Author: sarah

‘Divide and rule’ is an effective strategy for controlling any group, from family to country and nowhere is this truer than with women. When I first engaged in feminism in the early eighties it was laughed at in much of the media (Guardian excepted) and feminists were scorned for not being proper women,  called lesbians, ugly, fat, dungaree wearing. It was quite daring to announce that you were a feminist in my work circles (journalism) then. Arguably in certain sectors of work and society it still is.  The strategy was to distance the women who challenged patriarchal power from the vast majority of women who were acquiescent and it worked.  But strategies change and now many of the demands second wave feminists campaigned for have come about or at least are acknowledged as being social issues and not fanatical or fanciful ideas. It is now acknowledged in this country at least that women are just as capable, just as clever as men even if social arrangements often prevent them from fulfilling their potential. However the divide and rule has now been applied in a different way – to split feminists. A lack of education of feminism means that there is now little gratitude from the young to the earlier feminists who campaigned so hard for change.  Indeed some older feminists  have been cast aside by the young for being ideologically unsound evidenced by the no platforming of feminists like Linda Bellos, Jenni Murray and Germaine Greer. Today lots of young women describe themselves as feminists and the ‘I am not a feminist but….’ start to a sentence is not as common. But political movements need theory and much of feminist theory has been diluted or rejected. Feminism or even feminism(s) as some prefer to say, is much more tentative than it was.

Twenty five years ago some feminists myself included argued that the project of feminism would be damaged if we went too far down the poststructuralism path.  We feared a political and moral relativism that would lead to the fragmentation of the class of women and would ultimately result in their disempowerment. Academia continued on the path anyway and the human subject became ever subject to scrutiny – unstable, partial, changeable, relative. Once you remove the ability  to name a subject the theorising of discrimination and violence becomes pretty impossible. Material reality was critiqued, deconstructed endlessly, power existed in and through discourse and was continuously shifting. Truths and experiences  were limited to ‘partial’ truths. The feminist research focus on violence, rape, inequality and pornography i.e. the everyday reality for many women, was redirected to ‘sexier’ theoretical subjects of linguistics, identity and intersectionality. Yes the early feminist work was white middle-class centred but then so were many of the  first wave suffragettes. That does not mean that their work and theory should be discredited, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Whilst these postmodern theories may sound much more inclusive, each theoretical proclamation could be critiqued, undone and disrupted leaving no solid foundation for a cohesive political theory at all. Much of it is built on linguistics and is hard to understand, therefore distancing itself from women’s lived in experience. That itself is a different sort of privilege and means its ideas are inaccessible to the majority of women.   Feminism is built on the concept of a universal womanhood, however deep the differences in experiences inevitably are. We need to remember how well  divide and rule  has worked  well in the past to paralyse women’s progress.

In the great poststructuralist sweep ‘grand narratives’ like feminism and patriarchy were condemned as simplistic, universalistic and culturally biased. Poststructuralist ideas were and still are useful in allowing a more nuanced analysis of power and how it operates at different levels and in different locations. It is not a zero sum game. However its limits in relation to the analysis of women’s lives  must be acknowledged. Writer Dorinne Kondo   concluded pessimistically and correctly with reference to the power women have to change relations with men,that applying  only poststructuralist concepts of discourse ultimately means that ‘they (the women in her study) and we will never be able completely to  dismantle the master’s house’ (Kondo 1990).

No truths, no big ideas, no commonality, no material power – we can see so easily how this was leading to the near destruction of a feminist theory and the political movement for which it provided the foundation. Its ‘grand narrative’ theory was dismissed as middle class and white after all. Women’s studies became gender studies in the nineties, although we knew it meant women – perhaps gender was more sophisticated and academically acceptable, and we were interrogating what it meant to be a woman at specific times, gender as a social and cultural construct. It also opened the door to studying men and interrogating masculinity. And men there were, analysing masculinity and power within a feminist context. Then queer studies and queer theory, the ultimate in post-structuralist theory of sexuality and identity seeped in to the academy, co-opted poststructuralist feminist theory and ballooned.  Materialist feminist theory all but vanished. Queer studies popularised the concept of gender identity, which before feminists could blink seemed to have replaced the feminist reading of gender in everyday language. Judith Butler’s book ‘Gender Trouble’ has a lot to answer for, paving the way for a trans ideology which dominates this space in a way that early feminists and even early feminist poststructuralists would never have envisaged. Womanhood deconstructed to such an extent that even a man can now be a woman and, some women even agree, particularly the younger ones. An ideology held to be a reality which prioritises a notion of gender identity (whatever that may be) over biological sex. (Discussions of what is so wrong with trans ideology and how it harms women and girls are in another post here.)  Is it a coincidence that the poststructuralist philosophical landscape has coincided with an ebbing of women’s progress, as gender pay equality progress stalls, sexual violence increases and we already see a backlash to the #MeToo movement. Women sense that the concept of patriarchy is needed but we need to rediscover the theory that provides an explanation as well as solutions.

These observations may sound conspiratorial but historically there has always been resistance to women’s progress towards equality. All our rights have been fought for and challenged, not given freely and cultural and social conditions provide a myriad of ways to resist further change. It is not a group of men standing arm to arm but men are colluding with oppression through their silence. My work has looked at backlash and the unexpected ways resistance to women’s equality is manifested. It was ideology that encouraged a particular type of mothering which alongside structural barriers contributed to educated women staying at home in the fifties, sixties and seventies. My gut told me twenty five years ago that post structuralism was ultimately no friend to feminism. We know historically that violence is not  needed to keep people in their place when ideas will do it. And today women’s voices are being silenced and women punished for exposing the threat that an ideology that says you can think yourself a woman to be one, poses for women and girls everywhere.

Just when women’s reality was being acknowledged a theory comes along to say there is no such thing as reality. Just when women’s truth was being spoken and perhaps heard, a theory comes along to say there is no such thing as truth. Just as women started to become the human subject for the first time in history, a theory comes along to say there is no such thing as the human subject.

Poststructuralism is a useful analytical tool, but in essence a nihilist theory that by its nature could never provide the foundation for a political movement and nearly brought feminist activism and theory to a standstill. For women’s sake it is time to dethrone the poststructuralist crown.

 

 

“You have to know the past to understand the present.” Carl Sagan

Whilst I was reading the Global Gender Gap Report 2018 section on the lack of women in AI I began to think about women and tech generally. My own experience of tech has been limited to running an online retail business and through doing that I quickly saw that there were not many women on the web development side of things. I strongly encouraged the young women who worked with me to go on coding courses. I then remembered that the girls’ school I went to in the early seventies had taught computer science and we learned the basics of binary coding. When I mention this to people today there is surprise and praise for the school that seemed so progressive for the time. But now that I have researched the topic I realise that it wasn’t that it was progressive to teach girls computer science. Until the mid-sixties computing programming was considered a female occupation. What was unusual was that my school could afford a computer at that time not that it taught computer science to girls.  Many more girls studied computer science then than now. Today only 7% of UK computer science A-level courses are female. Just half of the girls that study IT & Tech subjects at school go into a job in the same field. Only 17% of people who are working in the tech industry in the UK are women. It is a similar situation in the US. In 1984 women made up 37% of those doing computer science degrees. Today it is 11%.

A glance at the big tech companies shows that their gender makeup does not reflect their users in any way. This is a cause for concern and they are increasingly being scrutinised and many are trying to improve the representation of women in their workforce.

Percentage of tech roles by women 2018 

Uber  5.4%

Facebook 17%

Apple 23%

Google 19%

Twitter 15%

Microsoft 17.5%

The lack of young women going into the industry will have a societal long term adverse impact, including the perpetuation of the gender pay gap as the power of tech grows.  Apart from missing out on broad pool of talent, technology is being developed for solutions across many fields without the input of women at the outset. The feminist analysis of science (e.g. Harding 1986) has highlighted the need for women to not only do the science but to make the decisions on where science should focus its efforts.

Adding women into the picture at a later date is not mainstreaming gender equality. We are in the process of repeating the same mistakes of the past (in science) allowing mainly men to determine where a new technology  is applied which will impact the lives of both men and women. Who knows if the problems the big social media companies are now having could have been lessened by having more women in the top teams at the outset?

