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Why women? A few suggestions

17 Oct

Yes – still here,  still blogging and prompted to do so again by noting that there’s a link to the Gender Blog on my new employer’s intranet – so hello, new colleagues from the Women Professionals Portal!

Here I am in my new hard hat,  as handed out during induction on Day One a couple of weeks ago.

My next post will be about what I’ve been up to in recent months but here in the interim is a useful reminder,  courtesy of Forbes Women, as to the value women bring to leadership positions.

List compiled by Magus Consulting.

• “…. Companies with three or more women in senior management functions score more highly on average (on nine dimensions of company excellence). It is notable that performance increases significantly once a certain critical mass is attained, namely, at least three women on management committees for an average membership of 10 people. “ (Women Matter, McKinsey 2007)

• “Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women board directors attained significantly higher financial performance, on average, than those with the lowest representation of women board directors.” (Catalyst, October 2007)

• “A selected group of companies with a high representation of diverse board seats (especially gender diversity) exceeded the average returns of the Dow Jones and NASDAQ Indices over a 5 year period.” (Virtcom Consulting)

• “An extensive 19-year study of 215 Fortune 500 firms shows a strong correlation between a strong record of promoting women into the executive suite and high profitability. Three measures of profitability were used to demonstrate that the 25 Fortune 500 firms with the best record of promoting women to high positions are between 18 and 69 percent more profitable than the median Fortune 500 firms in their industries.” (European Project on Equal Pay and summarized by researcher Dr. Roy Adler in Miller McCune).

“Feminism is the unfinished revolution …”

13 Mar

- declared Natasha Walter in The Guardian earlier this week,  in her column about the centenary of International Women’s Day. Meanwhile,  back in my spiritual home of India, Dr Elizabeth Menon‘s piece in The Hindu reminded us that equality for some is still very elusive.

For me,  IWD was all about spending the day at a university,  at which I spoke and chaired an event called “Breaking Glass”.  I heard about the glass ceiling as it exists within academia and learned,  not altogether surprisingly,  that the issues faced by female staff at universities (reasonably high numbers at entry level, falling away at a career mid point,  subsequent difficulties in progressing to the top tier) mirror almost exactly those faced by their sisters in the corporate world.

I used the centenary of IWD to structure my talk around the way in which the world has changed for women since 1911 and the key events and people who have made those changes come about.  My brief had been to “make it light”,  so I peppered my slides with a few key quotations – some of which I share now.

“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women …”

– Madeleine Albright, the first female US Secretary of State, 1997 – 2001

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what a feminist is.  I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

– Rebecca West, writer, 1913

“Well behaved women seldom make history …”

– Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, professor at Harvard University

“I wanted to work there because I wanted to become a writer. I was quickly assured that women didn’t become writers at Newsweek. It would never have crossed my mind to object … It was a given in those days that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule.”

– Nora Ephron – writer, novelist, film director [on starting her career in 1962]

My favourite quotation,  which I didn’t use because I hadn’t then read the originating article,  comes from Mariella Frostrup in The Observer,  who,  in a blistering and truly excellent piece of journalism, reminded us that the struggle is far from over and that,  within the closed world of UK politics:

“… there are more blokes called Dave and Nick in government than there are women MPs. Women continue to hover at a steady 19% in the chamber, put off perhaps by a testosterone-fuelled climate where the last two prime ministers’ wives have given up high- flying careers to support their husbands or simply to satisfy the perceived demands of middle England.”


Check it out – one of the best and most impassioned articles on feminism you may read.

Men? In decline? Really?

7 Feb

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s latest blog piece is entitled “Be My Valentine” (I like what she did, there) and in it she urges the media – “enough, already” – to stop with the raft of stories equating the so called “rise” of women with the equally untrue “decline” in male fortunes.

