Business is just as bad. Among CEOs of the biggest companies in the UK and the US there are more men called John than women of any name. Financial institutions in both countries are overwhelmingly white, male and middle class. Other key institutions – the judiciary, the police, the media – share the same weaknesses.
Here’s something else they share: most of them claim, institutionally and individually, to support gender equality. The liberal consensus is still alive but it is under concerted attack from different expressions of political and religious extremism. The forces ranged against it aim not only to destroy it, but to dismantle its legacy of rights and protections. Progress is not, after all, linear, and it is far too easily reversed.
We would not have so much to lose if not for the achievements of feminism. Its Western incarnation loosely divides into four eras, or waves. The first, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coalesced around the battle for votes for women. The second kindled in the 1960s, and asserted reproductive rights as a tool of liberation that would enable women to define their own being and sexuality and participate alongside men outside the home. It often rejected the possibility of equality within existing systems and structures. A third iteration in the 1990s grappled with the movement’s own failings to address systemic inequalities in its own ranks, while another strand attempted to seize ownership of male ideals of womanhood and recast them as female empowerment. The 1993 remake of Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, starring Daryl Hannah, becomes a parable of emotional as well as physical growth, and gets a happy ending.
We’re now well into a fourth era, more of a torrent than a wave thanks to the proliferation of digital media, and too fast-flowing to analyse easily. It doesn’t help clarity that so many people lay claim to be part of that flow. Business leaders insist that finding and retaining female talent is essential to success. Economists hail increasing gender balance in the labour force as the key to growth. One recent report estimates a boost to global GDP of £8.3 trillion by 2025 simply by making faster progress towards narrowing the gender gap. Two large-scale pieces of research by Credit Suisse suggest that companies with significant numbers of women in decision-making roles are more profitable. Multiple studies also show that giving women a greater say – and a greater stake – in the planet is essential to building a healthier planet. Trump rushed to withdraw the US from the Paris accord, continuing to voice doubts about the reality of climate change. Among the rural poor, women don’t have the luxury of such doubts. They are at its sharp end, because females are most often tasked with sourcing water, food and energy for their families and communities. In 25 sub-Saharan countries, 71 per cent of the water collectors are women and girls who every day spend an estimated 16 million hours fetching water, compared to six million hours spent by men. The worse the drought, the longer the journeys and the greater the vulnerability of those women and girls. In India, 75 per cent of rural women work in agriculture but own only nine per cent of arable land. Bina Agarwal, Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester, posits that increased female participation in business decision-making improves environmental outcomes.
Agarwal rejects the romantic idea that this is because women are in some way closer to nature than men, but much of the current orthodoxy identifies women as a corrective to testosterone-driven cultures. The Credit Suisse studies find companies steered by women take fewer risks. ‘Where women account for the majority in the top management, the businesses show superior sales growth, high cash-flow returns on investments and lower leverage,’ says the 2016 report.
Politicians of many stripes laud women and profess to fight for us. Congresswoman Ann Wagner went so far during the US election campaign as to call on her own party’s nominee to stand aside because of his misogyny. ‘As a strong and vocal advocate for victims of sex trafficking and assault, I must be true to those survivors and myself and condemn the predatory and reprehensible comments of Donald Trump,’ Wagner said in an October 2016 statement. Less than a week before polling day, she urged voters to back Trump, and has subsequently become an enthusiastic cheerleader for his dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Thirteen male Senators drafted Trump’s first attempt at a replacement bill, which restricted funding for Planned Parenthood and access to abortion insurance, and would have allowed companies providing healthcare insurance to charge women more for ‘pre-existing conditions’. That might sound reasonable until you consider the conditions – pregnancy, Caesarian sections, post-natal depression, domestic violence, sexual assault and rape.
Wagner has been unlucky in one respect. Political commitment to gender equality is often little more than skin deep, but a great many politicians get away without their commitment being so publicly tested and found wanting. This is not to paint all politicians as hypocrites. Many of them believe in women. It’s just that when push comes to shove, they believe in other things more – and they also make the mistake I once did, of assuming that gender equality is already well on its way, without any extra help from them.
If there is a sliver of a silver lining to Trump’s victory, it is that it dented this myth. It did not destroy it. Clinton’s defeat seemed to contrast a regressive US with feminising cultures elsewhere. Patricia Scotland had recently taken office as the Commonwealth’s first female Secretary-General. Estonia had its first female president. Rome and Tokyo for the first time had elected female mayors. After a campaign dominated by male voices tore up the UK’s membership of the European Union and Prime Minister David Cameron stepped down, Britons wondered if women might save the day. Some looked with envy at Germany and its unflappable Chancellor Angela Merkel. More than a few English voters discovered a new reason to beg Scotland not to secede; they wanted the country’s clever First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to be Prime Minister of England too. Britain’s two biggest parties, the governing Conservatives and Labour opposition, turned hopeful eyes to senior women in their ranks. There was, after all, precedent. In 1979, the British economy seemed locked into a downward spiral of a weakening currency and blooming inflation, amid industrial unrest that saw even gravediggers down tools. Then a general election returned Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street, the first female Prime Minister not only of the UK but of any major industrial democracy. Within a few years, her economic policies had laid waste whole communities and sectors but galvanised others and, more than that, revived a sense of potential that had long been missing.
She set a template for the female leader who sweeps in to sort out the mess created by men. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman. The press dubbed Merkel Germany’s Margaret Thatcher. Inevitably Sturgeon became Scotland’s Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May transmogrified into Margaret Thatcher in kitten heels or, when that comparison wore thin, Britain’s Merkel. ‘Women are such rare creatures that they can only be understood through the prism of one another, like unicorns or sporting triumphs by the England football team,’ observed the journalist Hadley Freeman.
This barb held true after May entered Downing Street as Britain’s second female Prime Minister, called a June 2017 snap election aiming to increase her mandate to negotiate Brexit and instead lost the Conservatives their parliamentary majority. This left her government dependent on the backing of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a party led by another woman of tarnished reputation, Arlene Foster. Northern Ireland’s delicate power-sharing agreement had foundered over Foster’s role in a scandal involving an overgenerous incentive scheme to boost renewable energy that handed taxpayers a hefty bill. May and Foster display many weaknesses as politicians. Their critics attack them as female politicians. The journalist and broadcaster Janet Street-Porter typified this approach, writing a piece entitled ‘Theresa May’s incompetence has set women in politics back decades.’
Women aren’t immune to making sweeping assumptions about women, about female difference – whether that difference is female failure or, just as often, female superiority. ‘If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman