All the way back in 2000, when Destiny’s Child sang ‘Independent Women’ on the soundtrack of Charlie’s Angels they were making a declaration, and that declaration was ‘I bought it’. The central tenet of the song was that women could be financially independent of their men, and that their independence should be a point of ass-kicking pride. (How that quite fits in with the fact that all three of Charlie’s ‘angels’ still ultimately answer to a male boss who technically ‘owns’ them, however, is another question entirely.) Ever since Cosmo declared, ‘Cheers for the capitalist feminist!’ in 1986, the idea of the woman at the top, dressed to kill and with a work ethic to match, has dominated the popular imagination. She is the ‘career woman’, workin’ 9 to 5 with her trouser suit and her shoulder pads and her ballsy, assertive attitude. Cosmo argued that the way to female equality was through earning your own money, and, considering that it wasn’t until 1958 that a lady could even have a bank account without her husband or father’s permission, you can’t help but agree that, to a point, the magazine was right.
In the 1960s, reproductive freedom, in the form of the contraceptive pill, gave women the reprieve they needed from being baby-making machines in order to focus on other things, one of which was to start trying to redress the balance as far as gender roles were concerned. The ability to choose if and when to become pregnant enables a woman to pursue certain careers that, previously, would have been constantly interrupted by that inevitable offshoot of procreation: being covered in a permanent film of shit and vomit. Being able to have your own career and your own money gives you a different kind of freedom: the freedom to buy your own shoes, the freedom from dependency, and the freedom to leave a relationship that has become unpleasant or violent, taking your children with you. This new freedom was initially what Sex and the City was all about. It portrayed a new kind of woman: financially and professionally successful, in control of her own romantic life as well as her career, and yes, very much able to buy her own shoes, too. Unfortunately, as the series progressed, it became less about those other kinds of freedom and more about the shoes, reaching its nadir with Mr Big’s construction of a magical fashion cupboard for Carrie in the more-than-slightly disappointing 2008 film of the same name. Somehow, society had swung it so that female liberation had come to denote simply being able to buy more stuff. The fact that most of that stuff was wrapped up in traditional notions of what it meant to be a woman (looking pretty) was surely just a coincidence. Right?
Money was important to female liberation because, much like Esperanto but with a larger uptake, it’s the language of the world. Suddenly, in the 1980s, women were speaking it for the first time. Authors such as Jackie Collins and Shirley ‘Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’ Conran captured the mood perfectly in their novels – the 1980s career woman was a force to be reckoned with, and her sexuality was completely tied up with her power. While previously the twin attributes of ruthlessness and assertiveness were universally perceived as male qualities, the 1980s saw the creation of a new kind of cliché: the office bitch and the foxy female boss, complete with stiletto heels, electric blue eyeshadow and aggressive sexuality. The ‘Women of Wall Street’ issue of Playboy from August 1989 depicted just this fantasy woman: a huge-titted lady clad in a suit jacket (nothing underneath) is the central image, looking seductively out of the photograph from behind her sexy glasses. It’s pure porno professional – like a cast member from ‘Dominatrix Headmistress Makes Cynthia Squirt ’Til She Cries’ or ‘Busty Librarians in Heat’. But the reality was very different, and rather than spanking naughty account executives with their trousers around their ankles in the boardroom, women were running themselves ragged trying to juggle the new demands of work and the old demands of home.
There comes a point, however, where there’s a limit to the liberation that money can buy. Romance-novelist-turned-Conservative-MP-turned-journalist Louise Mensch once wrote an approving article in The Guardian about how right-wing feminism (that apparent oxymoron) is all about the pursuit of money. For her, financial equality was the only equality, and the way to achieve it was through selfish individualism, battling your way to the top without worrying about any social and cultural factors that might have been keeping you down. That might be the way to CEO for one woman, but it isn’t the way to equality for all women. As coverage surrounding the death of Margaret Thatcher noted, there’s no use making your way through the glass ceiling if you’re going to pull up the ladder after you. But if you really do want that position on the company board in the City, it’s worth examining how those rare female high-flyers are presented once they’ve reached the dizzying heights of the company boardroom.
It’s not often that women’s magazines concern themselves with your career, but when they do, they’re pretty sure that it all starts with granola. ‘I begin the day at 5 a.m., with a spot of Bikram yoga,’ the standard ‘life in a day’ article will read. ‘After that, I really need to set myself up for a hard day in air traffic control, so I make sure that I boil my semi-skimmed milk to exactly 35 degrees – the optimum temperature to complement my home-made multigrain porridge. I go out and do a bit of redirecting aeroplanes, which is stressful but I’m dressed for success. At midday, we eat jacket potatoes, which I know that I can work off at my 5k jogging class round Hyde Park in the evening. If I didn’t look the part, then nobody in this male-dominated environment would respect me.
