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.

The article starts:

Goa: the smallest and the richest state in India; a former Portuguese colony, a place of beautiful golden beaches, swaying palm trees and over a million domestic and foreign tourists per year. The wealth brought by the tourists also brings an influx of economic migrants. In search of work and money, they travel to this tiny state in western India from other areas – hundreds and in some cases thousands of miles away.

I first visited Goa in 1999, have been back many times since then and have seen the volume of both tourists and of workers from other parts of India soar in the intervening years. Unsurprisingly, the Goan infrastructure is now creaking under this flood of people; from a tourist’s point of view, power cuts and water shortages are increasingly common but can be dismissed as being “part of the Indian experience.” However, what many tourists never see are the living environments of many of the migrant workers – and, more particularly, how this impacts the health and education of their children.

- and can be read in its entirety by clicking here.

This week,  I’ve been writing copy for some of the other pages on the ETI website and I had a Skype call with the team in Goa in order to get some ideas for content and to check some details and facts.  Here’s what they told me when I asked what they’d buy with certain specific cash sums:

£5                                Buys 5 pairs of flip flops to protect children’s feet from injuries and blood poisoning

£10                              Provides rice, milk and eggs for a dozen pregnant and breast feeding women

£15                              50p per day pays for a month’s medical supplies such as antibiotics, plasters, dressings, headlice treatment, cough medicine, anti-malarial tablets etc

£20                              Funds materials such as a week’s worth of petrol to drive between their projects and visit the mobile schools, take sick children to hospital and so on

£25                              Pays for one week’s rent at one of the two permanent schools

£50                              Buys a DVD player and educational DVDs

£100                            Pays for one teacher’s salary for a month.

As I say in the article,  these figures certainly put my daily latte habit (c. £50 a month!) into perspective …

(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).

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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.

From my new article on networking 2.0,  published today in TheGlassHammer:

“I haven’t got time for networking”, one senior woman from a major City of London investment bank told me recently.

“All that standing around in rooms full of complete strangers,  drinking either bad wine at the end of a long day,  or bad coffee and stale croissants at the start of another day – no thanks. It’s so unstructured and unfocused,  and such a bad use of my time.  I’m sure there probably ARE useful and interesting people at some of these events – but how on earth do you find them in a packed room,  and what use might we be to each other?”

Other women told a similar tale,  with one commenting that she had now stopped going along to organised “group meet ups”,  as she found that she either knew no-one,  or would see a familiar face in the crowd and then “cling to that person for the whole evening,  thus negating the idea of meeting new people!”

In response to this changing mindset – and independently of each other – two London based women have begun to evolve a more nuanced, “networking 2.0” framework,  which delivers the benefits of what we might perhaps call “old school” networking – expanding your contacts, sharing connections and skills – but which also uses technology and social media interfaces.

Read on here …

Carol Paterson Smith

My profile of Carol Paterson Smith of Rothschild Blackpoint, who also runs her own business, Alpha Female, is now available on TheGlassHammer.

Here’s  the link – happy reading.

It was a great piece to write,  as Carol was such a fabulously inspiring interviewee – the words just flew from her onto the page and I hope you agree that that comes through in the article.

Sample quote:

“As a way of supporting women in the City, I take my two female interns out and about with me so that they too can network and learn. I lacked role models when I started and I want to try and stop that.”

However,  proof of my networking and writing activities came all neatly rolled up into one busy day last week,  when my article about IDDAS‘s report into board effectiveness (as viewed by the chairmen of a number of FTSE 350 companies) and where diversity fits within that model was published on the Glasshammer (here’s the link)  and a piece on travel tips also went live on Alpha Female.

Do check out Alpha Female if you can; it was founded earlier this year by Carol Paterson Smith (whom I’ll be interviewing later this week for a Glasshammer profile, so look out for that too) and is a fabulous treasure trove of useful connections, smart ideas and stylish hints to make life easier for busy women everywhere.

Carol and I met last month when we were seated next to each other at the WIBF awards, and that in itself was an interesting example of what can happen when you’re naughty and move the seating plan around so that you don’t have to sit with your back to the stage … if I’d stayed where I was meant to sit,  I wouldn’t have met Carol,  checked out her fabulous site (you have to create a user name and register to view the content,  but it’s free to do so and well worth it)  and written her a guest article.

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If you follow me on Twitter,  you’ll have seen that I was Tweeting on Sunday about the community party we held on my street in west London in support of the nationwide Big Lunch initiative.  More on that event later this week; as well as being tremendous fun,  it was a fabulous example of collaboration, planning and new friendships amongst neighbours of long standing.

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 50^th 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 20^th century autonomy for women.

Ah well – it’s always good to aspire, right?

As reported here in the Daily Telegraph, Sainsbury’s (“Try something new today!” – indeed …) were merrily selling nurses’ outfits “for girls” and doctors’ kits labelled “for boys”, along with pilot and “superhero” costumes – but these have now been removed and will be replaced with a new range of gender neutral dressing up outfits.

Nice work, PinkStinks – and a great testimony to the strength of their pester power social media campaign (which I joined even though I don’t have children myself, let alone daughters or even nieces).

Whenever I hear stories like this, or read about manufacturers and retailers unwittingly promoting gender and/or inappropriate messaging and stereotypes (wasn’t it Woolworths – RIP – who hit the headlines a few years ago for launching a range of pink painted bedroom furniture aimed at little girls named the “Lolita”?), I remind myself of a small boy called John and how invidious and impactful gender images can be. 

John is the son of a female friend who works as a GP; she is evidently from a very smart family, because her sister is also a doctor. One day, returning home from a visit to his aunt’s house, where my friend and her sister had been talking medical shop, John, then aged five, asked his mother:

“Mummy – when I grow up, can I become a doctor too, or is it only ladies who are allowed to do that?”

Spring is on the way and I’m marking it by refreshing the look of the blog.  I’m also celebrating having a guest blog piece published on one of my favourite websites, The Thin Pink Line. I’ve been a fan of this site (and its founders – check two of them out on the Recommended Reading link) for some years now,  so I’m tickled, em, pink, to be published on there.

My article in question is another take on last month’s launch of the ILGA website,  which is continuing its promise to be a go-to source of news and updates on matters which impact the LGBTI community. Good to see refreshed news items on the front page every time I visit.

My very wonderful network of friends continue to keep up the good work and ensure that I’m invited to relevant and interesting events in the diversity space.  In a few days’ time,  I’ll be at city law firm Herbert Smith listening to Britain’s most successful Paralympic athlete, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson (she’s won 11 gold medals and broken 30 world records) speaking on motivation, success, diversity and reaching your potential.  More on what she has to say towards the end of the week.