The push for equality stopped years ago. Women need to wake up to what has really happened
A year into the Tory coup, it is no great surprise that Cameron has the confidence to say in public what he really thinks. His "calm down, dear" remark to Angela Eagle clearly gave Gideon a cheap thrill. "Reactionary men think reactionary things," is not a shock. What is, though, is the view taken at face value that this is funny. It reveals the sense of humour of a 70-year-old guy trapped in the body of a 40-something. Icky! We look forward to some cutting-edge Benny Hill quips.
Nick Clegg winced during this discussion. He has his own problem with women. He can't get enough of them. If there there were an election now, on current polling there would be no female Lib Dem MPs, according to the Fabian Society. The men have all the safe seats. A party concerned with any kind of progressive politics has to be embarrassed about this. A party pushing for AV on the grounds we will end up with a more representative way of doing politics looks just daft if it cannot represent half of us.
As I keep saying, we are going backwards. The last election sidelined women as wives. As the Tories secure their position, there is an increasingly public anti-women rhetoric in situ. The mantra of conservative culture that "feminism has gone too far" is ringing in our ears.
Feminism acts as a convenient bogeywoman. It can even be blamed for the wrath of the gods of the free market. So it can blamed for everything from unemployment (Willets) to busting up families (Duncan Smith). We are a busy lot, as this is apparently a full-time operation. But in destroying what Tories hold dear, I want them to point to our great "gains", for when you look at the actual figures on the representation of women in public life for example, these gains are tiny.
The notion of even "the token woman" (PC gone mad!) seems to have evaporated recently. The AV campaigns have been pitiful. Newsnight excelled itself with a film about AV, which featured women doing pottery, whose husbands were going to explain it to them. Sweet. This was then followed by a discussion in which three squashed-up grey men argued with another three squashed-up grey men about fairer voting systems. In Scotland this was topped off by more argument about the constitution, which featured 16 men and not a single woman.
As in politics, so too in business. Given cover by the establishment, it is now perfectly OK to talk about the terrible "risk" of appointing women to the boardroom. The risk, of course, being that they might get pregnant. Some women can be intelligent, but don't worry yourselves about that. Simon Murray, chairman of Glencore, the largest commodities trader, floated at $60bn, offers us the benefit of his wisdom on women: "They have a tendency not to be so involved quite often, and they are not so ambitious in business as men because they've got better things to do." Such as? "Bringing up children and all sorts of things."
It must be our interest in all sorts of other things (Macrame? Meringues? Matriarchy?) that prevents half of the FTSE 250 companies having a single woman in the boardroom? Murray echoes Alan Sugar's remarks on the "problem" of employing women, which are seen by many as simply "realism".
Vince Cable then described Murray's comments as "unbelievably primitive" and talked tough, saying Murray had single-handedly made "the case for tough action to ensure that there are more women on boards and to ensure women's rights in the workplace are properly entrenched". Tough action? Oh Lib Dems, heal thyselves. Tough action means quotas, and you cannot sort out quotas in your own party because its structure means decisions cannot be imposed on local parties. Instead, the most under-representative party of them all has created a namby-pamby "leadership programme".
Quotas, women-only shortlists and any form of positive discrimination are often disliked equally by men and women, but they work. The alternative is waiting for the great promised land of meritocracy to start. I'd give it time. We are in fact still operating in the realms of hundreds of years of male-only shortlists and men giving people that remind them of themselves (other men) promotions. Rwanda has a bigger proportion of women in its parliament then we do. At the current rate of success the Fawcett Society estimates it will take Labour 20 years to get to 50% female candidates, the Lib Dems 40 years and the Tories 400.
The business community is also terrified of quotas, though Norway and Spain use them, and France is on the way. The great fear is that jobs will be given to less talented women, simply to make things look good. What is needed, all agree, are more enlightened attitudes. But quite where these enlightened attitudes are to come from is something of a mystery. Surely they come about by a change in culture, whereby men and women work alongside each other?
The idea that low-"calibre" women (Duncan Smith on Labour's women?only shortlists) will push out presumably high-calibre men is everywhere. We certainly wouldn't want a bunch of low-calibre guys running stuff, would we? I mean, look at the amazing results the high-calibre guys in the banking system have achieved.
This is not about women being inherently better. To say that we remain under-represented in politics, business, law, the academe and most of public life is simply a fact. Many see that this fact needs changing, but also resist the methods by which such change might come about.
Feminism is, in the end, about choices for women. Those choices are not expanding any more. It's not all about being a high-flying executive. Indeed, many younger women, having seen their mothers' generation over-stretched, may well opt out of the having-it-all means doing-it-all scenario. Nonetheless, young women cannot assume that the rights won by their mothers' generation are extended to them. Especially in the field of employment. The push for equality stopped years ago. We have stalled. Women need to wake up to what has really happened.
Listen to Sheryl Sandberg addressing a conference at TED. Sandberg is Facebook's chief operations officer, and talking about the situation in the US, but it applies here too: "My generation, really sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They are just not moving. We are 50% of the population, but in my generation there will not be 50% of women at the top of any industry." This is from a woman in her early 40s who is hugely successful.
This is the context in which we celebrate the marriage of a woman who works part-time to be available for her man. This is the context in which we are voting for a more representative voting system. This is the context in which equality has not been achieved, yet a regressive, conservative establishment is bearing down on women's rights. This is the context in which Cameron tells a woman to 'calm down'.
I say, do the opposite. Dears.
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