‘Some days, there might be an unexpected occurrence; for instance, a plane crashes on to the runway, engulfed in a huge, searing fireball. I slip off my court shoes, don pumps, and get stuck in, clawing through the wreckage for possible survivors. My flotation therapy might have to be rescheduled on a day like that, if I really want to be home to pick up my two beautiful children from Gifted and Talented class by five. I don’t beat myself up about it – after all, what’s really important now is the precious “me time” I get while moulding my greenhouse-grown organic chickpeas into falafels for dinner.’
Ever come across this sort of narrative, smugly encased in a 500-word feature that’s apparently intended to inspire the innocent reader? The problem is, it’s very rarely a genuine source of inspiration. Take Nancy Dell’Ollio, a cross-disciplinary superwoman who lists public affairs, networking, novel-writing and TV production amongst her many talents, ‘dedicates a lot of time to cleansing and moisturising’ and is ‘gifted to not need a lot of sleep’. Her descriptions of her afternoon acupuncture or her lunch meetings, fascinating though they are (‘I have a lot of meetings, which I like to do over lunch at the Berkeley in Knightsbridge, ten minutes from where I live. Or Claridge’s, or the Ivy Club. I don’t know anyone who does as much as I do’), are unlikely to impart to the common reader much in the way of practical information.
Women at the top of their game are always presented as living lives that reflect their smart career choice: smart food choices, smart exercising regimes, smart clothes in a ‘capsule wardrobe’ that doesn’t include one single gaudy item they once found in the bargain bin at Forever Vintage and convinced themselves was a period piece, rather than a dead person’s worn-out cardigan that boasted an appliquéd sequin kitten motif and smelt vaguely of damp. No stinking cardis for the CEO! She’s sorted, she’s ‘sussed’, and she probably didn’t need an epidural when she gave birth to little Johannesburg Esteban IV, either. She doesn’t feel paranoid and guilty about paying for childcare rather than staying at home all day. She lost her baby weight by doing coordinated pushchair walks with other local mothers during her (two-week) maternity leave. It’s not difficult to see why, all too often, this ‘aspirational reading’ becomes another reason why you can take your permanently hungover, yoga-illiterate, demonstrably untoned arse right back to the Sainsbury’s checkout counter. After all, if you haven’t even got your own herb garden yet, then how the hell can you expect to become a space scientist?
That’s the thing with magazine career advice: it purports to give you a helpful leg-up into the business world, but really it’s just another lifestyle story. Where some magazines used to include practical advice about building your CV, negotiating a wage review or the qualifications needed for veterinary medicine, in the last twenty years most of this has been swallowed up by sensationalist writing – mainly because of the agendas of advertisers who would rather see Dior lipsticks in make-up bags than ladies on the board of Dior. There is no guarantee that product-pushing can be included in a careers section, especially as job interview attire is generally so conservative that it can never really be reliably ‘styled up’. They may tell you that Maggie T is this season’s style icon, but ain’t nobody ever looked cutting edge in a skirt suit. As we all know, any outfit that doesn’t involve big ‘directional’ hair or a sheer-bottomed ‘trouser’ (yes, just one) isn’t of any interest to the fash pack. Nor is your interview ensemble likely to feature a cheeky flash of ‘underboob’ for that candid front-page photo.
The word length for the average feature in a women’s monthly magazine has shrunk demonstrably in the last decade (now averaging around 300 words, which is about how much a five-year-old can read before getting cranky), and the career section has all but disappeared from most publications. Look back at the magazines of the 1980s and you’ll be surprised by how long and in-depth some of the writing about earning potential and career possibilities is in comparison to today’s cursory input.
