Canada: All-woman panel to run federal election debate

Article here. Excerpt:

'A stellar cast of central Canadian journalists, all of them eminently female, has been selected to moderate the first federal election leaders’ debate. They are three news anchors — Lisa LaFlamme, Rosemary Barton and Dawna Friesen — and two columnists, Susan Delacourt and Althia Raj.

There is no way of precisely knowing this, but I am confident that choosing all five exclusively from the XX chromosome class was a matter of some exultation, perhaps reaching to self-congratulation. Somewhere, in whatever closet these mysterious deliberations were conducted, surely at their conclusion there was a whoop of “You go girls!,” and surely, too, much high-fiving over the shards of another broken “glass ceiling.”
...
So the declaration of a “No Males Zone” around the moderation of the first debate has to be a “good thing,” achieving heights of fashionable correctness that would stir a gulp of envy even in the puritan confessionals (sound booths) of the third-wave sisterhood down south at National Public Radio (home of the hushed voice, where even the news is organic and “shade-grown.”) A high standard indeed.
...
There are all sorts of ways to constitute a panel that have nothing to do with the modish and now quite tiresome fascination of putting “women” as a qualifier. And to avoid as well this horrible detour into dead-end identity politics.

It would be fun to have a farmer of either sex (or even of the multiple gender options that are now available) to talk about canola. Someone from Prince George or Port aux Choix to speak of rural concerns, a logger, trucker, sales clerk, maybe even a hotel chambermaid to pass on to leadership candidates what life is like where real life is lived. Accountants, oil workers, women from the fish plants, immigrant taxi drivers, Aboriginals from the high north, a teacher, some people from an old age home. The press talks diversity but there are days its seems it really doesn’t know what it is.'