Why we need women to be in power...

…and working in journalism*, and the police, the army and the courts and more or less anywhere. And I mean In positions of power not just support.

This is an excellent article by Linda Grant on Comment is Free.

She is talking about her work in investigating claims of mass rape in Bosnia during the Balkans Conflict. She identifies it was the first time that rape was generally recognised as a weapon of war at the same time that the war was going on and that it was women being involved that made that happen: She says:

“What was different in Croatia and Bosnia was that this was the first war that had been monitored by women's organisations, which received reports and collected data.

It was also, perhaps, the first war in which women were, in increasingly large numbers, gaining high profile positions in journalism. After the piece came out, I was contacted by Veronica Waddley, then features editor of the Telegraph (now editor of the Evening Standard)”

I know that many people say that it doesn’t matter what gender or race a person is, they can still represent all humanity. And in theory, I agree. I wouldn’t like to think that I would discriminate in my compassion for others, on the basis or their gender or race.

However, I note that in practice, that it just doesn’t work like that; it has needed women getting into positions of power to start recognising that rape is used as a weapon of war. It did take the increases (however paltry) to the number women in parliament in 1997 to bring in some of the flexible working, maternity and childcare legislation and provision over the last 11 years.

So, although in theory it doesn’t matter what groups are in power and what their gender is, in practice is seems to. This is why diversity is so important. Diversity is important, to have not just a woman’s experience but both men and women’s experience when making decisions on things.

To me this is so important that I am not prepared to wait until there is equality ‘naturally’. I don’t think that will ever happen; we need to rebalance it in women’s favour.

I appreciate, some men out there may not feel particularly advantaged: there are always those who have the merit of being the right colour, the right class, having the right amount of money and having gone to school with the right people. However, as can be shown through the numbers, the biggest advantage there is in politics, in business, in anywhere where power exists, is to be male.

And I can’t see how this is going to change, given the stagnation that has happened in the numbers of women being elected into parliament without some form of quotas. In the Liberal Democrats we do in fact have gender quotas for most bodies, from the FE & FPC, to selection committees, shortlists to PR election lists; why do we refuse to bring them in for the most vital, the most likely to effect positive change for millions of women? Why do we not have them for winnable parliamentary seats? Why do we not have a good long look at how we define the various roles in the party, especially those of PPC and agent to make them fit women’s lives more easily instead of insisting that women’s lives fit them?

In the Labour party they do use All Women Shortlists (AWS) and their women’s organisations have real strength within the party, are taken seriously and listened to by both men and women.

It always makes me very sad to see how few men turn up to the usually very interesting fringes that Women Liberal Democrats put on; we’re supposed to believe that they are able to represent all our experiences but they don’t both to do the most simple things to find out what they are.

Even in the Tory Party, Cameron at least goes on Woman’s Hour and sounds like he wants women to join and take part. I listened to the Women’s House podcast when he was on a few months ago – I tell you, he was very compelling! When are our leaders going to be going on Women’s Hour asking for the listeners to get involved?

Nick Clegg has said that if we don’t sort it out within two parliaments then we are going to have to look at AWS again. Well, from the data that the Electoral Reform Society has come up with that’s not going to happen in the next parliament so that only leaves one more. Why wait for the inevitable? Why wait another parliament of nothing changing when bringing forward change would make a real difference for millions of women’s lives? Why should all that be sacrificed for the sake of the ambitions of 30 odd male approved candidates? I know that the sacrifice of the individual for the group does not fit with our liberal values but I think we are cutting off our nose to spite our face if we don’t do this. I truly believe that more diversity will lead to better lives for all.

I’m very interested to see what the newly incepted Speakers Conference comes up with; I do hope it is going to deliver real action and not just wishful thinking! I’m also looking forward to hearing a bit more about what the Bones Commission in the Lib Dems has to say about sorting this problem out. I’m kind of hoping that it will and that will explain why Nick has been so quiet on this topic over the last 7 months.

*How many lobby correspondents are women, by the way…have you counted recently? Quite a few national newspapers don’t have any women reporting from the press gallery. I went to a press gallery lunch the other week that Nick spoke at and I’m trying very hard to remember but I don’t think there were any questions by women and was told that most of the women in the room were not in fact journalists but invited as the guests of journalists (as I was). So a lot of men asking other men questions about things that interest men.




Sexism in the City

This Tuesday the Fawcett Society will be launching their campaign Sexism in the City.

I’ve worked the majority of my working life for Financial Services firms (although not in wholesale or investment banking which I understand are the worst) and most of that has been in the square mile; I can confirm that there is quite a lot of sexism going on.

Sexist ‘events’ or comments or whatever you want to call them happen on a daily basis and I couldn’t tell you if it was getting worse or better. My most recent ‘favourite’ was a couple of weeks ago when I was leading a rather dry but rather complex business requirements workshop. I run a pretty tight ship on these things, especially when there are people on the other end of a phone line as it’s very easy to get bogged down and go off on tangents.

This one guy, oh, probably in his early thirties, already referred to by one of his co-workers as a bit of a loose cannon was constantly talking over other people and several times I had to stop him and ask him to wait a second so that others could finish what they were saying. After about the third time that I had to ask him he announced to the rest of the meeting that he was very glad he wasn’t married to me!

I have to say I was wrong footed by this and it took me a good few seconds to believe that he had just said what he has said in the middle of a work meeting. I am glad to say that the rest of our colleagues looked pretty embarrassed by what he had said and just wanted to move on. Which we did.

Can this man not imagine any role for a woman but to be a potential wife and so feels the need to announce it loudly when someone doesn’t fit the bill?

So, there you go, in one move he attempts to undermine me as a professional in a hope to reduce me to the role of a wife and lets face it not a very nice wife at that…a bossy wife, who doesn’t just let the man ramble on. Of course, a real man like him would never have anything to do with a harpy like me.

And if you think I’m over reacting to how this man reacted to being asked by me to wait until someone else had finished their sentence I wonder if he would have said the same thing to a man? No, of course he wouldn’t.

It was quite an unpleasant thing to say, it was quite spiteful and frankly aggressive but worst of all it was sexist.

Of course, I’m a tough old nut I don’t let something like that get me down, do I? I see it and him for what he is but I wonder what effect it would have had on me had I been younger or slightly more sensitive.

And it is just one more example about how women are objectified in the City. Being a liberal then if my male clients or co-workers want to go and have lap dancers titillate them of an evening that that’s their prerogative. But I have to say it’s a close run thing, as I’m not convinced that it doesn’t do any harm to women. I wonder if they find it so easy to purchase sexual titillation and see women only as something to buy how they manage to switch the next morning into treating the women they work with as equal professionals. Surely, the lines between female colleague and sexual object must blur?

I have no desire to work in an environment devoid of humour or humanity but I do want to work in an environment where my abilities, skills, experience and excellent delivery is undermined by some men’s view of women.

I don’t mind what people get up to in private as long as it is consensual but I am getting increasingly worried by the objectification of women in the media, on the internet, in drinking clubs and (most of all) on billboards around London; basically in public. I think it sends out the wrong message to both girls and boys and I think we are a poorer society for it. And I’m pretty sure that it impacts how seriously I am taken in my professional life, by some people, because I am a woman and that really, really winds me up.

Blimey! Quotas for Board Directors!

Or: is Norway just a very good country to be a woman in?

This article from Guardian Unlimited caught my eye, unsurprisingly this morning! It looks at a new law brought out in Norway, which states that 40% of a company’s directors must be female; yes, my eyes nearly popped out of my sockets too! Apparently all but 12 companies have done it!!

There is a strong economic case for diversity in business and Norway at least recognises that ‘lack of experience’ (read: lack of supply) is not the only reason why in 2002 only 7.1% of board directors were female.

Are quotas the answer for us in the UK? Well, I suspect not. We have yet to recognise the benefits that diversity brings and we just don’t have the same culture of action in favour women’s equality that they have in Scandinavia. Although, its fair to say, that the debate in Norway’s was framed in terms of economic necessity rather than gender equality but I don’t see much evidence of even that level of sophistication in the diversity debate, if there is one, in the UK.

However, one comment by Marit Hoel, a Norwegian sociologist and the Director of the Centre for Corporate Diversity, made me smile as it reflect some of my own impatience with women’s position in business but also in terms of their representation in politics. She says:

"I would have preferred the quota to be voluntary - but that would have meant waiting another 35 years”.