In the past, magazine professionals have suggested to us that because more women buy magazines featuring celebrities in bikinis than they do those containing references to female entrepreneurs or women in management or heads of socialist financial cooperatives on the cover, the female readership has spoken. According to their sales figures, we don’t want careers advice – and even though sales figures are a fairly inaccurate and superficial way of judging how people respond to editorial content (there never seems to be a box to tick for ‘meh’), we’ve been told to swallow the fact that they know best. This very narrow definition of ‘women’s interests’ is almost always being decided for us, mostly by men (at the time of writing, six of the seven ‘key people’ in the Condé Nast boardroom are male, and yet they oversee a raft of female titles including Glamour, Easy Living, Vogue and Tatler). Screw that. In a world of stubbornly persisting gender wage gaps, bulletproof glass ceilings, and a dearth of female world leaders and high-ranking executives, content that speaks to us seriously about career opportunities is important, necessary, and socially responsible. How can we ever aspire to success in the workplace when the message that we’re constantly being fed is that physical beauty is more important? We hate to say it, but the more you’re told that your mind doesn’t matter, the more the words seep in and start affecting your self-perception, to the point where your podgy earlobe obsession starts affecting your childhood dream of becoming a paediatrician. The fact that so many women end up succeeding despite the deluge of bullshit thrown their way every day should be an enormous point of pride.
This is exactly why articles praising fruitarian restaurant owners moonlighting as Zumba instructors, ex-City workers who’ve moved to the country and now make their own driftwood coat-hangers, or women who used their ‘power maternity leave’ (a phrase invoked by Stylist magazine to describe young mums setting up their own businesses, which was marginally better than the Telegraph’s ‘time off work’) to found their own raw food bar collectives – aka women that you’ll never be – are so frustrating.
Perhaps they’re supposed to be inspiring, but really these tales of abnormal success just make you sad because you know, deep down, that starting a knit-your-own-organic-veg-box factory when you can’t even sign up to a £2-a-month charity donation for fear that the direct debit will bounce renders your business plan a distant and impossible dream. Like the ‘celeb reports’ which scrutinise what the most recent graduate of The X Factor eats and her exercise regime, these ‘career profiles’ have been morphed by a constant demand for sensationalism into ‘true-life tales’. When the chief designer at Google spends 200 words of her 500-word article waxing lyrical about the fact that the Google canteen gives them free food, every day (seriously) right after some blatantly falsified ‘morning regimen’ (we’re willing to bet she actually chows down on a bacon butty while checking her emails at 6 a.m., swearing about the waiting times on the tube and getting rubbed up against on the daily commute by a guy in an anorak with chronic BO), the virtue of the career section has gone down the pan quicker than a muesli lunch on a high-fibre diet. How are you ever supposed to find yourself in the Google canteen, snaffling up the last of the free fish and chips on a Friday afternoon? ‘Try hard’ at university. Get into wholegrains. Sign up to a Yogalates class, preferably with a pre-dawn start time. Beyond that, you could bleed a modern-day article on business dry and still only be left with the remnants of someone’s ‘ultra-healthy’ vegetable soup and a facile admonition to ‘just apply yourself to something that you love’.
So what’s a girl to do if she’s truly determined to become a ‘career woman’? Well, first of all, the media conspiracy to continue on with the term ‘career woman’ should probably be swallowed by a black hole – unless ‘career man’ makes his long-overdue comeback. If you manage to mentally resist all the assertions that you should be properly versed in ‘domestic goddessery’ such as introducing probiotic bacteria into your own yoghurt, before you even set foot in an office cubicle, then you might be on your way. But there’s nothing a women’s magazine likes more than to stick another bright pink obstacle in your path, so be prepared for an altogether new onslaught once you’re headed for professional success. This comes in the form of that grating, perpetual question: ‘Can women have it all?’
Now, if you’re a female human being over the age of 13, you’ve probably become aware of this ubiquitous question. It got asked a lot in the 1970s, after women who had been housewives decided that if you’re going to be at a man’s beck and call for most of the day, you might as well do it for money. Then, for a while, all was quiet on the western front as equal parenting and attitudes to domestic work changed; it seemed as though we were witnessing the gradual evolution of stereotyping and prejudice into freedom and opportunity, where men’s familial roles would expand just as much as those shoulder pads women were starting to wear in the workplace. Needless to say, we have progressed in leaps and bounds when you compare today’s world to the days when a woman in a laboratory was assumed to have gotten lost on the way to the baby-changing facilities. But the granola-eating air traffic controller, with her two well-rounded children, her laidback but effortlessly wholesome lifestyle, and her adoring husband, is still never far from our minds. She is an unusual human being. She is a woman who ‘has it all’. And you’re probably nothing like her.
