Cherie Blair took time out of her whirlwind life last week to fly into Glasgow and address the sisterhood. What we need, she told us, is to raise our aspirations. Aspirations, it transpires, are a bit like hemlines and apparently we are setting them too low. She didn’t say anything about teaming them with white pixie boots or a black Agnès B leather jacket, but she left us in no doubt about the look for which we should be aiming; a cross between Condoleezza Rice and Martha Stewart.
The battle for equal rights has a long way to go, the prime minister’s wife told the Global Banking Alliance for Women world summit. (The fact that such an entity exists rather undermines her thesis. Had she been addressing the Global Baking Alliance for Women world summit, I might have seen her point.) Women need an old girls’ network if they are to make it to the top. A belief that the glass ceiling has not yet shattered is curbing their ambitions.
Her speech coincided with a survey showing the number of female directors in the top 100 firms has fallen from 121 in 2005 to 117 in 2006. Only three of them were chief executives.
While I was scrabbling around my sock drawer looking for an aspiration or two to raise, one thought occurred. Why should we be raising them? I’m full of admiration for women who reach the top of their profession, but I’m also full of admiration for people who trek to the South Pole or climb Everest. It doesn’t follow that we should all be doing it. Being top of anything is, by definition, a minority sport.
The loss of four female board members from FTSE 100 firms in the last year is not worth fretting about. It is true the proportion of women in top managerial positions in Britain has hardly changed in 20 years, but the old chestnut that it is because women are oppressed grows more hoary by the minute.
The past 20 years have seen rafts of equality legislation passed. Successive governments have made strengthening it a priority. There are more highly trained and experienced women in the workforce now than ever before, and it is rare these days, outside of the City of London, to come across a high-achieving woman who cites discrimination as a problem. In fact, most bosses are desperate to promote talented women. Were it otherwise, our industrial tribunals would be clogged with female high-fliers denied access to the executive canteen. They’re not. The reason the glass ceiling is invisible may simply be that it no longer exists.
The myth that Cherie Blair and other feminists insist on perpetuating is in danger of undermining our economic prosperity, as well as making women miserable. The rhetoric has failed to keep pace with the reality. The reason women are not running FTSE 100 companies is because, by and large, they don’t want to. Women, particularly women with children, don’t want to work long hours in demanding jobs. In which case, say the equality campaigners, the jobs have to change to accommodate them. But there are many important jobs that simply cannot be performed on a nine-to-five basis, let alone a nine-to-three basis with eight weeks off in the summer. To pretend otherwise is simply wishful thinking.
Many women do not share Cherie Blair’s ideas about what constitutes success. Grabbing the top job and earning the biggest salary is not their priority. It’s such a macho yardstick by which to judge anyone. The continued obsession with women in the boardroom is completely baffling. It’s an out-moded measure of achievement, like assessing a woman’s worth by measuring the size of her feet.
There are plenty of talented, able, working women in Scotland. They don’t have to be at the very pinnacle of their career to count. For every female board member, there are thousands running departments, acting as deputies or just doing jobs they enjoy. Telling such women to raise their aspirations is simply patronising.
Women in this country are not an oppressed minority. Gender should be as relevant as eye colour when it comes to promotion. The pertinent factor has to be ability and experience. We meddle with these criteria at our peril. Women now account for two-thirds of all places at medical school and the number of female doctors will outstrip male doctors in the next few years. Yet less than two decades after qualifying, according to the British Medical Journal, half of all female doctors work part-time. Because of this, it is estimated that Britain will have to train 4.2 new doctors for every retiring GP, at a cost of £237,000 per doctor. It makes about as much economic sense as Albania, yet question this crazy state of affairs and you will be labelled sexist.
There are far more pertinent issues for women in the workforce than whether they bag the key to the executive washroom. In Scotland, political make-up appears to be more relevant than chromosomal make-up when it comes to top public-sector appointments. In many regions, the Labour party still influences key posts, something the Scottish Trades Union Congress’s women’s conference ought to bear in mind when it addresses the issue of women’s representation in public life next week. If Cherie Blair really wants to address inequality, she should take on her husband’s party machine.
Then there is the problem many women face in getting into the workplace at all. I know countless well-educated, highly talented women who have taken time out to raise children, who have a great deal to contribute and who would be an asset to any company, but who cannot find work commensurate with their talents. They are simply invisible to employers and to government. If they are not under the age of 25 and don’t come from a deprived area, there is very little help available. It’s such a waste.
Three generations of women have campaigned for the luxury of choice. Now women have got it. The fact that they are not choosing to inhabit the boardroom may be an inconvenient truth for people such as Cherie Blair, but it is a reality they have to face. Dismantling the corporate world and re-engineering it to fit a cohort reluctant to take on the responsibilities such jobs necessarily demand is not just grossly unfair to men, it is economic suicide.
gillian.bowditch@sunday-times.co.uk