I have talked to several women who have worked in Silicon Valley and they all say that the culture is macho and difficult to work in. Unlike more established industries tech does not have a history of excluding women and therefore has not had a long time frame for the development of a masculine culture (in this sense I mean one that suits men more than women). We have very few rational explanations for why so few women are in tech apart from ‘male culture’ and sometimes citing women’s lack of science qualifications and/or the  essentialist  fall-back position of women being less suited to that kind of work. Women have made inroads into almost all professions which were formally barred to them in the past  for social, educational and cultural reasons. However in computing   women’s representation proportionally is smaller now that it was forty years ago. This decline goes against the trend of increased female representation in almost every other work sector, including science sectors. How has this happened?

Programming is women’s work 

We are familiar with work becoming feminised as women enter a field and sadly often the status of the work declines. But not so much the other way. However computer programming started off as women’s work and was made masculine – a process of masculinisation through the intentional development of a professional status and masculine culture. It is necessary to understand this specific and conscious gendering of the computing industry – how it was made masculine- in order to understand the current gender imbalance today.

At around the same time as the Gender Gap report was published I saw the obituary of Grace Roman (1925 – 2018) who was instrumental in the development of the Hubble telescope and I also noticed a social media post about  the American Evelyn Berezin ( 1925 – 19   ) who designed the first word processor. So women were in there at the beginning on the frontline.

It didn’t take much digging about to find stories of many women who had been at the forefront of the computer industry but whose influence and input was left out of history until recently. (Tessa Dunlop’s  book The Bletchley Girls and  the  2016 film Hidden Figures  which shows the story of  how three black women were  key mathematicians at NASA during the Space Race years in the 1960’s both brought women’s forgotten efforts into the public mind).

A female mathematician, Ada Lovelace, is widely recognised now as history’s first computer programmer when in 1843 she published an algorithm to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli (a Swiss mathematician famous for his pioneering work in probability and statistics) numbers intended to be carried out by Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.  She was followed by many highly influential women.  A wonderful article giving the brief stories of seven early women pioneers of programming (coding)  can be found  here along with the names of many other influential women.

These women were ground breaking computer scientists specifically in language development. But many other women worked specifically in the development of computer systems. “For decades, the work of many of these female computing innovators has been overlooked. However, every time we use our computers, phones or tablets, we are using tools that may not exist only for them” says  Marie Hicks, author of  Programmed Inequality.

Indeed all the early computer programmers were women. Women were the largest trained technical workforce of the computing industry during the Second World War and on through to the mid-sixties both in the UK and the US.

Women had made up the majority of the first programmers during the Second World War; Early on war efforts  like the Colossus in the UK (codebreaking ) at Bletchley Park , 8000 of the 10000 employees were women.  Women were recruited into these projects in large part because of the shortage of masculine labour during the war and also because much of the work was considered monotonous and therefore more suited to women’s ‘skills’. The work, particularly as part of the war effort, attracted many educated women who had little hope of gaining any other fulfilling work.

After the war, in the early years of the development of computers men worked with machines, the mainframes, the hardware; women programmed them, the software. Back then programming had no cachet. It certainly wasn’t seen as inspiring work.  Every company that made or used computers hired women to programme them. The excitement and initially the money was in the mainframes, men’s work. Before computing became electronic, women were tapped as the ideal workers for what was considered rote, mundane calculation work. The skills required were considered ‘female’ dextrous, attention to detail, repetitive work.

Even though at a higher level which women were able to gain entry to, this work required advanced mathematics knowledge – everything from spheroidal trigonometry, to calculus, to accounting, to codebreaking – it was perceived as nonintellectual and, because women were doing it, largely unimportant. These women were actually called ‘computers’: before a computer was a machine, it was a job classification, like ‘accountant’ or ‘baker’. When electro-mechanical and then electronic computers began to automate this work, women carried over: operating, programming, troubleshooting, and even assembling the hardware of these new machines.

The gendering of work and skills

We tend to think of skills as objective and neutral whereas in reality they are socially constructed and require a continual input of cultural resources to maintain their status (or lack of it). What does or doesn’t constitute  skilled  labour?

“Social judgements often determine which job related capabilities are seen as necessary and which become optimal or even invisible” says   Janet Abbate in Recoding Gender .. and this includes how skills are gendered for as Judy Wacjman said in 1991 “ the classification of women’s jobs as unskilled and men’s jobs as skilled frequently bears little relation to the actual amount of training or ability required for them. Skills are saturated with gender bias”

Women’s emotional labour was taken for granted as ‘natural’ and hidden until Arlie Hochschild revealed and named it as such in her book The Managed Heart. Several years later  this was turned into  emotional intelligence in management  jargon,  a recognised skill and one that men could learn. It is a now a ‘skill’ applauded and valued in men but arguably still seen as natural and expected of  women. Ascribing lower value to women’s work combined with occupational segregation are arguably the strongest cause of the gender pay gap.

How the tech industry was made masculine

It was not until the mid-sixties that perception started changing both here and in the US. Computers, instead of being seen as intimidating behemoths that were only good for technical work, were now becoming integrated into every part of the work of government and industry.  As their great power became more apparent, low-status women workers were no longer seen as appropriate for this type of work, even though they had all the technical skills to do the jobs.

The computerisation of the nation advanced, with computers becoming more important to the functioning of government and industry, and all the while this growing feminised machine underclass formed the infrastructure for many critical activities, from taxation, to scientific research, to economic forecasting.  In the Civil Service women programmed and operated computers that ran the new VAT and ‘pay-as-you-earn’ taxation systems that enabled the welfare state and the NHS to be funded. Women also wrote software for prestige cutting-edge, international projects like the Concorde.  Within government and the public sector, these women formed an underclass of highly technically trained and operationally critical technology workers – dubbed “the machine grades” within the civil service. As computers grew in power, having an underclass of highly-trained technical workers who were not aligned with the interests and goals of management was a potentially disastrous situation. At the time it was highly unusual for women to get to management grades. So Hicks argues that the British government began a decade-long effort to remove women workers from these newly-important technical positions and replace them with management-minded young men: people who could go from the boardroom to the machine room and manage computers as easily as people.

“Most businesses went out of their way to ensure that gendered hierarchies always put male managers on top, and the supposedly meritocratic civil service itself was the worst offender, carefully re categorising women and men workers into different job categories even when they were doing the same work. Irrespective of skills, job categories ensured that more men remained in positions of power while most women remained in functional roles, regardless of how they might have shown themselves to be capable.” (Hicks 2018)

As well as structural controls like grading and segregation, the professionalization of the industry and the development of an idealised and male computer worker added to further barriers to women’s entry in the same way as happened in the US.

The US computer industry at the outset also had an ambiguous gender identity, starting out requiring feminine skills and was also deliberately transformed into a masculine and high status profession. Women were very much a part of the early development of computers in the US.  Six women were recruited to assist with the development and operation of the University of Pennsylvania’s ENIAC machine (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) which was one of the first and most famous early electronic computers. These women were the first programmers (although they were not called that then) and all went on to have influential careers. Despite being instrumental in its development they were subsequently eliminated from the historical record until records of them were retrieved in recent years.

After the war there was an explosion in computers and in what they could do and companies were unable to recruit enough staff.  An industry doubling in size every year could not afford to discriminate against women and besides the ‘qualifications’ required were still being negotiated. This was a similar situation in the UK. There had been no time to create an industry/sector/profession with boundaries to keep women out as existed in other science and management fields.    People assumed that because women were doing this work, and the apparatus looked like a giant switchboard, that it was simple, concealing the reality that this work was highly technical and complex. This illusion lasted for many years.  As in the UK these positions were kept low grade despite the fact that the operators were becoming more and more skilled in programming design as well as operation.

As time moved on, academic Nathan  Ensmenger suggests that men began to recognise the importance of programming in the new age of information economy and edged into the profession. In order to elevate the importance of their work the first generation of male programmers began crafting a professional identity that effectively excluded women.  By the late 1960’s already the tide had turned and companies sought out men not women as the work grew in status. Despite the tide turning large numbers of women relatively continued to study computer science until the mid-eighties. In the US women doing computer science at university peaked at 37% in 1984 and since then has steadily declined and is now only 11%.

Academic Nathan Ensmenger in his chapter ‘Making Programming Masculine’ in the book Gender Codes says “computer programming was gradually and deliberately transformed into a high status, scientific and masculine discipline. Men from established fields like physics mathematics and electrical engineering making the leap to a new field that had no history, no barriers to entry.” In the 1960’s the job title of computer programmer was switched into software engineer and in the process this embodied a more masculine vision of programming. Engineering was even more male then than it is today with approximately 1% of engineers being female in the 1960’s. Programming became coding, the former associated with women as they had done most of it but the latter now associated with men.