The twenty-first century has seen a resurgence in media interest in whether women can ‘have it all’; in fact, ‘Why women still can’t have it all’ by Anne-Marie Slaughter was one of The Atlantic’s most globally discussed features of 2012. But what exactly is ‘having it all’, and why do we never care whether men can? The question appears to be whether the woman in question can ‘have it like a man’, but the subtext is whether she can live her life according to a set of unrealistic expectations which almost never impose on her male counterparts. First, there’s the assumption that she needs to be the primary caregiver to her children, almost entirely and solely responsible for how they are raised. Secondly, she has to be constantly available for work during hours that don’t usually correspond with school times, since they were decided upon when almost every household had one partner (the woman, in case you hadn’t guessed) permanently in the home. Thirdly, she should single-handedly uphold her romantic and sexual life with her husband, usually by pretending to be a lap dancer in the lounge on regular occasions; and fourthly, she should be the first port of call for any domestic issues whatsoever.
It’s a rare publication that frequently calls for a male readership to examine whether ‘you’re doing your best in the kitchen, the bedroom, the nursery and the boardroom’, and an even rarer one that asks him to consider whether his massive pay packet intimidates his girlfriend. While magazines present being a successful career women as an unachievable ideal, and then in the next breath question whether ‘having it all’ is possible (never mind whether you even care about ‘having it all’ – or, God forbid, might distribute those anxieties between you and your partner equally), they’re edging us further and further away from that enviable salary. In ‘Why women still can’t have it all’, Slaughter spoke of the ‘genuine superwomen’ who are high up in government or senior business positions – the ones who really do manage the porridge and 5 a.m. aerobics class – and how they are the only ones to break through the barriers because of the weight of these unrealistic expectations. These women have to be ten times more dedicated than their counterparts just to get a brief nod in their direction. And a lot of them, having been told relentlessly that they won’t be ‘proper mothers’ while at the top of their game (just look at all those stock photos showing babies crying as their suited and booted mums leave for work), or that their work ethic will be destroyed by that ridiculous, anti-medical concept of ‘baby brain’, decide to not have families, in order to preserve their credibility. They know that if they procreate, the speculation will begin; and if they’re ‘celebs’ in the public eye, so much the worse, because they’ll immediately be relegated to the position of ‘yummy mummy’ on the cover of heat or Reveal. And the only career progression from that position is to MILF.
In 2012, the Daily Mail (whose advertising campaign, ironically enough, used to be: ‘Behind every successful woman is a Daily Mail’) went especially insane for newly appointed Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, who famously worked through maternity leave after being hired while she was pregnant. The Mail claimed, of course, that female ire had been piqued after she had the audacity to return to work only two weeks after having her son, lauding her nevertheless as proof that certain hard-working women can ‘have it all’. A guest article in the Huffington Post, by a CEO and mother-of-one, quickly followed up the news with the claim that it was possible to ‘be a wife’ as well as a mum and a businesswoman – and a slew of similar pieces followed. And the same thing will undoubtedly happen when another Marissa Mayer comes along: the endless, tiresome discussion of whether it’s possible to be both a wife and a worker, pleasing everyone it’s your responsibility to please. Nobody seems to be asking what ‘being a wife’ entails, and why it has special gender requirements over and above those expected from other human beings, but it definitely comes with a longer job description than ‘being a husband’ – and it’s often subtly implied that it might involve earning less than your male partner, y’know, for the sake of marital harmony. The woman who ‘has it all’ comes home from her FTSE 50 job and does the homework with her son in between preparing dinner and ironing the school uniforms with a great big smile on her face. In other words, she basically doesn’t exist, except in the eyes of the media – but her persistence in those outlets means that real-life women are made to feel inadequate in the workplace every day, stuck in a perpetual panic that they are failing in one of these spheres, when they should probably just be down the pub getting rat-arsed and voguing along to Madonna as they slosh Pinot Grigio from bar to bathroom.
If you’re lucky enough not to be a ‘yummy mummy’ – probs because you’re not a sleb – then the moment you touch a keyboard in between breast feeds, you’ll be lumped with the term ‘mommy blogger’ (a charming linguistic import from America that describes women who write online and also have kids) or ‘momtrepreneur’ (a mother who also sometimes sells stuff). This ensures that, if you’re female, the moment you procreate becomes a moment of redefinition. It follows you around like a four-month-old with a malodorous nappy, changing the way you’re spoken about, even in the workplace. This, of course, says a lot about our own society and the roles we decide are most appropriate and most natural to females. The ‘dadtrepreneur’ doesn’t exist, not just because it’s a shitty word, but because it’s assumed that a man’s status as father will have little or no effect on his professional life. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama is ‘Mom-in-Chief’, and Victoria Beckham gets asked at the launch of her Spring/Summer 2014 collection by Closer magazine how she ‘manages to juggle all her responsibilities’ as a ‘pretty amazing fashion designer – and … a dedicated mum’, until Posh Spice shamefacedly admits, ‘I do feel guilty.’ As long as we’re still defined by motherhood and the public perception of women’s roles remains so skewed, the question about whether or not women can have it all will seem a little premature.
