There was something so depressingly retro about last week’s sex and power report from the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) that I had to put down my soya latte to check whether I’d picked up a back issue of The Manchester Guardian circa 1970 by mistake.
Once more, the EOC audit found that men were in charge almost everywhere, from the courts to parliament to the boardrooms of the FTSE 100, and that 6,000 women had gone “missing” from the top 33,000 jobs in Britain. Once more, we heard Jenny Watson, EOC chair (yes, that’s right, just “chair”, as if it would be unfair to either gender to define her otherwise) remind us that women make up only one in 10 judges or directors, and the proportion of women in parliament, at 20%, is lower than in Iraq, Afghanistan and Rwanda.
Yes, it’s wrong that women get 17% less than their male counterparts for doing the same job, just as it is wrong that millions of women have much less than men to live on in retirement, and that they lose their jobs or chances of promotion if they have babies or become carers. It’s wrong, and it sucks. Nobody, in 2007, dare dispute the above (at least not in public, not with ladies present).
But none of this was new, or surprising. What was surprising, to me anyway, was the persistence of the retro notion that none of this was up to women. The whole report, and the reaction to it, bizarrely depicted the workplace as a sort of hostile environment where all women were rammed against the glass ceiling, wailing about being stuck in the “mummy track”, and looking on in envy as men snuck the glittering prizes from under their noses.
In the whole debate about the gender gap, someone has forgotten to make an obvious point. If women wanted to be on top, they would be. Look at Ségolène Royal and Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton. At Clara Furse and Dame Marjorie Scardino, at Baroness Denise Kingsmill and a whole bunch of others. By 2008, not just one but three of the world’s most important democracies could have a female head of state. A million women in the UK are running their own companies.
In my experience, which I don’t think is that different from anyone else’s, women are very skilled at getting exactly what they want. So if women are not running companies or enjoying what the EOC called the “spoils at the top”, it is not because they are being kept from doing so by threatened men or competitive childless women, or are somehow deliberately excluded. If the majority of women seem quite content not to be top dog at the office as well as top dog at home, it’s much more likely that it’s because — now here’s a wild, crazy thought — they don’t want to be.
Women have cleverly worked out the following. Working a 60-hour week, commuting to and from an office, having your “performance” being continuously “reviewed” by your superiors until you drop dead of a heart attack during an ill-advised game of squash with the boss — is a mug’s game.
If presented with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of getting up at sparrow’s, putting in a full day in some airless grey-carpeted office, returning home on public transport in the dark, the highlight being a takeaway bread-free sandwich you eat in front of a screen during a 16-minute lunch break, I know what most women I know would say.
“It’s a really sweet offer,” they would reply. “Gosh! I’m really tempted. Thanks, but no thanks.”
Women who want to work, work. Women who need to work, work. Women who neither want or need to work, don’t work. While men are all still, in the main, expected to experience what Harriet Harman deemed “the dignity of work” (the marvellous phrase she came up with when trying to ignite the ambitions of single mothers). Even so, men are seeking in record numbers (1.2m in this country, or 10% of the male workforce last year) to go part-time.
In fact, the one injustice to women that the EOC report does not highlight is the misconception that women have no choice in their lives or dominion over the terms and extent of their employment. They do. And they often choose worse pay, a smaller pension, and a more humble title in exchange for that priceless commodity, a life. In this regard, my sex has a lot more power than men.
We just try to keep very quiet about it.
- “I know!” I heard my 10-year-old say to his brother, back home in London after the new year. “Let’s, like, check out the Saddam video!” We’d been on Exmoor. We do not
have a television on Exmoor. The prime reason we do not have a television is, obviously, so I can say in superior, my-hinterland-is-bigger-than-thine tones to visiting friends, “Oh, I’m sorry! You can’t watch Celebrity Big Brother down here, I’m afraid! We don’t have a TV.”
The secondary reason we don’t have one is so our couch-potato, square-eyed children, for just a few weeks of the year, might be reduced to reading, playing Monopoly or hitting each other with large sticks, just as we did at their age.
Anyway, when he mentioned his fun plan to watch Saddam hang by the neck until he was dead, my son used just the same eager tones that he might to suggest a kickabout in the garden. I know. Nice.
For all liberal, laissez-passer parents like me, I suspect, last week’s execution, broadcast everywhere and posted on YouTube, was when our media chickens came home to roost. Like other parents,
I laboured to explain the important difference between watching actors acting getting killed and watching a real person die. My children appeared to listen, I think. But I don’t think they got the distinction. They’ve seen too much, much too young.
So our spavined, spineless approach to what our children watch and do on screen or online has returned to haunt us parents. But — the bigger question — will it return to haunt our children? I can’t tell, yet. But meanwhile, I am happy to report that my 10-year-old last night broke down in tears, during a film. It was not an 18, or even a 15, or Borat. It was a U.
“Turn March of the Penguins off, Mum,” he sobbed, as yet another close-up of a stiff newborn chick or dead ruptured egg filled the screen. “Please! It’s . . . just . . . too upsetting.”
Our children may be inured to screen violence, having witnessed the operatic deaths in a splattering of fake blood of God knows how many actors, and even the killing of a former head of state in a bootleg snuff movie.
But when their hearts and souls and imaginations are truly engaged in a narrative drama they can’t bear even to witness the natural death of one tiny, unhatched penguin. They can’t take it.
Let’s hold onto that.