Yes, 35 years, I’ll be 71 and hopefully settling down to lots of book reading and pottering, although with less money and pensions than my current male equivalents, of course.

Often when I am voicing my frustration at the slow progress being made in increasing the number of women in positions of power in politics, let alone in parliament I am told (most often it has to be said by men who are somewhat younger than me) to be patient as it’s all going in the right direction.

Well, it’s not going in the right direction for a start, we have 2 less female MPs now than we had after the 2005 general election and female membership of boards is at a 9 year low.

And as for being patient, it will take 200 years before there is equality in the UK parliament. I think it’s fair to say, even with medical advancement as it is, I’ll be long gone before then; so will hundreds of other skilled and talented women, already around, but sadly missing from the green and red benches. So telling me to be patient, that things are progressing OK, is a bit like telling me to give up and forget it.

Obama and the women's vote

Early on in these primaries it seemed quite clear cut, Hillary had the women’s vote and because there were enough women, she was winning the race to the Democratic nomination.

All the US commentators are now saying that one reason that Barack Obama is pulling ahead from Hillary is that the women’s vote is abandoning her and has gone to vote for Obama. Now, I know women don’t vote as a block etc, etc but there are significant amounts of movement in voter’s demographics to see a trend that aligns women and voting intentions.

This new development does seem to be flying in the face of my pretty strong defence, yesterday, of identity politics as a rational way forward. Having slightly sophist tendencies I have been for some days now putting this move towards Obama as a result of his wooing of female voters and the attention his campaign has paid in the last few weeks to them and matters of interest to women voters. I mean you would, wouldn’t you if you were looking at your campaign strategy? I still think this is the case.

However, here on the CBS News website Elizabeth Cline does an interesting analysis of the young female voter and the fact that it is them, as far as anybody can tell, that are voting in increasing numbers for Obama. So what makes a young female voter make different decisions from an older female voter?

“College has become one corner of American life where hardworking females are consistently and fairly rewarded, and they are succeeding there, to a much greater degree than their male counterparts. It's possible, maybe even likely, to graduate college with little sense and zero experience of institutionalized gender discrimination -- with almost complete freedom from the type of covert, daily setbacks that drive blacks to the polls for Obama and older women to vote for Clinton.”

This resonates with me. I can’t say that I left University with no feminist consciousness. I identified myself as a feminist before I went to University the roots of my feminism going deep, deep into my upbringing and experiences growing up (or at least, watching the experiences of the women around me). Whilst at Aberystwyth, studying International Relations, I took courses on feminist theories of international relations and indeed that was where I got a grounding in the various feminist political theories which allow me as great an understanding of them as I have of say liberalism or fascism. I arrived at University a feminist and left a slightly better educated one!

But I will say that at University I had never felt or had any personal experience of discrimination myself – although I had seen it, especially, weirdly, in the Drama Department; despite there being many times more women in the department than men, the plays used for people’s practical examinations tended to have very strong male roles and hardly any substantial female parts at all; rather concerning if you are trying to achieve a 1st or even a 2:1 by playing the third washer woman from the right! But, I am digressing…..

No, it’s only as I have got older that I have become more and more aware of the under the radar, structuralised, many faceted, drip, drip, drip of barriers to women’s progress and equality and, indeed, have experienced them myself. And I consider myself one of the lucky ones, one of the least oppressed women on the planet!

It makes me sad that it’s the case, but I think as you get older and come across these barriers, you do get to understand that no matter how you think the world should be theoretically, in fact, it isn’t like that! As Cline says:

“…the advantage women have in college quickly slips away in the working world. Women get paid a lot less than the men they graduate with, no matter how much extra work or hours they put in. One year out of school, women working full-time are earning 80 percent of what their former male classmates are making, according to a 2007 study by American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. And this fact hasn't budged over the past ten years -- despite the advances women have made on campus”.

The positive thing is that when you do have a meritocracy, which people believe in, then they do start to drift away from identity politics, as can be seen in, what Cline terms, the ‘girl-positive’ environment of college and/or University. But out in the real world where there’s power and money at stake, not just good grades, it’s not so ‘girl-positive’ and the identity politics and an understanding of how the world really does work drifts back in. Cline summarises:

“Young people are going to continue to impact this election in unprecedented ways -- a force of history that leaves me simultaneously in love with young people's fervor and optimism and unnerved by their lack of interest in Hillary. For the candidate, the parallels between college and the real world are striking. She has worked hard and done what's expected of her, but may very well get passed over by a less qualified guy when payday comes”.