At the other end of the spectrum, we’ve been told of readers’ and friends’ dismay at being made to feel that their decision to stay at home with their newborn baby and take a break is somehow ‘beneath them’. Right-wing newspapers jump on this attitude as evidence that their conservative agenda centred on traditional family values is correct, and that high-and-mighty career women need taking down a peg or two. A sneering article from our favourite right-wing tabloid (the Mail, of course) in November 2012 was entitled ‘The women who think they’re too clever to have babies’. Meanwhile, one in seven women is made redundant after taking maternity leave. It shouldn’t be a question of ‘us v them’, and the arguments just demonstrate how confused we all are. It seems that people are forgetting that feminism – inclusive feminism, anyway – has always been about choice, and who the hell is anyone to pass comment on your decision to work part-time or take a break altogether? Women caught up in the rat race aren’t faring much better than stay-at-home mums in terms of media pressure, which is why it’s all the more important that we support one another’s choices rather than condemning them. Despite its being technically illegal these days, many male bosses seem to think that asking ‘Are you planning on having a baby?’ in a job interview is acceptable, as is suggesting that your frustration during a particularly challenging project might be because you’re on your period.
The gender pay gap in the UK continues to stand at around 16% at the time of writing, with the percentage of women at the top of most careers levelling out at a depressing 22%. Clearly, we’re nowhere near ‘having it all’; in fact we barely even have a slice of the pie, which we probably baked ourselves while sobbing into the pastry at 4 a.m. One of the reasons that gender inequality in the workplace still exists is the sheer level of the demands made by the current economic system – if you’re not clocking in at all hours of the day or night then you’re not doing your duty to the company. Despite our increased ability to work from home thanks to new technology, flexible working hours remain as fantastical as the Diet Coke guy in the adverts: an infinitely appealing but untouchable mirage. No wonder so many women are setting up their own patchwork oven glove companies and becoming their own bosses; rather than ask why it is that a full-time job is still so incompatible with having children, the media redefine it as a ‘career break’. But if being at home with children is so easy, why aren’t more men doing it?
This endless reductive pigeonholing of the female public position – the ‘yummy mummy out on the town’, the ‘sassy singleton in the city’ with her BlackBerry and her Louboutins, the ‘health freak with her high-flying job’ (and her requisite even-more-high-flying ‘hubby’), or the ‘ballsy homemaker mother-of-four, wielding the full force of the PTA’ – is just another example of the unfair scrutiny afforded to those in possession of a vagina. While a male politician will always be judged on the work that he does, sadly a ‘lady politician’ (and what a joyously archaic term that is) can be brought down by a bad haircut. The advice put forward by various outlets reflects this scrutiny of your looks, behaviour and ‘business persona’. The Forbes article ‘10 ways body language can help you be more powerful’ is a potent example: don’t wear too much lipstick, or it will be assumed that your eyes are on your colleague rather than the prize. Don’t smile too much – it’s a ‘sign of weakness’. Don’t frown, or you won’t seem flexible. Don’t peer over your glasses, because ‘it makes you look distant and snobby’. Don’t expose your wrists (yes, really) because ‘an exposed wrist is a sign of submission’. Don’t ‘act girlish’ or ‘be overly expressive’, because you’ll overwhelm your male audience. Similar advice pops up everywhere.
Where genuine career advice is absent, articles about ‘job interview conduct’ (hair and make-up) abound, including this particularly nauseating example from Glamour (September 2013) entitled ‘What to wear for a job interview, including hair and make-up tips’, written by a Marissa Gold who describes herself thus: ‘Lives for love; eats dessert first’. ‘Dressing for a job interview can be tough,’ it begins. ‘You want to appear professional, mature, and serious but still show off a little personal style.’ Is that really your principal concern, though? Teen Vogue continues the patronising theme by informing its readers that, ‘Business professional doesn’t have to be boring … A sizeable satchel is important … though your best accessory is a résumé printed on nice paper – and a smile, of course!’ Further up the age range, Good Housekeeping tells you the ‘5 best looks to land the job’ – because, as always seems to be the case with these features, the suit is more important than the woman in it. Make sure you get the right type (a skirt suit, because trouser suit says lesbian and everyone knows that lesbians are for porn and not the latest business pitch), with the right skirt length (tread the line carefully between ‘slutty receptionist’ and ‘frumpy office mother who brings the boys coffee’), and don’t ever, ever be yourself. It may seem that this kind of style spaff is restricted to the media, but sadly it’s bleeding into office culture too. In October 2013, law firm Clifford Chance came under fire for emailing a list of ‘Presentation tips for women’ to the company’s female employees which included such gems as ‘No one heard Hillary the day she showed cleavage’, and ‘Talk through your mouth, not your nose.’ All sounding a bit like season one of Mad Men? That’s because it belongs in the 1960s.
