The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) trust may just get its first female chairperson and The Telegraph decided to inform readers that she is “mother of three”. God save the Queen, sexism is alive and kicking in the land of our erstwhile colonial masters.

It was reported last week that Rona Fairhead, a 53-year-old business woman, is the British government’s preferred candidate to chair the BBC trust. Fairhead is set to appear before the Commons’ Culture, Media and Sports Committee next week before a final decision is made.

According to a profile on BBC, Fairhead was Chief Executive with Financial Times  and has considerable experience in business and media. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and has been on boards of multinational corporations like PepsiCo and HSBC.

Fairhead’s impressive CV, one would assume, should provide enough fodder for desk editors to pen a headline that would do justice to her many professional accomplishments. Not really. The Telegraph instead decided to focus on the number of children she has and ran the headline: “Mother of Three Poised to Lead the BBC”. The article’s second sentence describes Fairhead as a “married mother of three”.

Deservedly, the British daily got trashed on Twitter for the gender faux pas.

Slamming the newspaper headline, Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, a collection of over 10,000 women’s daily experiences with gender inequality, also wrote a piece in The Guardian in which she raised a pertinent question: “When women already face high levels of maternity discrimination in the workplace, is it helpful to report on a high-achieving woman first and foremost by referencing their family life?”

We decided to ask a few journalists in India on what they thought about such headlines considering sexist headlines and articles aren’t new to India. Sure enough some of them were shocked. “Is this for real?” said Indulekha Aravind, Assistant Features Editor, Business Standard. “Unless the only reason she got the job was because she was a mother of three, or if being a parent automatically disqualifies you for a job at BBC, why would you put that in a headline? This is tiring.”

“The accepted narrative on working mothers is always linked to their motherhood; in a way hinting that juggling motherhood and a work life is not really normal. We will discuss the number of weeks Marissa Meyer takes for maternity leave, but do you know how many kids Steve Jobs fathered?” said Amrita Madhukalya, features writer at DNA.

Some however felt that it may not have been such a bad thing. “There are two aspects to this, purely from a desk person’s point of view, ‘Harvard graduate becomes BBC chairperson’ will not get as much traction as ‘Mother of three becomes BBC chairperson’. In the Indian context, if a Dalit becomes Chief Minister of Bihar, won’t the headline emphasise on the fact that a dalit has become CM? In case of Obama, didn’t all papers emphasise that he is black in their headline? Sometimes it may be important to highlight milestones. How many women with families make it to top positions in a corporate set-up?” said one journalist not willing to be named.

In spite of the advances women have made, a culture of judging them on the basis of how well they manage the twin hearths of home and office persists. While it is considered natural for men to assume leadership positions, women must still answer for how they think they would manage their families while having a globe-trotting career. And this problem seems to be widespread. “From PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi speaking of her experiences as a mother to the new Airtel ad in which the disciplinarian boss is also the nurturing wife at home, women leaders are often made to feel incomplete if they do not have their hands in both worlds,” said a journalist on condition of anonymity.

At the end of the day, it is a question of perception, and there certainly the media has a role to play. How events are reported can play subliminally into stereotypes about women’s roles and inclinations. Time, perhaps, for news organisations to come up with reporting/writing guidelines that insist on covering individual achievement and failures for what they are, not for what they reflect on gender or society’s traditional expectations of it.