Some commentators have attributed the decline in women doing coding in the US with the advent of computer video games which appealed to men. “When Women Stopped Coding”.  The popular myth of the ‘accidental’ role of the male almost adolescent computer nerd at home in the development of computer industry is still fuelled by popular culture. However Ensmenger  contends that this ‘type’ of masculinity was present decades before the personal computer. Early associations of programming ability with maths puzzles and chess playing were reinforced through dubiously designed aptitude tests and personality profiles and then embodied into the hiring practices of the commercial computer industry.  These became more a masculine ideal as time went on and as more men became programmers that fed into the stereotype that we have today. Studies were done to find out the attributes of the ideal programmer. What emerged was a male figure who was very  good  at problem solving and not very good at working with people (many of the women had fitted this description in the studies too!). The establishment of this male ‘nerdy’ rather antisocial stereotype who is brilliant but not very communicative continues to feed into hiring patterns today.

This re positioning of computer work was done on both sides of the Atlantic. As men entered the new computer sector, a lot of effort was made to develop it into a profession, including the development of formal programmes in academic computer science, the creation of societies, professional certificates and professional journals. The purpose of professionalization is to increase the work’s social status, improve opportunities for advancement and better pay. A profession also implied managerial authority. All of this like the professionalization of other occupations taking place in the sixties had the effect of marginalising and or/excluding women for whom a public life was still very restricted at that time e.g. like an emphasis on a four year degree course at a time when women were underrepresented at college whereas before aptitude tests allowed non college women to enter the field.

The professionalization of computer programming also involved the work being segmented into low status and high status levels. Segmenting work leads to segregation of workers and into a hierarchy of status and pay. Women who were still present in the computer workforce increasingly found themselves at the lower grades and stuck there, like in the UK, unable to cross into the managerial ranks. So while computer work had been open to anyone who could pass an aptitude test over the course of two decades 60’ – 80’s the development of a more professional status brought this to an end.

Another barrier women cite today as excluding them to the tech industry is the long hours culture. In the early years when computers were large and expensive, shift work was done to utilise the twenty four hour day and very often a nocturnal culture developed.  In some companies women were often precluded from working in the night for safety reasons, hence erecting a structural barrier. Even after technical requirements for this night work disappeared the working through the night culture persisted and in some cases celebrated.

So in the space of only three decades the UK and the US computer industry shifted from low status work to a high status profession and in the process from a sector with a reasonably high representation of women to one where they are scarce. Women who were once welcomed into the sector now find themselves marginalised or excluded by a hostile culture and anti-social work practices. A combination of professionalization, and segmentation leading to segregation and the development of a masculinised work culture ensured that women despite having been on the front line of coding at its inception were demoted and eventually excluded. The development of an  idealised ‘male’ version of a computer programmer  was embodied into hiring practices as men took over the computer industry and made it their own.

Today many of the formal barriers are no longer there but neither are the women! However  informal barriers in the form of culture can be just as powerful in their exclusion and /or marginalisation of women in the workplace and this includes the culture of long hours.( Baggulely 1991, Witz 1992,  Rutherford 2011)

What this short history shows is that the excluding culture we associate with the tech industry was not there at the beginning in the 1940’s and fifties. Like all cultures it had to be created and recreated over the course of decades, replicated through the development of practices and institutions. For cultures to change they require resources and it is always the dominant group will create a culture that suits them best. Therein lies the paradox at the heart of all our diversity programmes, which these days focus on culture change. They do not work if men don’t back them. The positive from this story is that it is possible to change cultures  over time and in those early years despite the social climate for women being much more prohibitive than today women were able to carve out interesting careers for themselves.

In 2017 a Google engineer was sacked for saying in a leaked memo that one of the reasons that there was so much disparity between male and female tech engineers could be explained by genetic differences, thus perpetuating and repeating stereotypes which even this short article proves to be historically incorrect. Maybe instead of just sacking the 28 year old man the company could have educated the whole workforce on the historical, social and cultural reasons as to why there are now so few women in those roles in Silicon Valley. And take it from there.

Just before Christmas the World Economic Forum published its Global Gender Gap Report 2018 showing that progress in women’s equality almost stalled last year. This index measures much more than just pay and is a useful report for global companies aiming to promote their D & I policies globally as well as providing a timely reminder that in certain areas the UK and the US could do with improvement.  As with the UK Gender Pay Gap Report, the numbers act as a broad signifier and further country analysis is required to explain some of the results. Behind the headline figures are a complex picture of advance and regression in different areas of public life for women globally.

The Global Gender Gap Index was first introduced at the World Economic Forum in 2006 as a framework for monitoring gender based disparities among a large group of countries. The number of countries is added to each year and only countries that can provide the relevant data are included – this year there were 149. The report sets out country as well as regional rankings and there are four key sub-indices which make up the Index.

1. Political Empowerment
2. Economic Participation and Opportunity
3. Health and Survival
4. Educational Attainment

There was extremely slow progress this year with the overall gender parity gap being reduced by only 0.03%. Whilst some of this could be explained by the entry of fairly underdeveloped countries being added to the index each year, individually some Western countries have stalled as well.

Top Ten Countries

1. Iceland
2. Norway
3. Sweden
4. Finland
5. Nicaragua
6. Rwanda
7. New Zealand
8. Philippines
9. Ireland
10. Namibia

United Kingdom was 15^th

Globally the average (population weighted) gender gap is 32% but there are huge disparities among the different sub-indices. Gender parity in Western countries has slightly reduced while the progress is ongoing on average elsewhere.

The Political Empowerment index showed the greatest gap of 77%. The measurement currently only includes offices at national level and so this may not reflect the picture at regional level but it is still a substantial gap. There were improvements in 89 countries this year but the disparity between countries is vast. There are 17 countries that have women as heads of state while only 18% of all minsters and 24% of parliamentarians are women.

The country with the best political empowerment ratio was Iceland which has a 33% gap but one quarter of all countries have a gap of 90% or more and four countries have one of more than 97% – Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman and Yemen. The report says that the progress in political empowerment made over the past decade has started to reverse.

The huge gender gap in the political empowerment index skews the results even though the researchers have weighted each sub-index. This seems to favour countries with good representation at national government level which may have very poor indices elsewhere (e.g. Rwanda, Namibia and see below for discussion of a specific example, Bangladesh). There are also many aspects of women’s lives which are not measured but could be thought central to their equality and respect – typically sexual violence and domestic violence, and rights to birth control.

The Economic Participation and Opportunity index showed a global gap of 42%. It was the only sub-index to show a reduction in the gap and that was 1%, however within that index the participation in the labour force element has seen a widening of the gap and there are as expected wide country discrepancies. Globally 34% of managers are female across countries where data is available and less than 7% in the four worst performing countries’ – (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Pakistan). The estimated income gap is 47%. In terms of broader economic power, gaps in control of financial assets and in time spent on unpaid task continue to preserve economic disparities between men and women. Women have as much access to financial services as men in just 60% of countries assessed and to land ownership in just 42% of countries assessed. For the 29 countries that have relevant data women spend on average TWICE as much time as men on housework and other unpaid activities. In Japan this is fivefold!

The Educational Attainment gender gap is significantly smaller at only 4.4%. The worst performer is Chad at 57%, and there are still 44 countries where over 20% of women are illiterate. In Chad just 13% of women can read and write. And near parity in higher education enrolment rates often mask low participation of both men and women. Only 65% of girls and 66% of boys enrol in secondary education globally. The figures have also been criticised as using enrolment rates when in reality in many countries girls drop out significantly earlier than boys. So although the global gender gap is small, again the figures mask huge disparities and show overall very underdeveloped human capital in many countries.

Health and Survival gender gap is small at 4.6% with 74 countries having a gap of only 2%. In almost all countries women tend to live longer. The gender parity on sex ratio at birth is also very advanced. It is as it should be (a natural 94.4%) in 113 countries with almost all countries showing above 92%. Four countries’ (India, Azerbaijan, Armenia and China) measurement is below 91%, highlighting the ‘missing women’ statistic. These countries show strong preference to boys and girl babies are known to ‘disappear’ or in more recent years to be aborted.

