Women can't depend on liberals for equality. We need radical action now
Gender quotas in politics and the boardroom are the best way to shake our powerful men out of their cosy assumptions
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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 May 2009 20.30 BST
- Article history
Last week a couple of hundred policy wonks, public executives, charity bosses and politicians gathered in a large room in London to hear the liberal thinktank Demos's exciting new vision. Five speakers from the cabinet, the shadow cabinet and Demos's advisory council made stirring addresses. Power must be radically devolved. People must have more freedom and autonomy in their lives. Real social change was necessary, and Demos, with its new and fashionable cross-party council, was the thinktank with the radicalism necessary to imagine it.
As I stood listening, I began to feel a rising tide of outrage. There was just one problem with this message of transformation and innovation – which was that every single one of the five speakers arguing for change was a man (white, at that). That every name mentioned as a new Demos adviser was that of a man. That no one mentioned women's existence once. And that when we were shown a brief video about how power must be shared with the people, every silhouette and every symbol on the screen was – quite unselfconsciously – that of a man.
In the last few months, the reality of the male hold on power has been brutally hammered home. The Equality and Human Rights Commission reports that the numbers of top female judges, newspaper editors, MPs, public appointees and chief executives have all fallen in the past year. The proportion of women on FTSE 100 boards stands at a pitiful 11.7%. David Cameron is pictured at his spring conference surrounded by his shadow cabinet, and every one of the dozen faces behind him is male. The Damian McBride disaster reminds us that the inner circle around Gordon Brown is completely dominated by frequently thuggish men. The financial crisis hits, and suddenly women are almost absent from the airwaves, as practically everyone who is thought to matter – whether as player, villain or commentator – turns out to be a man.
This level of invisibility, of not mattering, is beginning to cause consternation among the women I come across. But at least we know these power structures are hard to break. It's the Tory party, for God's sake; it's an inadequate, socially uneasy prime minister in his late 50s; it's the testosterone and lapdancing City. What really hits home is when a modern organisation, newly reshaped and with a self-avowed mission to redistribute power, is happy not to include a single representative of half the population in its launch. We're meant to be in an age of diversity; we've just had an equality bill. But if even liberals are oblivious to the absence of women on their platforms, then we really are losing the battle to be taken seriously. So what's going wrong?
It's not deliberate discrimination. Powerful people everywhere say and believe that they don't care about gender; they're just looking for the best people for the job. The trouble is that women are fatally handicapped in their attempts to match the CVs of men. That's not just because, in most households, women are the ones rushing back to argue with the teenager and do the washing up, as men signally fail to step up to the plate at home. In the workplace and in public life, research shows there's something much more powerful and insidious going on. And that's a whole level of quite unconscious prejudice that fails to give women the same credit for achievement or potential that men get. Those tiny differences in treatment add up, very quickly, to big differences in men's and women's status, achievement, self-confidence, public standing and pay.
No one believes they are prejudiced. Yet one tiny example from much fascinating research shows how far it's true. People shown pictures of men and women standing in doorways and against desks are asked to estimate their height. In fact, every man has been matched for height with a female pair. But the answers overwhelmingly conclude that the men must be taller. Why? Because the respondents know that men are normally taller than women. They don't see what's in front of their eyes; they give men credit for something that isn't there.
That, as work by writers like the psychologist Virginia Valian has shown, is a phenomenon repeated endlessly at work. Men fit the existing role models for power and authority in society, so they're consistently assumed to be right for those roles in a way that women never are. They're given opportunities and public platforms that women don't get. The glacial pace of change – at this rate, women will have equal representation in Britain's boardrooms in 2225 – means that all the assumptions about women's inadequacy are endlessly reinforced.
There are two choices here. Either we resign ourselves to decades, if not centuries, of being underrated. Or we look to radical action, and I don't mean Harriet Harman's personally courageous but politically timid equalities bill. I mean something like the bold action taken by Norway or Spain. There, they've decided to cut through all the prejudice and simply change society by putting women where they haven't been before. As of February last year, 40% of all positions on Norwegian company boards have had to be held by women. The initial public outcry, with stark warnings that investors would panic and flee, has been followed by a realisation that nothing's gone wrong; women are good at the job. In Spain, the prime minister has appointed women to half his cabinet, announced that women must make up 40% of all political candidates, and set boards the same 40% target as Norway. The argument is simple. In a competitive world, countries can't afford to ignore the talent and potential of half their people. Change the representation of women at the top, give them chances, and real social change will follow.
There's never been a better moment for reform. All the old arguments in favour of chaps who know how the world works have been blown away in the revelations about how group-think in politics, business, finance and journalism created the financial catastrophe. The World Economic Forum, itself the embodiment of male dominance, now says it is vital there should be more women at the top of financial institutions and government – not just to find solutions to the current problems, but to stave off such crises in the future. We know that diverse boards deliver higher profits than homogenous ones; now we know that reforming them might help countries and companies survive.