I’m currently undertaking some research ahead of next month’s centenary of International Women’s Day and am compiling lists of amazing, game changing,  glass ceiling smashing women from around the world – please feel free to share your nominations with me, below. From Marie Curie, Margaret Thatcher, Daphne Jackson, Benazir Bhutto, through to Barbara Castle and Julia Gillard – the world is very definitely a different place now to when IWD was first conceived a century ago.  But has the success that women have undoubtedly achieved really come at the expense of men?  I don’t think so and nor does Avivah:

“It is imperative that this constant pairing of ‘rising women’ and ‘falling men’ stop. Women have absolutely nothing to gain from fearful men. Neither at home, nor at work. And the reality, in my experience, is quite different.

It is true that the tectonic shift in the roles and status of women have profoundly affected couples, companies and countries. We are, I often think, at the end of a century where women have lobbied, questioned and redrawn themselves in a million myriad ways. We are at the very beginning of a century where men have begun to think and write about the impact and implications of those changes on themselves.”

Here’s the last word from Tanya Gold; as she pointed out in Grazia last week, in response to a (male) assertion that feminists are bigots who discriminate against men and who “choose” to earn less, allowing careers, finances and ambitions to fall by the wayside:

“… We want to be paid less! We want rubbish jobs! We want to be denied a voice! Watch us oppress men with our lower wages!”

I hear you, sister.

 

 

Desperate housewives?

14 Jan

I love (actually, maybe “love” is too strong – OK, I’m “interested in”) the way that Mad Men’s Betty Draper is now being used by picture editors as visual shorthand to illustrate articles referring to, variously, housewives, stay at home mums and ladies who lunch.

(Similarly, photos of Joan now inevitably accompany an article about “curvy figures”.)

Dr. Catherine Hakim’s recently published report – Feminist Myths and Magic Medicine: The Flawed Thinking Behind Calls for Further Equality – which concludes that mainstream feminist thinking is defective and that the UK government should stop trying to promote it (there’s an accurate, if somewhat right wing summary of her arguments here in this Daily Telegraph article) and that women tend to marry for money rather than love – has caused a rash of newspaper reports, published from London to Sydney and (probably) all points between – and the two highlighted here both feature lovely photos of the former Mrs Draper, as does a recent article along similar lines in Grazia.

Tanya Gold’s piece in the Guardian:  

“Inequality between the sexes is not a big deal any more, a new study tells us. That is only true if you are happy for women to have less than men …”

- does at least make some fleeting Mad Men reference to the assumptions in the report, commenting that perhaps Dr Hakim’s work is:

“ … based on a weird, Mad Men themed dream she had on Boxing Day …”

Female writers across the world have decided that actually, it’s OK to want to marry for money, to not have your own career or income and to stay at home, surrounded by items from Cath Kidston and Emma Bridgwater (ironically, two women who manage to be married and have their own eponymous businesses). And of course, yes, it is fine, I suppose. But this lifestyle framework is surely only OK if there’s someone to fund it – and what happens if that someone isn’t there anymore – either through death, divorce, a change in their own or their employer’s financial circumstances?

(This rather gloomy article from 2008 suggests a potential increase in divorce due to the credit crunch, with:

“… about 80 percent of those surveyed believe that the turmoil — and lower bonus payments — will prompt more women to seek a divorce before their husbands’ wealth evaporates further.” )

Obviously, nobody goes into marriage or life as a stay at home mum thinking “one day we’ll split up or he’ll lose all his money in some huge, unprecedented global melt down and then what will happen to me?”.

But as this cautionary tale, Regrets of a stay-at- home Mom, recently published on salon.com shows, it can happen:

“Fourteen years ago, I “opted out” to focus on my family. Now I’m broke.”

(For more on the wildly radical idea that “a man is not a financial plan”, check out The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up too Much?  by Leslie Bennets on the Recommended reading tab above).

* * * * *

In other news … the flyer I designed for Educators’ Trust India has now been printed up and is ready for use – if you’d like to see what they’re giving out to tourists in Goa in order to raise awareness of the issues of child poverty and of the need for literacy programmes, you can take a look and download a copy from my freelance writing site, Collaborative Lines.