 The limits of the index

An example of why the top line rankings need closer scrutiny is Bangladesh. Bangladesh cemented its position in rankings as the top performing country in South Asia, climbing to No.48 on the global list from last year’s ranking of 72. Despite ranking in the lowest 15% of countries for equality in economic opportunities, Bangladesh ranks seventh in female political empowerment. This puts the South Asian country one spot above Sweden in political gender parity. Yet the conditions and lives for women in the two countries couldn’t be more different. Bangladesh has a female prime minister, Sheikh Hasina and since 1991, a woman has held this office for all but three years. Women are politically empowered at the highest levels. This is because the country has implemented a gender quota system in parliament, automatically reserving 50 of its 350 seats for women. This move enabled it to decrease its gender gap in political empowerment without waiting for societal norms and attitudes about women in leadership to change first. The country performed poorly in other areas and was ranked only 124 in labour force participation, 104 in wage equality, 108 in earned income, and 106 in legislators, professionals/technical workers (sub-indices of economic performance) “If the report is based on the Prime Minister, opposition leader, and speaker of the parliament, or a minister of one or two ministries, then it does not reflect the reality on the ground,” BNP’s Assistant Secretary for International Affairs Rumeen Farhana said. So this top line result masks Bangladesh’s continued struggle with violence against women, wage disparity, high dropout rates among female students in primary and secondary schools, and the absence of women in top bureaucratic positions.

The Philippines boasts of being one of the most gender-equal countries in the world for the past years,  despite slipping three spots from 7th place  to 10^th in the Index.  The Philippines legislature passed the Magna Carta of Women Act in 2009, which promotes gender equality in government by mandating quotas for the proportion of women in government jobs. It also empowers the state to take measures to encourage gender diversity in the private sector, though it stops short of mandated quotas. The relative equality there is attributed to that as well as with a strong history of matriarchal ethos in the society going back centuries. But some studies show that there are limits to women’s participation and equality in the workplace. The Philippine Institute for Development Studies states   that the unemployment rate is not always reflective of the working conditions of women, especially since it can make it seem that “women in the Philippines who join the labor force have similar economic opportunities as men.”

In a different report by HR in Asia, it was also found that 76 percent of female respondents in the Philippines deal with inequality and prejudice in the workplace, with 17 percent admitting to being questioned about their desire to have a family during the interview process.

Conclusion

The magnitude of gender gaps in countries is the result of a mix of socioeconomic policy and cultural variables so regardless of political intention, religious and cultural restrictions on women’s equality mean that certain countries perform very badly on the index – Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Pakistan. The report also highlights the strong correlation between a country’s gender gap and its economic performance and the connection between women’s equality and poverty – women’s labour participation and the economy.

This is ongoing active work; gender parity will not be gained automatically. It requires consistent commitment and effort at the highest levels. Just like in organisations a change of leadership, a change in economic fortunes can lead to a lessening of focus on gender. Sometimes a crisis can result in a positive move (Rwanda, Iceland) as most change happens when there has been a conscious and consistent decision to do so. Certainly some countries’ good results have come about through the implementation of political quotas (Bolivia, Rwanda, Philippines, Bangladesh). However government policy and indeed political quotas on their own do not yield the best results as the examples above show.

 

 

Just when women’s reality was being acknowledged a theory comes along to say there is no such thing as reality.

Just when women’s truth was being spoken and perhaps heard, a theory comes along to say there is no such thing as truth.

Just as women started to become the human subject for the first time, a theory comes along to say there is no such thing as the human subject.

Poststructuralism – a useful analytical tool, but in essence a nihilist theory that by its nature could never provide the foundation for a political movement and nearly brought feminist activism and theory to a standstill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vogue is a fashion magazine known the world over. It is a magazine aimed at women and celebrates fashion and glamour.  Sensing a move in the gender political zeitgeist it is the latest media outlet to bow down to the  fashionable ideology of transgenderism.  With not even a nod to some of the concerns women and girls are expressing about an ideology which reduces womanhood to a state of mind,  the new  gay male editor Edward Enninful  has gone down the easier avenue of choosing the most attractive and feminine looking transwomen, plus a couple of transmen to feature in its November issue magazine. Paris Lees, who was the first transgender person on its front cover earlier this year has now been appointed a regular columnist.   Lees has undergone extensive feminisation facial surgery to attain the looks of a woman good enough to grace Vogue’s cover. Good for her. (So Vogue in one move ticks the box for being edgy and radical whilst still perpetuating a stereotypical image of  women). But in her first column Lees has chosen to criticise feminists, claiming to understand ‘true’ feminism despite living almost her entire life as a man. As a lifelong feminist and someone who has worked with improving women’s equality in the workplace as well as occasionally thumbing through Vogue, I just cannot let Lees’ comments pass, or Vogue’s collusion with them.

If trans people  can pass as the opposite sex then that’ s great for them, but it still doesn’t alter the basic fact that they only do so because of extensive surgery and hormones.  Does this matter? I never thought so until relatively recently.  Because as well as recognition of being trans and accepted as that, some trans activists insist that that is not enough. If they are not accepted as real women then somehow this is an attack on their trans ‘rights’, more so even an attempt to erase them.  I am not sure where the logic of this position can be found as I have yet to hear anyone articulate it clearly. Perhaps Vogue can tell us as Vogue has chosen to call this new trans campaign ‘We shall not be erased’.  No one wants to erase them. But this headline provokes immediate sympathy and outrage and support for whatever comes next.

Paris Lees is to write a regular column and it is heavily marketed as a trans voice.  So it is interesting that Paris chose to use this first column as an attack on women. Because by attacking  feminists particularly those that have spent their lives improving women’s lives, Lees is attacking women.   In the article Lees goes through the roll call of well known celebrity trans people – models, actors, Kellie Maloney – the boxer who beat up his wife- and of course Lily Madigan, the Labour Party’s women’s equality officer  and the most famous Caitlin Jenner who was Bruce Jenner of the Kardashian family fame, yet  concludes that  despite all the attention this trans community is getting,  that trans people are now suffering a backlash and a cruel one. And who are the villains? Feminists!  Some of us just will not agree with the ideology that womanhood is in your head and not your body. How annoying!  If this is received as trying to erase trans people then this is a narcissistic reaction. Narcissists cannot tolerate criticism or challenge as their egos are too fragile and they actually feel they are being erased. I cannot think of any other reason for this extreme reaction.

Despite the examples of the trans celebrities listed in the article Lees also maintains that the media is soiled with ‘anti trans’ commentators. This is simply not true. I can name only a total of five or six journalists (men and women) who have questioned the ideology and reported on disrupted meetings  whilst in no way expressing anything anti trans. Disagreeing with an ideology is not the same as ‘hating’ or being anti a person. Surely we can agree on that.   But the backlash for writing on this subject is ferocious. Twitter even shuts down accounts where people question whether men can be women. The Labour Party suspends members who do the same.  Feminist figures like Jennie Murray, Julie Bindel and Linda Bellos have all been no platformed because of their views.  But the majority of public figures and journalists are silent.

No one would dispute that trans people should be allowed to  live they way they want to without discrimination and hurt. But the current trans ideology goes way beyond that as well Lees knows, and has implications for everyone, despite trans people being only 0.5% of the population. Therefore people should have a right to debate the demands that may impact them as well as the ideology that informs them. So when public toilet facilities began to go mixed sex,  trans women with male bodies compete in women’s sports, take women’s places on shortlists etc. etc, do people like Paris Lees really think that this should continue without any input from the 99% of the female population who are the most affected?

The refusal to even debate with women about the impact of self-ID and sharing spaces with male-bodied people tells its own story but it is the appalling abuse and behaviour of some trans activists that has probably caused any backlash to trans people…not feminists.(see previous post)

Lees is  disrespectful of feminists without whom the likes of her would not be able to be who she chose to be today and who have always supported the trans community.  Lees labels detractors of the ideology that if you think you are a woman you are one as ‘fake feminism’. Pardon me?  Then Lees knows nothing of feminism and the lives of ordinary women.

Women may have concerns about male bodied people coming into their spaces because after all that is why there are female only spaces in the first place. Sadly there is a number and it may be small of trans women, biologically men, who are sexual predators, particularly in prisons.  For many women who have been abused by a man, a male body is terrifying- full stop.  What about their rights?  If trans women like Lees want to identify with women they need to understand the need for women only spaces as many trans people already do.  Responding with the ‘Sadly, there are awful people from every walk of life, of course, but the research shows trans women are more likely to suffer violence and sexual assault.’ , is actually plain wrong. Women are killed by men at the rate of two a week… the violence to women is far greater and more endemic than it is to trans women. One trans woman was killed in the UK last year. And there was one killed each year before that since 2009. Please get facts right if you want to use them.