Britain's powerful men, both in and out of politics, need to be shaken out of their complacent assumption that the world is best served by promoting and presenting people like themselves. Pretending they inhabit a meritocracy while remaining blind to their own power and prejudice won't do. They should heed the words of the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, speaking after his election in 2004. "One thing that really awakens my rebellious streak is 20 centuries of one sex dominating the other," he said. "We talk of slavery, feudalism, exploitation – but the most unjust domination is that of one half of the human race over the other."
As I stood listening, I began to feel a rising tide of outrage. There was just one problem with this message of transformation and innovation – which was that every single one of the five speakers arguing for change was a man (white, at that). That every name mentioned as a new Demos adviser was that of a man. That no one mentioned women's existence once. And that when we were shown a brief video about how power must be shared with the people, every silhouette and every symbol on the screen was – quite unselfconsciously – that of a man.
In the last few months, the reality of the male hold on power has been brutally hammered home. The Equality and Human Rights Commission reports that the numbers of top female judges, newspaper editors, MPs, public appointees and chief executives have all fallen in the past year. The proportion of women on FTSE 100 boards stands at a pitiful 11.7%. David Cameron is pictured at his spring conference surrounded by his shadow cabinet, and every one of the dozen faces behind him is male. The Damian McBride disaster reminds us that the inner circle around Gordon Brown is completely dominated by frequently thuggish men. The financial crisis hits, and suddenly women are almost absent from the airwaves, as practically everyone who is thought to matter – whether as player, villain or commentator – turns out to be a man.
This level of invisibility, of not mattering, is beginning to cause consternation among the women I come across. But at least we know these power structures are hard to break. It's the Tory party, for God's sake; it's an inadequate, socially uneasy prime minister in his late 50s; it's the testosterone and lapdancing City. What really hits home is when a modern organisation, newly reshaped and with a self-avowed mission to redistribute power, is happy not to include a single representative of half the population in its launch. We're meant to be in an age of diversity; we've just had an equality bill. But if even liberals are oblivious to the absence of women on their platforms, then we really are losing the battle to be taken seriously. So what's going wrong?
It's not deliberate discrimination. Powerful people everywhere say and believe that they don't care about gender; they're just looking for the best people for the job. The trouble is that women are fatally handicapped in their attempts to match the CVs of men. That's not just because, in most households, women are the ones rushing back to argue with the teenager and do the washing up, as men signally fail to step up to the plate at home. In the workplace and in public life, research shows there's something much more powerful and insidious going on. And that's a whole level of quite unconscious prejudice that fails to give women the same credit for achievement or potential that men get. Those tiny differences in treatment add up, very quickly, to big differences in men's and women's status, achievement, self-confidence, public standing and pay.
No one believes they are prejudiced. Yet one tiny example from much fascinating research shows how far it's true. People shown pictures of men and women standing in doorways and against desks are asked to estimate their height. In fact, every man has been matched for height with a female pair. But the answers overwhelmingly conclude that the men must be taller. Why? Because the respondents know that men are normally taller than women. They don't see what's in front of their eyes; they give men credit for something that isn't there.
That, as work by writers like the psychologist Virginia Valian has shown, is a phenomenon repeated endlessly at work. Men fit the existing role models for power and authority in society, so they're consistently assumed to be right for those roles in a way that women never are. They're given opportunities and public platforms that women don't get. The glacial pace of change – at this rate, women will have equal representation in Britain's boardrooms in 2225 – means that all the assumptions about women's inadequacy are endlessly reinforced.
There are two choices here. Either we resign ourselves to decades, if not centuries, of being underrated. Or we look to radical action, and I don't mean Harriet Harman's personally courageous but politically timid equalities bill. I mean something like the bold action taken by Norway or Spain. There, they've decided to cut through all the prejudice and simply change society by putting women where they haven't been before. As of February last year, 40% of all positions on Norwegian company boards have had to be held by women. The initial public outcry, with stark warnings that investors would panic and flee, has been followed by a realisation that nothing's gone wrong; women are good at the job. In Spain, the prime minister has appointed women to half his cabinet, announced that women must make up 40% of all political candidates, and set boards the same 40% target as Norway. The argument is simple. In a competitive world, countries can't afford to ignore the talent and potential of half their people. Change the representation of women at the top, give them chances, and real social change will follow.
There's never been a better moment for reform. All the old arguments in favour of chaps who know how the world works have been blown away in the revelations about how group-think in politics, business, finance and journalism created the financial catastrophe. The World Economic Forum, itself the embodiment of male dominance, now says it is vital there should be more women at the top of financial institutions and government – not just to find solutions to the current problems, but to stave off such crises in the future. We know that diverse boards deliver higher profits than homogenous ones; now we know that reforming them might help countries and companies survive.
Britain's powerful men, both in and out of politics, need to be shaken out of their complacent assumption that the world is best served by promoting and presenting people like themselves. Pretending they inhabit a meritocracy while remaining blind to their own power and prejudice won't do. They should heed the words of the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, speaking after his election in 2004. "One thing that really awakens my rebellious streak is 20 centuries of one sex dominating the other," he said. "We talk of slavery, feudalism, exploitation – but the most unjust domination is that of one half of the human race over the other."