Children, women, flip-flops and money

7 Jan

Happy New Year!

A friend just sent me a link to this site, wordle.net, which will generate your own word cloud for you,  based on your  choice of text (which you paste into their cloud generator window) or a URL.

Here’s what we get when I popped in www.thegenderblog.com – click on the image below for a closer look!

Wordle: A month in Goa, India

On Pill popping

7 Jun

Over the last ten years or so,  “fertility” to many of my female friends, colleagues and wider circle of acquaintances has often been about encouraging the arrival of babies,  rather than preventing them.

Inadvertently, I’ve become familiar with words and phrases like IVF, surrogacy, Clomid, cervical mucus and the like.  Although two-thirds of British women in the 20-24 age group take the Pill, when you’re in your 40s (or even in your late 30s),  you tend not to do so, either by virtue of your age (and weight, or smoking status) or because you actively want to have children and so popping a daily pill from its little multi-coloured blister pack is an act from the past.

In series one of iconic TV show “Mad Men”,  there’s a scene where ambitious Peggy,  newly working in Manhattan and determined to be independent,  goes to see a doctor (who smokes throughout her examination – another example of how this visually stunning TV show uses props to invoke a sense of time, place and era) in order to obtain the Pill.

It’s the early 1960s and,  for the first time, there are doctors who will provide (unmarried) girls like Peggy with the tool to free them from their fertility.

I’m nearly as old as the Pill,  a fact of which I was reminded by this article in the weekend’s Observer,  which celebrates the Pill’s 50th birthday and reminds us of how far we’ve come since Peggy’s day. How about this quote?

“Well into the 1970s, women in Britain and America were still pretending to be married in order to get a prescription; some used to pass around the same battered wedding ring in the doctor’s waiting room.”

And as novelist Margaret Drabble comments:

“I think I would have had a child a year if I hadn’t started taking it.”

So, happy golden birthday to the Pill, an iconic symbol of late 20th century autonomy for women.

Confession time …

2 Jun

… I have a small (platonic) girl crush on Laura Liswood (co-founder of both the White House Project and the Council of World Women Leaders and a Senior Advisor to Goldman Sachs).

I’ve heard her speak lots of times,  I’ve met her a few times,  she featured (and was fabulous) in the film, “Closing the Gender Gap”,  on which I served as Executive Producer in 2008 and, well,  I just happen to think she’s great.  She’s smart, funny, makes some great points around the business and social benefits of gender diversity and is a fabulous advocate for women in leadership.

And now she has a new book out, The Loudest Duck,  in which she reflects on how the Noah’s Ark approach that many organisations take isn’t working. (“If we could only get two of each in the Ark, we’ll have our diversity.”)

Check out her guest entry over on the Catalyst blog and see what you think.

Women of Britain: please vote!

6 May

Rocking the vote in Florida, 2004

Whatever you do,  wherever you are today,  please go and vote; a hundred years ago,  you wouldn’t have had the option.

A hundred years ago,  women died, were imprisoned, starved themselves in prison, so that we, their future daughters,  would have the right to go to a polling station and exercise our vote alongside our husbands, fathers and brothers. 

Voting,  particularly for women,  is not only a right,  it is a hard-won privilege. 

If you think that “politics doesn’t apply to me”,  as I have been told so many times by so many women – then think about all the things in your world, in your life,  which do apply to you:  the environment, education, hospitals, employment, medical care, crime.  By voting today,  you are  using your voice to make a conscious choice about how your country is run and by whom.

Please – make time to vote today, whether it’s because you want to have a say in how UK plc is governed for the next five years or in memory of the brave suffragette fighters who suffered so terribly so that we would have the rights which they were denied. 

