I find, when I am writing, that my imagination is decidely unimaginative when it comes to names. I keep coming up with the same little coterie of names, the Seans, Bens, Terrys, Roses, Janes and Lauras. I have to keep checking whether I used exactly the same name for my villain in my first book…. So once in a while I do a little exercise, taking the front pages of newspapers, and noting down names. It's not a scientific exercise, but it's devastatingly disheartening to see the list of men's names spreading down one page, onto the next, and then the next…. While the same exercise on the same front page of a broadsheet newspaper will produce at best a tiny handful of women's names. As I've already said, it's not scientific. And it wasn't devised as any kind of fact-finding mission on gender equality. But as the mother of two daughters, and as a woman, and as a daughter of a woman, and the grandaughter of women, I find the fact that women are scarcely named in the reports of events in the world to be deeply unsettling. Now, in the interests of name-gathering – which was of course my prime purpose all along – I do the same exercise with the front page of the Daily Mail, and here women's names are overflowing. But look at how these women are named – they are named as lovers, as mistresses, as prostitutes, as fat bodies, as thin bodies, as addicted bodies, as enhanced bodies, as stripped bodies…. Okay, I can sit here in my study and gnash my teeth all day. But Lindsey Hilsum is on the front line, so listen to her, not to me. She writes in The Independent today about why women must continue to report the news, even when on occasion they are sexually assaulted, as Lara Logan of CBS was in Egypt. As a woman, she writes, she actually has an advantage over her male colleagues in largely Islamic countries, because she has access both to the male world (by virtue of being a foreigner and a journalist) AND to the world of women, which is closed to her male colleagues. Her point (and I am finding it hard not to type all of this in capitals) is that the world of the Afghan woman, or the Palestinian woman, or the Iraqi woman is half the story. To write them off, not to name these women and present them alongside men, is to write half of history. She concludes, tongue joyously in cheeck, that: "Since female journalists are able to report all aspects of the story, not just what the men say or do, it is clearly an advantage to be a woman. Nonetheless, I believe men should still be allowed to report the Middle East. I understand their limitations, but I think they have a contribution to make and it would be wrong to discriminate against them."