The Women's Television Network, recently purchased by Corus Entertainment for $205 million, was merely a twinkle in the eye a decade ago.

As early as 1989, Ron Rhodes, working as a "hired gun" on the startup of the Family Channel, discerned a need for a channel that cast its net a little wider.

"Although we called it the Family Channel we showed Disney movies. And I thought that we really needed a family channel that dealt with family issues and was information-based."

A conversation with his eventual partner in the Family application, Michael Inat, confirmed Rhodes' suspicion that the opportunity for such a channel did exist.

In 1991, Rhodes left Family and started working fulltime on developing a new issues-based channel. And then it all started to come together in his mind: in pursuit of programming ideas for the new channel, Rhodes and Inat "started going around and talking to people to get some feeling of what programming for a channel like this might look like.... Then we went to social agencies and hospitals looking for programming ideas, thinking, 'Is there enough meat there, can we fill out a programming schedule seven days a week?' " recalls Rhodes.

Problem solvers

"And one day the light went on. In all the issues we were dealing with, the protagonists of the solving of problems were always the women. It was always the mothers; the fathers were never involved. The caregivers were the women, never the men.

"And I thought, 'Here we are dealing with family issues but it's the women who do the work.' And then I thought, 'It's not really a family channel, it's a women's channel, because women are the main protagonists of how these issues are solved.' "

Not only that, Rhodes realized that specific differences in perception between the genders were not addressed in programming as it was then.

"Men and women see things in very different ways. If you get 10 little boys and show them something and get 10 little girls and show them the same thing, they gather very different information from the same event. For example, [during] research, we showed a woman going into a store and robbing it of drugs. Men say, 'She's broken the law'; women say, 'How sad, she must be desperate.'

"This is why women require their own programming: they experience in a different way and take different things away from an event that a man would never be sensitive to."

At the time, with the exception of Trina McQueen, then at CBC, most programming across Canada was decided and planned and delivered by men in their mid-fifties.

"When we put together the [WTN] application, we took the position from the first days that this had to be a service programmed and run by women. Women would bring a different skill set."

Funding initially came from a woman with a high media profile: Martha Blackburn, owner of the London Free Press, who Rhodes says was "critical and key to the success" of WTN. After her untimely death, funding had to come from elsewhere. Rhodes went to a number of broadcasters for funds, "who all said, 'Who needs a women's channel?' "