Here’s an extract from the 1909 diary of suffragette Laura Ainsworth,  in which she describes being force-fed:

“They hold your arms and legs … You have a towel wrapped around you. One doctor kneels at the back of your right shoulder and forces your head back.  He forces your mouth and the other doctor pushes the tube down your mouth about 18 inches. You have a great tickling sensation, then a choking feeling and then you feel quite stunned.”

(For more on these brave women and the debt owed to them by 21st century women,  check out “The Ascent of Woman: a History of the Suffragette Movement” by Melanie Phillips).

Belated season’s greetings!

28 Dec

I’m back,  after my longest non-blogging spell since I got started in May.  December has been so busy; I returned from India and had a whole FOUR days back in England (during which time I had two – unsuccessful – job interviews) before then using up some more airline miles and going to California for a week.  A greater contrast with Goa I’m not sure exists and I spent my time there in complete flux; three countries, three time zones (in opposite directions), three currencies, a million contrasts.

I then returned to the UK a week ahead of Christmas and had to frantically “get organised” with sorting out cards, presents and food in time for cooking lunch last Friday (I know that Christmas is about so much more than simply “cooking lunch” … but when you see the queues and the all-out fights which break out in British supermarkets … I wonder …). This is the Christmassy image that I meant to post at the time but didn’t get a chance to – it’s my grandmother,  wrangling a Christmas turkey into a basket,  back in 1938:

For those who follow me on Twitter (@TheGenderBlog), you may have seen that I tweeted that I was emulating Sarah Brown, doyenne of number 10 Downing Tweet Street and trying to avoid using paper to wrap my gifts.  My packaging of choice was these Goan canvas shopping bags,  of which I brought around a dozen home with me on December 7th and so I used them as both an additional, sustainable gift in their own right and also as “wrapping” for this year’s presents:

Unsurprisingly,  most people on my list this year received pashminas, Indian tea and sarongs within their shopping bags. And, on the receiving gifts front,  there was a distinctly Indian theme to my own presents: “The Jewel in the Crown” on DVD, “The Darjeeling Limited” also on DVD, “Being Indian” and “India’s Unending Journey” in paperback.  Along similar lines,  I also decided that I would really like to learn a few words of Hindi for my next trip to India and so I ordered a “teach yourself Hindi” CD pack from Amazon which arrived on Christmas Eve.  OK, so it’s still in the packaging as yet … but the intent is there.

One of the most unwelcome contrasts between the beginning of December (Goa) and the end of December (west London) has been the weather.  I’m so cold! We’ve actually had snow in London,  which has both been quite unusual and also caused huge chaos,  given that the British are not a nation who cope well with extremes of temperature,  be they “heatwaves” of post 22 degrees or,  at the other end of the spectrum, a few flakes of snow at a level that the average American East Coaster would doubtless not even recognise as the same substance.

Here’s The Observer’s Barbara Ellen with a sublime quote on the white stuff:

“Indeed, snow is the one-night stand of weather conditions: initially surprising, even magical, but you end up wishing it had never happened, and would indeed just melt away.”

Apparently,  more snow is “promised” over the next few days,  so cue total news coverage,  which I suppose will make a change from the many (many) shots of people queuing up at assorted airports.  Happy days!

“All the world’s a stage …

30 Oct

… and all the men and women merely players.”

And this link to a Vanity Fair article on the difficulties experienced by female writers trying to break into the closed circle world of writing for the US male chat show hosts shows that the issues faced by women in corporate life are no different.

October 2009: Nell Scovell on David Letterman Hollywood: vanityfair.com

This bit particularly resonated with me; swap “late-night-TV” for “investment banking” and “writers” for “executives” and the identikit situation is more than clear:

“One frequent excuse you hear from late-night-TV executives is that “women just don’t apply for these jobs.” And they certainly don’t in the same numbers as men. But that’s partly because the shows often rely on current (white male) writers to recommend their funny (white male) friends to be future (white male) writers.”

OK. I do concur that perhaps male investment bankers may not be as funny as the guys who knock out the gags for Jay Leno’s monologue. But apart from that … same scenario, different dress code, yes?

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