. Even as recently as 1973 a BBC document listed among the "limitations" to employing women "menopausal tensions." That gem was in yesterday's programme, tracing how long it took to have women read the news, marking the competitive influence of ITV in 1975 when the BBC nipped in ahead of its rival to sign Angela Rippon to read the TV news at 9pm. Monday's programme marked both the BBC's "early enlightened progress" and "bewildering backward steps." The programme we know now as The Week in Westminster began in 1929 as The Week in Parliament, made by women, for women, presented by women MPs. Why, Garvey asked Jean Seaton, the BBC's official historian, has the programme format lasted so long? Because, said Seaton, the women involved in its inception knew that a conversational tone that drew listeners into the heart of the subject was what was key. Matching style to subject is easier said than done on any programme but this series is doing it very well. Congratulations to Ritula Shah on being officially named last week as the main presenter of Radio 4"s The World Tonight. About time, too. She's good, so good she didn't need a careful publicity campaign to introduce her to the audience. We already know her to be authoritative, informed, responsive. It was also a pleasure to hear Edward Stourton last week on both The World Tonight and The World This Weekend. Gender doesn't matter. Impact does. That point was made again in The Essay (Radio 3, all last week) a series about 1973 by Michael Goldfarb, five turning points in history within that year, from the coup in Chile that overthrew President Allende to the inflation crisis that led to a new era in economics. Midweek came a fascinating study, on how the checks and balances of the apolitical American constitution led to President Richard Nixon's downfall but had unexpected after-effects that are with us still. Nixon's forced resignation, Goldfarb posited, has made Republican politicians vengeful ever since, doing their best similarly to bring down any Democratic President. The series was memorable, this episode was haunting. On a homelier but no less significant level You and Yours, a programme about which I am the only critic ever to have been kind, packs a real punch whenever Winifred Robinson presents. Last week, she neatly exposed the NHS muddle of the shingles vaccine, supposedly available to anyone between 70 and 79, actually being denied to anyone who is not either 70 or 79 (as I overheard in my own doctors" waiting room the other day) because, really, there isn't enough to go round. That was nothing compared to her pursuit on Monday of the Saga home insurance man. Why was there a difference of £1000 in last year's quote and this year's? Why should a new client be offered a more favourable rate than an existing one? Logical, attentive and polite throughout, she could give lessons in total and utter verbal demolition.