Lees asks to be treated with respect. Respect is a two way street. Women today  have the freedoms they have because of feminists. Yes, the kind of feminists that do not agree with Lees’ trans ideology. Feminists who, like myself, believe in a concept of both biological and socialised womanhood that is the foundation of feminism and which clashes with the trans ideology that you can think your way into womanhood regardless of your biological sex. Gender is not a feeling in your head.  Taking gender stereotypes and essentialising them is what feminism has been fighting against for years.  It is also disingenuous to collate different types of women and put trans women into the mix as the same… I  think that disabled, black and ethnic minority women etc. all share something in common — the same biology and socialisation as women, despite our many, many differences.

Vogue, if you want to be truly radical ask an experienced feminist to write a column. About feminism.

 If we reframe the discourse which pits feminists against transgender rights  it is easier to see why so many women and men are concerned about the proposed changes to the GRA 2004 and the replacement of the word sex with gender identity.   Of course trans people are entitled to rights and they have these under the protected characteristic of gender reassignment in the Equality Act 2010,  but further demands like self ID come at  the loss of rights of women and girls. The current debate has become so toxic that  feminists who even ask questions about trans gender issues are vilified as ‘transphobic’.

It is unprecedented to have such fundamental changes such as the removal of the categories of M/F from administrative forms, the demand that male bodied trans women can use spaces reserved for the female sex for their physical safety, the removal of women’s toilets to mixed sex, the changes in language, the change in what we can wear, without any public debate about the consequences to women and girls allowed.  Yet that is what has happened. Until now.

Many women and some men are concerned about the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004. If passed the new law would allow trans people to self-identify to their preferred gender without the need for any objective assessment, medical or otherwise. Currently a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is required, together with some medical assessment and a two year period of proof of living in the other gender. So far fewer than  5,000 people have gone through the process which trans groups claim is proof that the process is too burdensome. Most feminists do not have a problem with simplifying the process. But many do have a problem with blanket self-identification without any objective assessment at all and where this may lead.

There are  real conflicts of interests between women and trans women which are not being explicitly considered.

What began some years ago as a movement to protect the rights and safety of a small number of transsexuals has now expanded into the beginnings of a fundamental transformation about how we categorize ourselves in society and the consequences are far reaching particularly for women. The GRA 2004 was passed in response to a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 2002.

This ruled that people who had transitioned to the opposite sex should be allowed to marry even though that would de facto mean marrying the same sex. This was at a time when same sex marriage was illegal and people who were trans were still legally their birth sex with no way of changing that.   So the UK had to make changes in the law, basically creating a legal fiction whereby a man who transitioned to living as a women, could obtain a new birth certificate. This enabled transsexuals to marry. There was a lot of confusion around the words sex and gender during the debate of the bill, and basically it was fudged by using the word gender for a transition and recognition certificate whilst the result was to change the sex on their birth certificate. There were some concerns about the consequences of this expressed during debate but these were dismissed because Parliament said it would affect very few people – they estimated approximately 5000 transexuals. Little did they know.

Since then fewer than the estimated 5000 have applied for a Gender Recognition certificate. Already people are free to change their identity, including their names, driving licenses and many other papers without a certificate. And of course it is now legal for two people of the same sex to marry. So the need for a GRA is arguably less.

Fourteen years after the GRA of 2004,  estimates range  between 200,000 and 500,000 for the number trans people in the UK. There is a much broader meaning of trans today than there was then and these figures would include other non gender conforming, non- binary and even cross dressers, according to Stonewall’s definition.  Even so, taking the top end of this estimate, this means that social changes to accommodate less than 0.5% of the population impact 51% of the population, who have not been consulted.

The focus of feminists has been  to voice our views about the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 during the government’s consultation process, which ends at the end of this week but the debate has become toxic and the reciprocity that is vital for democratic discussion has broken down.

A major cause of this breakdown has been the way in which the debate has been framed as being only about trans ‘rights’ and ‘equality’ –  two words that trigger guilt and a knee jerk reaction to being rightly ‘supportive’ in most liberal minds, but also positions any opposing voices to the ‘unsympathetic, bigoted, prejudiced’.  But rights have to be  negotiated  in society and this debate requires input from non trans people, (99% of the population) and from those particularly whose interests and rights may be compromised – women. What we should be discussing is how can the rights and welfare of trans people be upheld without impinging on or endangering on the hard won rights of women and girls.  The other major question boils down to “who should be defining what it means to be a woman? Women themselves or 0.5% of the population?”

And so this is a  much broader and complex debate than just, should trans people have rights?  The shift from sex to the category of ‘gender identity’ is already happening, regardless of any potential changes to the law. But whether it is called gender or sex, the categories of men and women are to most people fairly fundamental – in research, health and social policy and in the context of public spaces, in sport, and particularly safety for women.  Hardly a day goes past when we read of male and female public lavatories being replaced with ‘gender neutral’ ones – for that read ‘mixed sex’. The YHA is the latest to be ‘advised by outside agencies’ on trans policy and have changed their wording from sex to gender so as to allow transwomen to share dormitories with women.  This is not in keeping with the law  or social practice as we know it but it is happening under the guise of ‘trans inclusive’ policies by well-meaning organisations.

Schools are changing their cloakroom facilities for the one or two youngsters who may decide they are trans (whatever this means at primary school age),  and changing their uniform policies. Ironically women fought hard for girls to be allowed to wear trousers in public places including schools and there are now schools where the girls have to wear trousers – a unisex uniform designed to make the school’s transgender students feel more comfortable.

Primary schools do not teach feminism but many now teach a trans ideology often under the guise of LGBT  anti- bullying training by lobby groups. There is certainly evidence to suggest that a social contagion is causing the monumental increase of young girls turning ‘trans’, a worrying trend of a 4000% increase over five years. Authorities tried to suppress Lisa Littman’s article on this phenomenon called, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. Meanwhile,  Stonewall the LGBT pressure group is advocating that 16-18 year olds should be able to self-identify. Young people are impressionable, often confused about their sexuality particularly during puberty and how they may want to express themselves should have nothing to do with changing sex.  A brilliant speech by Michele Moore sums up the dangers of self-ID and young children and what is taking place in schools that have succumbed to the trans orthodoxy.

Organisations including the government are taking advice from charities and pressure groups (like the very influential LGBT campaign group Stonewall as well as smaller agencies like Mermaids,  and GIRES),  whose ideology is extreme and arguably out of step with society.  These charities receive government funding, and Stonewall is particularly well funded with close ties to many businesses. All these organisations, public and private,  take women’s equality seriously and public organisations have a public duty to do so, yet they have failed to consider the implications of their policies on women and girls. For a measured and informative critique of the GRA consultation process so far read this article by  Professor Kathleen Stock.

On October 8th, Ruth Hunt, Chief Executive of Stonewall, spoke on Radio 4 and was asked about the opposition many women and men and some trans people have about the right to self – identify, one of the key proposals for the repeal of the GRA Act 2004.  She defended Stonewall’s stance and likened the current hostilities to previous struggles of gay and lesbian rights. This was disingenuous. These are not comparable to the current trans demands as they did not directly conflict with other people’s rights or impact their lives apart from perhaps upset ethical or religious sensitivities. The new demand for changes in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 framed as  ‘trans’ rights demands, do impact others’ rights…. over half the population’s rights. The half that historically has been subjugated and ignored. The half that is currently celebrating 100 years of women’s (partial) suffrage. You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to see the irony of this.

Hunt also insisted that she believed that trans women are women, claiming erroneously that this was already enshrined by law. It is not. But, by saying it often enough there are thousands of organisations that already believe it, or are too scared to challenge it.

Amidst the ridicule and disbelief expressed over the misuse of language like “pregnant people”, and “people with a cervix” and the decision to make Mother’s Day cards gender neutral so as not to upset trans people, there is alarm among women at the redefining and even erasure of the word woman

Last week on Newsnight  a trans woman told a male interviewer that feminists should not be offended by the word womxn which the Wellcome Collection used instead of women – to be more inclusive.

It is ironic that the trans activists are dominated by trans women many of who are married and have fathered children but are now telling women what it means to be a woman. And a couple of weeks ago a poster with the dictionary definition of woman, which was put up near a debate over the GRA repeals, was ordered to be removed because it was considered transphobic.

There is also controversy over the phrase  ‘the gender assigned at birth’ to denote  birth sex. No one has to assign a gender or sex  to a baby unless it is intersex and requires a decision to be made by a doctor as to male or female. It is from there that the phrase is originally derived. The rest of us are born boys or girls. But this is now the absurd language used by public organisations and the media.

Language is important. Language is power, which is why subordinated groups have struggled to name themselves rather than be named. Transgender people have chosen transgender rather than the former identity of transsexual, which they consider demeaning and too much based on the biological. However as well as naming themselves, trans activists insist on demoting all biologically born women into a sub category. They are trans women and 99.9% of all other women must be called ‘cis women’. This is domination by any other name and women are not going to accept it.

