Last week’s visit to city law firm Herbert Smith’s Women in Business network event, courtesy of my friend Liz, got me thinking that laws may change but that attitudes sometimes take a while to catch up.
The guest speaker, on the topic of motivation, was multi-medal winning and record breaking Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, who was fabulous: funny, charming, self-deprecating and extremely witty (“I tried swimming lessons but didn’t take to it – the highlight of my swimming career was failing to drown …”).
Now aged 40, she has been in a wheelchair since she was just seven years old, having been born with spina bifida. She retired from professional athletics three years ago and recently joined the House of Lords as a cross-bench peer, as well as serving on the boards of UK Athletics and Transport for London.
Tanni is the third paralympian that I’ve heard speak in recent years (the others were swimmer Giles Long and equestrian Lee Pearson) and her message was not dissimilar; she started with a DVD clip of her greatest hits on the track and then went on to talk about focus, planning and goals. Had you been in the room as an unsighted person, you wouldn’t really have known from Tanni’s presentation (and subsequent post-event chat) that she’s in a wheelchair; her speech was full of comments about “going for a walk” and she generally gave the impression, other than occasional sidebar references to being carried up a flight of stairs, in her chair, in Singapore, by Sir Steve Redgrave and David Beckham, of being oblivious to her wheels.
I took a lot from that, in terms of having a positive mental attitude and just getting on – with stuff in particular and with life in general. So Tanni herself clearly has a very robust personality, as you’d expect from someone with her hugely impressive track record – but my flabber was well and truly ghasted when she told us about some of the attitudes and comments she’d encountered over the years with regard to her wheelchair.
As a child growing up in Wales, getting out and about was difficult, as there were no disabled toilets in Cardiff; nor could she ever go to the cinema as she was a “fire hazard”, due to the lack of wheelchair suitable fire exits at that point.
And here’s what I was thinking – the law has clearly (and rightly) caught up with the need for there to be wheelchair access in public places and so now a seven year old girl in a chair can go to the loo and see a film at the cinema. But how do we change people’s mindsets as to what the differently abled can do with their lives? Tanni has an eight year old daughter called Carys and she told us all sorts of funny stories about taking her daughter to the track to play whilst she and her husband trained; as a toddler, they’d stick Carys in a fluorescent baby-gro (for visibility) and let her crawl about at the side of the track, or park her in the long jump pit with a bucket and spade and tell her that she was at the beach. Tanni’s love for and pride in her daughter shone through; she wants Carys to be a human rights lawyer when she grows up.
But when she was pregnant, Tanni was told that she couldn’t be an athlete and a mother (did anyone ever say that to Paula Radcliffe? I bet not) and apparently some random woman walked up to her one day, pointed at her baby bump and said “people like you shouldn’t be allowed to have children” – !
How the hell do you come back from a comment like that?
So I think we’ll only have really won through in terms of rights and awareness for Tanni and everyone like her once disability ceases to be just about access to disabled toilets and dropped kerbs (in the UK, we’re getting there, even if Singapore still needs to do some work) and becomes much more focused on mindsets, behaviours and challenging biases, both conscious and otherwise.
Invisible woman syndrome
16 SepLet’s talk about role models. I think it’s universally agreed that role models are A Good Thing, especially for women; they provide a sense that change is possible, a glimpse of the future, an alternative perspective on what life might be like “there”, perhaps some tips and hints on how to get there. When I was researching and then writing The Leaking Pipeline, which featured interviews from 79 senior business women, all great role models, around the world, I took and learned so much from their stories and their determination.
Of course, role models can come in all shapes, sizes and walks of life, as the PinkStinks campaign team demonstrate so admirably on their website, which is in turn a great example of how to harness multi-media technology in this ever changing world. When I was growing up, pre the computerised age, my role models were the women I saw around me: my mum (a mature student, a successful career woman in later life and now, in her sixties, a “sandwich generation” carer to both her grandsons and her own mother AND one of the applicants to volunteer at the 2012 London Olympics), teachers, librarians, perhaps TV presenters such as Valerie Singleton. I don’t really remember many women, other than actresses, on TV in the 1970s, across the three channels to which we had access – Anna Ford and Angela Rippon read the news and that was about it.