Is it really only 80 years?

As Ros and Jennie have already noted, it is 90 years ago today that women got the vote. 80 years since they got the vote on the same terms as men and 50 years since they were allowed to enter the House of Lords.

And, although all is technically equal on the legal front, we are still having to loosen, finger by finger, the grip that men have on power and money. We have just 19% of our MPs female, even less running our top companies and the pay gap, well, it's still the pay gap and interestingly (or if you're me, bloody annoyingly) gets wider the higher up the career ladder women go! I reckon, that we're about 20% down the road to equality; you know, real equality, in how we live our lives, as opposed to equality in the eyes of the law.

Women's unpaid labour is still not included in national accounts, with all the implications for public policy that that entails, rape conviction as a proportion of reported rapes is frightenly low and I don't seem to be able to walk down the road or get on a bus without having a highly sexualised image of a women presented to me at every opportunity. My favourite one to hate at the moment is one advertising a programme called 'Skins'; I really enjoy having to look at that at the bustop surrounded by primary school kids.

There's an excellent article in the Guardian about it where Katherine Rake, the Director of The Fawcett Society.

It's a wide ranging interview looking back, as well as forward, but for me she really hits the nail on the head for me when she says:

"We are only half way through the revolution: there has been a huge change in women's lives but very little in men's. We have got to look at what happens in men's lives in future, in terms of a fairer division of labour and getting the benefits and costs of that."

Such completion of the revolution means wading into the private sphere to challenge the very way most of us live our lives, but Rake remains unapologetic. "There has to be a day that happens. This is very much a part of [Fawcett's] heritage. Unless you talk about changing the rules, about social transformation, the fundamental rules don't change and you are not going to be offering equality for women.

"We have done as much as we can levering women into a system designed by men for men. Now we have to work for a society where the rules are fitted for everybody."

Don't worry! I too, the good liberal that I am, get nervous when people talk about wading into the private sphere, but she has got a point.

To be honest, I think this is what we've been trying to do in the Lib Dems for too long; we have been focussing on getting women to change and to go on all sorts of training so we can play the selection game the same way the guys do.

When we get our heads around the fact that diversity is not about looking different on the outside but, in fact, about doing things differently and that it's possible to believe in liberalism but approach the practice of politics differently, we will start to make some progress on diversity.

And changing the way we do things (the rules) means everyone, including men and I think that will make politics and liberal democrat politics, in particular, better for all of us, not just women! Hooray!

No Pay Day

Today is what the Fawcett Society is terming Women's No Pay Day. The pay gap between women and men working full-time is equivalent to men getting paid all year but women working for nothing from October 30th to year end.

And this is despite the fact that women do better at school than men!

And this is not a fringe issue, either. 71% of women think the government should do something about it (that's a lot of voters), over 50% of people would be more likely to vote for a politician who believed in equal pay.

What always depresses me about this debate is the fact the the first response of so many people is to try and undermine the statistic...so, you get from the BBC's have your say comment box today (I really must stop going there) arguments along the lines of:

• Women work fewer hours (no, the stats are per hour)
• Women choose to go off and have children and so it's fine
  
• Women don't do as hard a jobs..women are secretaries, men are managers...etc, etc, etc
• Women are better at looking after children, it's biology so deal with it!!
  

It seems impossible for the pay gap to be accepted as a fact. It seems we are still having to argue the case that there is an issue and always dealing with its denial rather than being able to debate and understand why it is so and what can be done.

To those who think that the pay gap is just a manipulation of statistics I ask: what is it do you think the campaign is about? I mean, do you think the Fawcett Society, and all of us who recognise a pay gap, are trying to do is trick our employers into actually paying us more than men for less work? Do you really think that government ministers and opposition front benchers would be going on Woman's Hour to talk about it if it was just a silly misreading of the numbers? After all, it's not as if we haven't got all sorts of other discrimination to go off and campaign about!!

I say government ministers and opposition front benchers but I am not referring, of course, to Liberal Democrats; our website and press releases have been silent about it all day. I don't know why; I think we find it a difficult topic to address as a party.

But still, there's a lot of voters out there interested in this....and what are we doing? Having a good old debate about Trident!!

The reasons behind the pay gap are many and complex and they are economic, social and political. I would like to get beyond the statistic and start looking into why we have this gap. Why if girls do so well in school as they paid, in London in particular, nearly 3/4 of that of their male counterparts? Why are traditionally feminine roles, that when assessed are equal in terms of skills, experience and responsibility to many traditionally masculine jobs, often low paid? For example, you are paid more to look after cars than to look after children!! Why are women who haven't taken time off to have children still paid less than their male equivilants?

The discrimination taking place here isn't the easy to identify and I'm not sure that legislation is the answer; it is a lot more subtle, a lot harder to pin down, easy to dismiss and more difficult to resolve. The answers are as much about what goes on in the home as it is about what goes on in the work place.

But then perhaps this is all part of my cunning plan to actually earn more than my male equivalents in the work place and I'm making a lot of fuss about nothing?

How do you tackle patriarchal attitudes?

Many thanks to The Free Think Blog for picking up on this item of interest to at least 52% of the population, if not the Lib Dem Blogosphere.

Well, the pay gap between men and women far from slowly improving is has widened for the first time in 10 years. Yes, I agree with the feelings of Free Think:

'Such inequality is depressing, and reveals how deep-rooted discrimination is in the workplace, with simple anti-discrimination legislation failing to tackle tacit patriarchal attitudes'.

However, I think it is naive to think that changing a law could be enough to really change attitudes.

Cultural change, and we are talking about a cultural change here, always requires something else...in business, and in change management circles (which I inhabit from time to time) it is understood that an effective change in culture always comes from the top. If the directors are clear that certain behaviour is unacceptable or acceptable then it tends to filter down pdq.

An example: a good friend of mine, a COO , went to work for a new company. In this company it was perfectly accepted (apparently!!) to use the 'c' word in meetings. My friend was quite clear that he did not find it acceptable to use that sort of language in the workplace and it very, very quickly stopped.

To effect a cultural change requires leadership and can rarely be left to the grass roots; I don't like that that's the case but empirically it is so. I might add that I don't believe the kind of nebulous, hard to pin down and impossible to prove legally discrimination confines itself to the workplace.

And whilst we look to legislation and/or rules to solve the problem for us we will be looking in the wrong place.

Often times in countries that are made up of many different nationalities or ethnic groups we ensure they are allocated fair quotas in government and the legislature so that those in the establishment cannot ride roughshod over those with less power.

But in the most of the UK we expect it all to just happen by itself when it comes to gender balance and then we are surprised when the outcomes are not as we liberal fair minded people would wish.

Apparently, it's not women that need fixing....phew!

Tipped off by Blunt & Disorderly, I read this great article from the Guardian ….someone somewhere has done some research on why women don’t demand the same salaries as men and come up with the conclusion that it’s not just a case of fixing women and making them more confident…that there might be something wrong with the environment itself.

I’ve been conscious of the fact that women are earning less and not getting promoted because they tend not to negotiate or demand as much as men for some time. This feminine habit of ours comes from a long socialisation that suggests to women that it is not pleasant behaviour in a woman to be too demanding…in any number of spheres. So, over the last few years, buoyed on by my professional and financial success even when I haven’t been that demanding I have been ‘coaching’ myself to start negotiating on my own behalf. The fact that it is on my own behalf is important because I have never faltered from asking for things on behalf of my employer or the organisation that I have been working for. I am not a meek person.

And whilst, my consciousness raised, I am getting better at it, I am still sure that my fellow, male self employed interim managers no doubt earn the 11% more than me that the study suggests, partly because I have yet to have a daily rate turned down. This indicates to me that I am still not pitching myself high enough. Although statistically it’s hard to tell as there are very few female, self-employed interim managers, working at the level I do.

It comes as no surprise to me that men don’t like women that ask or negotiate; generally, it’s referred to as nagging. But it is a strange relief to learn that it’s just not encouragement, training or confidence building that women need (although we do) but a change in the complex, sociological and psychological situations that we find ourselves. Situations that mean a decision not to ask for something for ourselves is not always down to meekness or irrationality but a logical, assessment of the social impact of any such decision – albeit that we’re not conscious of doing it.

Which leads me to the fact that although our selection rules attempt to be scrupulously fair and provide ‘an even playing field’, they are not going to solve the problem of the lack of female MPs. An imbalance that will take 200 years to correct before women are represented fairly in parliament and 300 before ethnic minority women are. An environment of complex social and psychological attitudes that are individual and often unconscious undermines those rules.

Prejudice is something we tend to keep to ourselves. If you think that Lib Dems are too liberal to be prejudiced then I point you in the direction of a member who said to me, less than a year ago during a parliamentary selection campaign, that she wouldn’t be voting for the candidate that I was campaigning for because their surname sounded ‘too Irish’. I’m sorry; clearly some people don’t keep their prejudices to themselves.

Likewise, I often hear that the problem is one of supply; women are just not coming forward, there just aren’t enough. We aren’t interested in formal politics and political parties; we prefer other outlets for our political activism. Like not negotiating a raise, our lack of representation is clearly all our own fault!

We all know some of the practical reasons why women don’t come forward; they’re too busy looking after a family or they just don’t have the support at home that helps when you’re standing to be an elected representative. Unlike male partners of women often the girlfriend or wife of an activist will find them selves getting involved in politics to support their man, if only making the tea to start with. Boyfriends and husbands with no interest in politics are more likely not to get involved, even with the tea making – they go out or find something else to do that is of interest to them.

With the exception of the odd crèche here and there, I don’t think completely re engineering in the next few years the division of labour between men and women is within the budget of the Lib Dems gender balance agenda.

Perhaps the women who are not coming forward aren’t just too busy or lack the confidence, perhaps they are not coming forward for the same reason that they don’t ask for more money; because the social cost of doing so is too great. As a PPC you do have to be quite demanding, wanting to be the candidate can be perceived as quite egotistical and it would seem women, if this research is to be believed, would suffer disproportionately as being seen as ‘not nice’.

So, it is all more complicated than just ensuring that members are at least able to pick a woman or sending us on women only training courses. If we spend all our focus and energy on an unbelievably complex, but still inherently blunt selection process then we will not solve our dilemma. For all our efforts women only have 18% of the MPs in parliament and it’s only that much because of the Labour party contribution.

I know that some will come up with all sorts of statistics around the proportion of women selected as candidates and how much it has improved but how many are in winnable seats? Do we even have a target and is it 50% in winnable seats? And how can you say? Crikey, with the political weather being as choppy as it is at the moment who can tell which are the winnable seats and look at the level of replacement in held seats, since 2005 we have been busy replacing male and female MPs with men.

I know there are many who say that it doesn’t matter whether an MP is male or female, all that matters is that we have Lib Dem MPs but even that is a little short sighted. Votes go up with a female candidate: more women come out to vote (that is why diversity matters and why role models matter) and most importantly it increases female political activism. In my London Borough, female activists, you know, really active ones, are thin on the ground! Even next door, in exciting, go ahead Lewisham only 2 of the 16 councillors are women.

I believe it is beholden on us, not just be satisfied with our processes for selection but with the outcomes as well. Outcome is a perfectly reasonable measure of fairness. Voters don’t give two hoots about whether we think that our processes to ensure diversity are fair or not, they just notice the outcome. In the Liberal Democrat case it is that we choose predominantly white men to be our candidates and elected representatives, particularly in winnable seats. I wince as I write that, but it is the fact of it. We need to start measuring success in terms of the outcome not the application of the process. Process purists will argue that the purpose of the process is not to deliver diversity but what the members want - if that's the case then the short listing requirements should be ditched. I might mention it just one more time; it needs to be the outcome that counts.

This is not an issue just for the Lib Dems; there isn’t a national parliament in the world that has achieved even 30% female representation (which is seen to be the minimum number needed to start influencing the political agenda and modus operandi) without some sort of zipping or quota. This is because not matter how ‘fair’ the process, or how much you encourage and train women to come forward there are all those unconscious, or even conscious, prejudices that you can’t legislate away that are getting in the way of both the supply and demand for female candidates and elected representatives.