There is also widespread public concern about allowing male bodied people who identify as women entering women-only spaces, and similarly being allowed to compete in women’s sport, and go onto women-only shortlists. This is already happening and it is understandable that many women  would like their voices  to be heard. The kernel of this whole  debate is of fundamental importance to feminism – it is the right of women to define themselves. The category of woman within the political community of rights and obligations based upon the rule of law is under threat.

Gender And Sex

Trans activists  prioritise the concept of gender identity over biological sex  for obvious reasons. You do not have to have a body of a woman to be one.  Stonewall has stated that it even wants gender identity to replace gender reassignment as a protected characteristic in the Equality Act 2010.  It is unclear how this concept could be legislated for given as we all have a gender identity of some sort. The term, gender identity, itself has yet to be adequately defined and is based on a subjective view of oneself in the context of stereotypical attributes of masculinity and femininity. Although gender and sex are used interchangeably these days, they do  not strictly have the same meaning. Sex is being biologically male or female and gender is more of a social and cultural construction. Indeed most dictionaries defines gender thus

“Either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones”. Oxford English Dictionary.

Historically the  concept of gender  has been useful for feminists who sought to challenge the notion that women are born to be a certain way which justified their secondary position in society (essentialism).Certain characteristics and behaviours which were attributed to men and women as being innate and based on biology could be challenged as being social and cultural and therefore could change.  Biology did not necessarily make women ‘passive and nurturing’ in all areas of their lives, but cultural expectations and socialization may have encouraged it.  Indeed stereotypical gender attributes are challenged on a daily basis. Up until recent times, women were considered too weak for sport, their brains too small for education, and that their role was solely to raise children. Distancing the biology from the social and cultural was necessary for these limiting attributes to be challenged.  Men too, have struggled against the restrictions of a dominant masculinity, and now we accept that they can be caring and nurturing and women can be adventurous and leaders.

The idea that gender was much more fluid than merely two opposing corners of pink and blue was welcomed by feminists.  Feminism has always fought against these stereotypes but now some trans activists are embracing them and using them as proof of innate sex difference! We are back to pink and blue.  Stereotypes trap us all. Playing with dolls and wearing pink does not mean a boy wants to be a girl! An article which will dismay all feminists was published in PinkNews, claiming just that.

Feminists have responded with the claim that biology does matter. After all our bodies are the main signifier of whether we are men or women. Women all over the world experience rape, violence and abuse by men  because of their biology and sex. Now perhaps we have to emphasize this as being the only certain differentiator if gender is up for grabs. The response to trans gender people has so far been… you can identify as men or women but that does not make you one. There is the material fact of a body. There is also the socialization that girls go through – Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote “One is not born a woman: one becomes one” refers to the ways in which girls learn how to become women. This varies in time and place but adult men transitioning to women have been socialized as boys.  Whether you define woman as being a gender or a sex, the issues and problems trans women and women face in society are different and cannot be ignored. Biology and the socialisation of women matter. Women would not think to represent trans people’s issues yet somehow it is considered appropriate for a trans woman to speak on behalf of all women. The Labour Party elected Lily Madigan, a young trans woman to be its Women’s Officer whilst at the same time suspending women members who questioned the practice of Self- Identification.

But we have a situation now where men can claim that their biology or socialization does not preclude them from being women. Not trans women but women.  The trans lobby are years ahead of feminists, who have been caught off guard. There is a lot of money behind the US trans movement  and perhaps more research is required to see what underlying interests are served here by the trans ideology. Change on the scale and speed we are seeing today only happens when there is power behind it. And usually that means money.

The decline of much meaningful feminist theory and political action  over  a period of twenty years is a consequence itself of the identity politics and influence of post structuralism that has produced the belief that sex, like gender is a product of social discourse and has no universal or essential meaning (see Judith Butler’s work e.g. Gender Trouble 1999).  There is too much to say on this here but the philosophical climate has provided the perfect fertile ground for what may be seen as a kind of attack on women’s rights through the destabilization of the word ‘woman’. Historically when women have progressed socially, a backlash has followed. And rarely in the same way.

Women silenced

So far the debate has been shaped solely by a set of very dominant activists who have shown no concern  as to the consequences of their demands on other parts of society. This is identity politics at its worst.  Any opposition to the concept of self- ID is described as trans phobic, and  even suggesting a debate attracts accusations that feminists want to deny trans people’s existence.  If ever there was an argument to banish hate crime to the realms of history, the playing out of this particular one is it.  Police have been called out on many an occasion including to people who have posted statements on social media like ‘women do not have penises’. The Labour Party has suspended members, included Jennifer James for saying similar. Linda Bellos, a socialist feminist who has done more for women’s rights in this country that most, has been taken to court by a trans activist for a supposed ‘hate’ crime. There is sadly a long list of women (and now some supportive men too) being targeted, losing their jobs, and being personally abused online. Most recently Ann Henderson, rector of Edinburgh University has been accused of transphobia for tweeting details of a meeting about the GRA and women’s rights.

Very, very, few public figures – even the outspoken Labour feminist MP’s like Sarah Champion and Jess Phillips –  have spoken out against this and supported women. Actually it is a struggle to name any politician at all that has specifically called out the trans activists’ hostile behaviour or acknowledged the tension between trans’ demands and women’s everyday lives. However on October 10^th  Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, a Conservative peer, chaired a meet for Woman’s Place UK. This was hugely welcomed.   And on the 16th October, women’s groups met with 50 MP’s brought together by David Davies, Conservative MP to discuss concerns they have over the GRA  proposals. But some MP’s requested that their names were not made public which tells us how undemocratic the process has been. They are fearful of abuse and backlash against them.   Even the Women’s Equality Party – the feminist party, has not taken the side of feminists and it actually parked the issue at their conference this year. Fear of not being considered ‘progressive’ has sadly created an environment that is more reminiscent of fascist and communist regimes than of the western democracy we are supposed to inhabit. There has been nothing progressive about the silencing of women we have witnessed over the past year.

Regardless of the outcome of the government consultation on the GRA reforms, changes in the way we organize ourselves are occurring and in the process is contributing to a slow erasure of the category of women. Biological men can already call themselves women, are admitted into women’s refuges, boys can go into the girl guides, into women’s prisons (with some frightening results), onto all women shortlists, enter women’s sports. Organisations are changing sex to gender in their equality statements despite the fact that it is sex not gender enshrined in the Equality Act 2010.   Adopting Self ID will just make it easier to change sex and harder to challenge those that do. So to those who see it will not impact the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act 2010, of course it will.

Conclusion

As a society we should address the question of what is fair and reasonable and  enables  transgender people to live dignified lives, without eroding the hard won rights of women and girls.

This may mean accepting changes to the GRA to simplify the process for trans people wanting a certificate.

But this may also mean putting in place measures that prevent male bodied people, whatever they are called, from accessing women’s sports, women’s prisons, places of safety and refuges, and women only shortlists. We may have to use new language like male- bodied to get round the problem of male- bodied trans women having access to these as self- identified women.

This may involve introducing a sliding scale of external verification of self -ID where stricter assessment may be required in certain situations where the safeguarding of women or girls applies.  Allowing anyone to declare themselves the opposite sex and to automatically enjoy every  access to that sex’s spaces opens the door to abuse of the system. And this also does a disservice to trans people the majority of whom want to get on with their lives without prejudice and discrimination. The extreme ideology of the activists and their abusive response to feminists  could have  harmed the trans population more than helped it.

It should be possible to challenge some of the views of the agencies advocating trans rights, who are currently advising government and other organisations, without being called transphobic.   This is an issue of democracy and reciprocity and change happens through give and take, not by attempts to dominate and annihilate those who disagree.

Resources

Information and guidance by

https://fairplayforwomen.com/

https://womansplaceuk.org/

https://www.transgendertrend.com/

https://manfridayuk.org/

Journalists writing sense on this topic are Janice Turner and Lucy Bannerman  in The Times, James Kirkup in the Spectator,  and Andrew Milligan in the Sunday Times.

An excellent resource is the seven essays published by The Economist giving views from all sides. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/transgender-identities-a-series-of-invited-essays

In January this year, Professor Jordan Peterson discussed the gender pay gap with Channel 4 News’ Cathy Newman, an interview that has been watched more than seven million times online. It wasn’t her finest hour and that detracted somewhat from the massive flaws in his argument. In it he argues that whilst prejudice may exist he does not believe it is the major factor.  Accepting that women are segregated from men in the labour market in both horizontal and vertical ways he explains this segregation and the ensuing pay differentials as being  largely a natural reflection of differences between men and women.