So why am I pondering on this now? Well, a few months ago, I watched a fabulous three part BBC4 series called Electric Dreams, in which a family of six (parents and four children, including two daughters) spent a month replicating the arrival of the last thirty years’ worth of technology. Their home was taken back to how it would have been, in technology terms, in the 1970s and they were stripped of TVs, mobile phones, computers, gaming consoles and all the associated domestic electrical gadgets: no microwaves, automatic washing machines or any other time and labour saving devices. As each new day of the experiment arrived, the time machine moved forward a year and the family took delivery of a new piece of technology – so we saw them getting to grips with early VCRs, black and white computer monitors, mobile phones the size of a brick and so on.
(c) BBC
The family were supported by a team of three technical gurus, including Dr Gia Milinovich, who is a technology writer and self-confessed geek. I thought she was fabulous in the series – clever, funny, great sense of history, with a real appreciation of how technology has been such a huge enabler over the last thirty years. The other two team members were blokes – see photo – so I think Gia served as a very positive role model for women in technology (and, perhaps, for the two girls in the house). I subsequently watched another three part BBC series which she presented (for which I can’t find a link – perhaps I dreamed it?) about the development and emergence of technology which made it seem really interesting and accessible, even to the non-Apple-owning types amongst us.
And I’m focusing on Gia because …? OK. Last month, Gia wrote this article for the Guardian, in which she highlighted how she has basically become invisible since her husband of six years, rock star/God like physicist Prof. Brian Cox, hit the media spotlight and became the acceptable (and sexy) face of popular science.
“When we first met”, she writes, “I was the expensively groomed television professional, working on mostly science and technology shows, and he was the newly appointed physics academic with a student’s wardrobe and a single bed.”
But, then: “… he presented Wonders Of The Solar System and everything changed.”
She goes on to detail how her husband’s level of fame and recognition (in supermarkets, on the street) then escalated to the point where other women are zoning in on him in public and on Twitter and behaving as if Gia simply … doesn’t exist.
As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, Gia has also had to take a hit in career terms, as she explains that:
“…A few years ago, I started to notice that the more Brian appeared on TV, the less interesting I became to other people. I started to morph from Gia Milinovich, independent woman with her own life and separate bank account, into “Mrs Brian Cox”, then into “wife”. Pre-fame, I was asked for my opinions; now, I’m asked what Brian thinks.”
And, circling back to our role models angle, Gia has now decided to take a step back from continuing to work in TV, describing here how she has found herself treated in a way which is doubtless only too familiar to women in corporate life – as if what she says has no value, unless and until the very same words are uttered by a male colleague in the same meeting, at which point they are fallen upon as if they are true pearl encrusted nuggets of gold.
“The respect for my professional abilities has declined in inverse proportion to the number of Google searches for “Is Prof Brian Cox divorced yet?”
“The first signs were there five years ago when Brian and I went to pitch some ideas to a producer at a well-known production company. I’d had a science-technology series broadcast on Channel 4 several months earlier, and Brian’s appearances as the science expert on This Morning were going very well.
“From the start, the producer’s attention was on Brian. Every time I spoke, he’d look at me as though I was interrupting their conversation. At one point, I came out with what I thought was an excellent idea. The producer again turned towards me, said nothing and then turned slowly back to Brian. About a minute later, Brian repeated my idea almost word for word and the producer told him it was brilliant.”
So, how sad is this? This clever, funny, educated woman, a fabulous role model for women in science, women in TV, women everywhere really, has decided that –
“Brian has made a well-loved science series and I, well, until I work out how I fit into all of this, I’ll just continue washing his pants.”
Don’t do it, Gia. Hang on in there – we need more women like you on TV!
Share this: