ONE of the strangest and most irritating customs that I’ve discovered in the many years that I have been living in the United Kingdom is the propensity for British women to be referred to as “girls”.

No matter what age or stage in life, you can be called a “girl” and expect to take it with good grace and a sense of humour. Why, even some feminists I know address themselves as “girlies”.

So, girlies, what to make of the announcement in a speech that David Bell, the head of Ofsted is giving today to mark International Women’s Day? As part of an explanation of why female students are still not fulfilling their academic excellence in the workplace, he says that the word “girl” is now routinely used as a playground insult to suggest that someone is pathetic or can’t hack it. “It is naive to think that this has no effect on girls,” he says.

To my mind, the little boys who taunt each other with “girl” in the playground are just practising to be sucessful members of the old boys’ club, smaller versions of the British men who use it to the same effect against adult women. Their “girl” is not the same girl as in “you go, girl!” which originated among black Americans as an encouraging battle cry to a definitely grown-up female. In the British lexicon “girl” means a frilly, silly, airhead, a hormone-imprisoned creature, hardly to be taken seriously and definitely in need of being taken care of.

At a recent meeting with some high-powered people, the male chair came to a pause and, looking indulgently over his glasses, addressed all of the women present as “girls”. “What do you girls think?” he said, and, getting quite pleased with his own modernity: “Let’s listen to the girls!”

The women, and to be honest, quite a few of the men, sat in an uncomfortable silence. I was reluctant to get into a 1970s feminist debate but, hey, this was the 21st century, so finally I said: “Well, boy, I don’t know how the rest of the women feel here . . .” and I went on to address his question. The effect was interesting: his face became quite red with rage and he promptly interrupted by accusing me of not having a sense of humour.

Women, he assured me, liked being called “girls”. It was a fond term of endearment that made them feel youthful. So, I asked him what had upset him about being called “boy”? Didn’t “boy” make him feel young again? Obviously not. A “boy” is an underling, weak, not up to the job, a loser. He got the message. He was one Master of the Universe who never used the word “girl” again in our presence.

I haven’t thought of myself as a girl since the day I left my parents’ home for good to go to university; the day I assumed responsibility for my own life. Later, when my father died, one of the hardest and most painful things I have ever experienced, I realised I would be no-one’s little girl again.

Maybe it’s because of my slave ancestry, and having seen, in my lifetime, grandmothers referred to as “girls”, that makes me so sensitive to the term. To me calling a woman a girl is a comparable insult to a racist jibe. But women who would be marching in the streets today if one of them was called a “darkie”, “Paki”, or a “Yid”, often brush off the slight implied by the word girl, believing it creates some strange kind of cosy, giggly bond.

Yes, I can hear those women out there up in arms, demanding to know what’s the matter with being called “girlies”, that’s what they call themselves. But black minstrels used to dance in blackface, too. That didn’t mean they were free.

So it came as no surprise to me to see that today’s Fawcett Society inquiry into women’s advancement in the law reports such lamentable progress. Show me the parts of British society where women are most likely to answer to girl — the City, the law courts, and the rest of the Establishment — and I’ll show you a culture where women are not thriving.

A word begins somewhere in the mind, and the mindset that can see a grown woman as something less than she is harms not only women, but men too. It keeps them narrow, rigid, tight. Girls are fun, but they don’t count. Girls may be sweet, but they’re not your boss.

International Women’s Dayshould be about potential. Those young women now hearing the “girl” taunt in their playgrounds should know they will, in let’s hope the not too distant future, graduate to adult womanhood. The girl has had her day.

The author is a critic and playwright

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