He also maintains that the dominant explanation put forward by others (particularly feminists which he says with an emphasis denoting disapproval) for the gender pay gap is that it is caused by oppression and the oppressive patriarchy .  First things first. No one who works in this area thinks that there is a single cause of the gender pay gap. I agree as he says so often particularly when he gets a difficult question – it’s complicated. He also fails to understand that patriarchy as a concept describes a system of social relations that enables men to dominate women … not that all men do this or that all women are victims. In short he displays a poor understanding of the history of women’s employment and feminism.

Now Professor Peterson is incredibly influential and has a huge following among young men.  These young men seem hungry for the kind of advice on life Professor Peterson is dishing out. Much of it is common sense and hard to disagree with e.g. the kind of things a good parent would say, like clear up your bedroom and take responsibility for yourself. If young men lap up his views on life it is important to hear what he is saying about men and women. It is also important to challenge him. I will only discuss the gender pay gap in this post but his explanation for this reveals his attitudes to gender relations more widely.

Those of us in the business and all those who worked so hard to measure the pay gap for their reports know full well that it is a fairly basic measure of a complex picture. And it is being discussed in the media  as if it is the be all and end all of equality in the workplace. It isn’t. It is a useful tool to analyse the position of men and women at work using specific organisational data.

My main criticism is that Peterson draws  on psychology to provide his explanations and his approach lacks a historical and cultural context.  Explaining men and women’s differences in their position in society and the workplace through the discourse of psychology and biology fails because it leaves out power and the social and cultural impact of men’s power over women since time began.

Firstly Peterson accepts the concept of work as being neutral. There are neutral workplaces and men and women go into them. But huge amounts of research have shown just how gendered the very concept of work is as well as workplace cultures.  (Hearn 1992, Collinson and Collinson 1989, Rutherford 2011) We cannot look at the gender pay gap without acknowledging that men and women are situated differently in the labour market as well as in wider society. The public world of work has been developed around men’s lives and has largely remained unchanged despite women entering the workforce in huge numbers over the past forty years.

A second criticism following this is, as I wrote above, his lack of historical and cultural context.  His mistake is to assume that men and women started out at the same place and that the natural order or biology  makes men do certain jobs and women others and that is why the pay is different.  But women have only had the vote for one hundred years.   Women have only been allowed to graduate from universities for a similar amount of time. Women were barred from all the professions until the 1920’s and were only allowed on to the Stock Exchange floor in 1973.  Virginia Woolf wrote about women’s exclusion from the public world fifty years ago. Working class women  had to work to survive and different rules applied. But middle class women, once they were allowed to work, had to give it up when they married.  The marriage bar was not removed in certain professions until the late 1950’s and teaching until the early 1960’s. If anyone has any doubt about the resistance to women entering the workplace it is worth reading some of the accounts in Parliament at the time. What jobs women do and don’t do, can and cannot do has less to do with what they choose and more to do with the development of a labour market that has exploited their availability and lower social status. Let’s not forget that in 1970 before the implementation of the Equal Pay Act in 1975 it was legal to pay a woman less than a man for the same job… so the gender pay gap then was 48% – does Professor Peterson put this down to women’s choice?

Because Peterson argues that the uneven distribution of men and women in the workplace is a  matter of choice – ““Men and women won’t sort themselves into the same categories if you leave them alone to do it of their own accord. We’ve already seen that in Scandinavia. It’s 20 to one female nurses to male… and approximately the same male engineers to female engineers,” he explains.”

The cultural attachments of work as male and female are incredibly powerful but they too can and do change and vary from culture to culture.  Women are now bus drivers – unthinkable only a matter of twenty five  years ago. When their work was required during the First World War women took over all manner of male jobs only to be pushed out of them at the end of the War. Men were secretaries before women were allowed to work. In India low caste women work in construction on the roads. There are some jobs which require physical strength which may suit men more than women but many of our ‘divisions’ today are pretty artificial and are more to do with cultural meanings and historical hangovers  than any real rational reason.

Skills are not neutral either, they are gendered and we value some over others.  So if we gauge  value by how much people are paid, in this country we value refuse collectors and train drivers more than we do cleaners and nurses. Why is this? Peterson seems to accept that being an engineer is a higher status job and therefore better paid than nursing but doesn’t ask why?

Why, if men and women are actually drawn to different types of work, is it  that men’s work is almost always better paid than women’s. Is it that women’s lower social status attaches itself to work which then assumes that lower status? When women enter highly prized areas of work dominated by men in great numbers, the status of that work will usually go down. 

What the gender pay gap did rather well was break down the quartiles making visible how heavily male the top of almost all organisations were. Professor Peterson suggests this is also a choice and  that women do not want to rise to these levels. How does he know this? Why is he accepting that long hours are a necessary part of the work itself and not just a cultural barrier which does a good job at keeping women out? In the 1970’s and 1980’s long hours as such didn’t exist like they do now but then there were other barriers more structural to keep women out of well-paid management positions.

Our working patterns have developed around the lives of men who had and still do have the ‘other side of life’ looked after for them. Women’s choice to have a family or a good career is not a choice. It is presented as one because the terms of the discourse have been set by men. Senior men can only do these jobs if the ‘other side of life’ is picked up by their partner or wife. If a woman has a partner who takes main responsibility for family and domestic life then she really does have a choice.

He also cites women’s predisposition to agreeableness, one of the  Big Five personality traits as a reason they are not in more senior positions at work. He sees this agreeableness  as conflicting with organisational hierarchies where people (men) with less agreeableness are better at negotiating and demanding higher paid and more powerful positions. So women remain in lower positions in an organisation.

There is another way of looking at this.  Peterson  says that women’s nurturing instincts which required her to be on demand and agreeable twenty four hours a day  for the first nine months of a baby’s life possibly tuned her nervous system which whilst suitable for the unspoken demands of a baby  made her less suitable for the demands of business and dealing.

If we use the biology discourse then how about  we also say that a woman’s programming for looking out for her young may make her much better at multitasking, time management and forecasting  future risk in business, some things men are not so good at? Indeed there was a flurry of academic research on this particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis. It was contended that women balanced out men’s tendency to exaggerate, be impulsive, be too blinkered and speculative.  I have argued elsewhere that the skills women learn at home are invaluable to being a good manager. Yet they are still rarely acknowledged or valued.

Academics  have questioned the value placed on status seeking and risk taking in business – masculinity here could be problematized as being an impediment to success, rather than women not fitting the mould.   Emphasising women’s difference to men is fraught with difficulties as it tends to be used to justify women’s inequality and leads to essentialism. In the end it is not about difference it is about what is valued.

I think women have changed more than men.  Today men are having to adapt to a world where women are  learning beside them, working beside them, competing with them and there seems to be some resistance. Instead of pandering to youthful  male insecurities which fans the flame of resentment  by blaming feminism,  Professor Peterson would help his young fan base so much more by imploring them to open up, talk about their  concerns and learn to embrace women as their equals.

 

This morning’s reaction to the poor excuses made by some of the FTSE 350 leaders as to why they had no or only one woman on their boards is a good reminder of how far thinking and action on gender in the boardroom has actually come. Some of the views expressed by leaders, which may have been  acceptable ten years ago,  have been condemned as pitiful, sexist and patronising.

I was lucky enough to become a non-executive director of a FTSE 250 company nearly fifteen years ago. So I recognise all the excuses in the report, as well as some that leaders would probably not utter to an interviewer today.

The timing of my appointment in 2003 was not a coincidence.  The Higgs Report on the Role and Effectiveness of Non-Executive Directors had been published the year before in 2002 and it recommended that companies cast their nets wider for their non-executive roles.

An enlightened headhunter had heard about me and approached me for a position. To be honest at the time it wouldn’t have crossed my mind as I certainly didn’t  have the ‘right’ sort of career path to get on to a board. So I was grateful to Derek Higgs, the timing and of course the lovely headhunter. But I was also lucky that the small board I joined were welcoming and appointed me despite my ‘different background’.  There was a risk in that and I know that the headhunter worked very hard in persuading the directors that I was going to be an asset to them.  My research has showed that men’s attitudes to sharing power with women is an important factor in determining how many women can progress in an organisation.

The headhunter  warned me about why I may not get a position and it wasn’t my lack of management experience. ‘You will be  considered too  young, and too pretty,’ and another  ‘Luckily you are married as they don’t want anyone who is divorced’. I had to keep very quiet (even to the headhunter) as I was about to embark on a very messy divorce at the time.  I certainly heard a member from my own board when recruiting another non-executive, say ‘we don’t want another different person’ clearly meaning they already had one! And then he looked across at me rather apologetically as he realised what he had said!

I don’t hold any grudges at all.  At that time I and other women were  breaking into a cosy all male club which isn’t comfortable for either side. I understood that. I learned from them and am extremely grateful for the experience.

The Davies Review, which introduced targets and the threat of quotas if they were not met by 2015 has resulted in boards finding women who were invisible to them before.  Importantly since 1999 there has been a consistent annual monitoring of women on boards  by  Professor Susan Vinnicombe’s team at Cranfield School of Management aka the Female FTSE 100 Report.  This keeps the pressure up and we know that what gets measured gets done.

Today’s report says that 10 of the FTSE 350 companies still do not have a single female board member. However this is a vast improvement since the Davies Review on Women on Boards published in early 2011 when  over one half of them had no women in the boardroom at all.  In 2011 only 7.8% of all main board directors were women and this increased to 21% last year. Acknowledging progress is as important as highlighting areas that still need improvement. Attitudes take a while to change but in this area I would say that they have changed pretty quickly. The executive  positions are a different matter and quite rightly attention is being turned to improving figures there.

 

Professor Jordan Peterson faced little opposition to speaking at the Oxford Union last week. In fact by all accounts he was welcomed  at Oxford University despite his very public and consistent criticism of aspects of trans activist ideology . This is in stark opposition to leading feminists who have been no platformed in other universities for similar views. And to the violent protests that met women meeting in Oxford recently just to debate the consequences of any changes to Gender Recognition Act.

Professor Peterson has been in trouble at his own university in Toronto, Canada because of rejecting a rule forcing him to use particular pronouns of someone’s choice. In fact it was this suspension that made him something of a global star. He argues pretty persuasively that we do not choose our identity – it is something that is negotiated in society and is constantly in flux. Using gender identity as a social category rather than sex has led to 31 different gender identities being recognised in the state of New York and he says it is absurd and unworkable. And that it is undemocratic for a tiny percentage of the population to impose changes in language which everyone else is forced to  use. He sees it as an attack on free speech.

Yet even questioning the right of biological men to claim to be a woman (self ID) ‘I am a woman because I say I am’ has been enough for a number of well-known feminists to be barred from speaking publicly about anything!  Germaine Greer, whose work was life changing for many women of my generation,  faced fierce opposition to  speaking at Cardiff University and still faces abuse because of her views (she is speaking though at Oxford Union next month) ; Julie Bindel, a campaigner against male violence was no platformed by Manchester University  and  Linda Bellos, a lifelong feminist activist was banned from speaking at Cambridge University. All three are critical of the transgender ideology, particularly of self ID. Why  is that  Professor Peterson, who  is  dismissive of  feminism, was applauded almost unreservedly  at Oxford yet women who have been activists and done huge amounts to promote the equality of women are being silenced because of views that they actually share with Peterson? Is it because he has an adoring fan club of mostly young men?

 

The last minute and presumably reluctant release of their gender pay gap reports earlier this month by the majority of companies with over 250 employees warned us that there would be some difficult reading.  No doubt hoping theirs would be buried in the swamp of thousands of others if they left it to the last day shows that leaders know full well some of the inequalities that still exist in their organisations. I know that in some instances PR consultants as well as lawyers have been hauled in to restore any brand reputational damage.

Yes the gender pay gap is a clumsy measure. To know that there are more men at the top of almost all organisations is nothing new to us, but it is still uncomfortable to see this uneven representation when it is laid out in statistics. And as well, to see this vertical segregation of men and women result in some huge pay disparities. But the exercise is useful because by looking closely at the figures we can also use them to see where more work or even some work needs to be done.

Vertical and horizontal segregation

The publication of the quartiles is revealing and these numbers are invaluable to companies in any gender audit. In the vast majority of organisations   women dominate the bottom two quartiles and it switches for the next higher two.  Looking at ways to promote women into more senior positions is on most companies’ to do diversity list and efforts can be redoubled. The missing statistic which I am sure companies may have themselves and should also look at it is in which divisions in the organisation men and women are working. Horizontal segregation is as important as vertical segregation. Who works where and what is the impact on gender pay differentials? Are women over represented in certain departments? Which departments are most valued? This should provoke a debate on the meaning of value and whether it is time to address some of the assumptions that dictate levels of pay.

A further line of questioning for organisations is this. Is there a correlation between the highly paid parts of an organisation and their cultures? Does the culture operate to exclude and/or marginalise women from the most highly prized parts of a company?  In my experience this is very often what happens and my survey is designed to capture this kind of exclusion / marginalisation.

 A useful measure of success of diversity initiatives

The gender pay audits can be used as a measure of success of gender diversity initiatives. Organisations are part of a wider labour market with its own inequalities and that itself is part of wider society where there is still gender inequality. So  there are limits on what can be done. But some organisations have worked hard over many years to achieve better representation of women throughout their organisations and it is interesting for these companies to see when and to what extent the work has paid off. Certainly a company like National Grid which has invested in many years of diversity work shows that even a numerically male dominated organisation can still achieve good results in gender parity.

Women at National Grid make up less than a third of the bottom quartile but are still nearly a quarter of the top quartile – a far less differential than in many female dominated companies. And the pay gap is much smaller than the average with women’s   median hourly rate being only 1.9% lower than men’s.

A female dominated company, Marks and Spencer also started implementing equal opportunities policies years and years ago like other retailers with predominantly female workforces.  Women’s representation throughout the organisation is fairly consistent and two thirds of the top quartile are women with 75% in the lowest quartile. The median pay gap is very low at 3.3% (mean 12.3%)

However some organisations have found it difficult to achieve good results despite a focus on gender equality and diversity. Goldman Sachs has been noisy enough about gender equality over the years. It has even won an Opportunity Now award a few years  for its initiative 10,000 Women  which  aimed to provide  microfinance for this number of women in Africa. However closer to home it is struggling to get women into senior positions. Only 17% of the top quartile are women whilst 62.4% of the lowest quartile are. Women’s mean hourly rate is 55.5% lower than men’s and median rate 36.4% lower.

The bonus gap

Almost everywhere I looked, whatever the size of the median hourly pay gap, the bonus gap was way, way bigger. Goldman Sachs, renowned for its huge remuneration packages, published a whopping 72.2% mean bonus pay gap (67.7% median).

And in organisations where the pay gap hourly rate figures were ‘good’, these were often not matched by similar size bonus gap figures. At Marks and Spencer  although more women  (76%)  than men (66%)  received bonus pay the bonus pay gap is vastly skewed in favour of the minority of men, with the gender gap shooting to 53% mean (15.9% median) lower for women. I do think the mean is important to look at when talking about bonuses because these large gaps mean the figures are being skewed by some very large numbers at the top, an important part of the story.

Ernst & Young, another organisation with an exemplary history of diversity and inclusion work, reported a 15% pay gap with 35% of women making up the top quartile. Yet when it came to bonuses a similar pattern emerged. Women’s mean bonus pay was 43.5% lower than men’s and women’s median bonus pay is 35.2% lower than men’s.

McKinsey has been consulting on and researching the benefits of gender diversity for a number of years now, publishing their reports Diversity Matters annually. The management consultancy had reasonably good statistics for women in the top quartile… 35% were women compared to the bottom quartile where 60% were women and the median hourly rate was a little below the average at 14.3%. However these relatively good figures get blown out of the water with the publication of their bonus figures.  Women’s mean bonus pay was 76% lower than men’s and 52.5% lower than men’s (median).

Whilst companies sought to explain differences in pay by the fact that there were not enough women in senior positions they were pretty silent on the bonus differences.

Comment

The pattern I see in these reported figures is consistent. It is that whatever the demographic of the organisation, or how evenly distributed men and women are throughout an organisation, there exists a top most senior group of predominantly men whose pay is so high it skews the figures dramatically (you can tell this from the mean averages of bonuses as against the median).

It is to be applauded that bonuses were included in the reporting requirements as one of the biggest obscurers of pay is the bonus culture. The accepted use of the bonus system to pay men disproportionately more than women needs to be challenged.

The glass ceiling is in fact very flexible… it shifts like cling film to protect the most elite, the most powerful and the best paid in any organisation. Yes, we are talking at this level about the kind of salaries few of us would dream of, but the exposure and analysis of this is important when addressing the lack of women in leadership roles.