Needless to say, there’s a lot that could be done by the magazines aimed at women of working age to counteract this madness. Instead of increasing pressure on the gals they often literally claim to love, with constantly reiterated articles on whether ‘he’ will ‘run for the hills’ as soon as your pay outstrips his, they could come over from the dark side and get stuck into smashing the glass ceiling, preferably with a sledgehammer as opposed to a stiletto. Some tentatively progressed in the last couple of years when feminism came back on the agenda (to be fair to them, Cosmopolitan’s campaign to tackle the wage gap was a step in the right direction). But the concrete advice that we need is still missing from many a magazine: how to present yourself assertively at a meeting about pay progression, for instance; questions to ask at the end of interviews (thus far Stylist is the only mag we’ve seen tackle this); or where to research different industries and their track records in gender equality. In the conveniently all-female environment of the women’s magazine, they could ask questions such as why Virgin Air showed an advert in 2013 in which ‘all Virgin Air employees’ had magical powers – but in which the male pilots are superheroes, whereas the stewardesses (all of whom bar one are female) have the ‘ability’ to wear shoes and repel water from passengers. Yep, the guys get superhuman military precision, and the gals get blowjob lips and an enhanced ability to mop up spillages. Is this the advert we want our teenage daughters to watch in between SpongeBob SquarePants and the latest music video of bikini-clad girls washing a rapper’s car with too many soapsuds? Some would argue that the male-pilot-to-female-steward ratio is merely a reflection of reality – most pilots are, indeed, male. But as many a feminist has said (or indeed yelled) before us, ‘You can’t be what you can’t see.’
If this advice isn’t enough, then there’s a plethora of books out there just waiting to confuse the general female population with their array of conflicting advice: use your ‘flirtatious advantage’ to get ahead; be as confident as a man, but not as brash; stay for all of the networking opportunities, but don’t stay in the pub past one drink, ever (nobody wants to see a drunk woman); nice girls don’t get the corner office; use your inherent feminine loveliness to progress in communications; think ‘like a man’. And just when you thought you’d disentangled yourself from that web of inconsistencies and properly settled in your own career, along comes a Woman’s Hour list of powerful figures that’s divided into ‘hard power’ (finance, war, hereditary positions) and ‘soft power’ (almost all of the industries where women have a proper foot in the door). Soft power. Suddenly, someone else has decided that your job in legal mediation is the flaccid penis of the business world.
One of the most prominent books of female career advice of late has to be Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the international success which urged women not to bow to pressure to remove themselves from the workplace. Acknowledging that society has a problem with successful women, she details how she asked to be removed from a yearbook voting her ‘most likely to succeed’ at school so that she could get a date to her high school prom. Her advice not to chip away at your career in preparation for a possible family future is solid, and her outspoken dedication to the feminist cause is encouraging. Nevertheless, we are inclined to agree with the Washington Post that Lean In is ‘full of good intentions but rife with contradictions’. Like Louise Mensch or Margaret Thatcher, Sheryl Sandberg pushes individualism and financial power, and assumes the presence of a supportive (male) spouse as well as a good background and an expensive education. She is a woman who ‘has it all’ – but then, she was born into a world which enabled that.
Meanwhile, books such as The Essential Difference (Simon Baron Cohen, 2003) claim women are better suited to nurturing roles such as teaching and nursing – admirable pursuits, but ones that we should never have to muddy with suspect biological determinism. In fact, the Daily Mail extrapolated so wildly from The Essential Difference during the book’s launch that it somehow managed to blame autism on ‘the changing role of women in society’. According to the newspaper, in the olden days intelligence wasn’t really prized when it came to selecting a woman with whom to procreate. Now that it is, more ladyboffins are having babies with intelligent ‘systematising’ men, thus producing more autistic children. Because, like, science. So while ‘Feminism causes autism’ sounds like something that’s come out of an online fascist headline generator, it’s alarmingly close to a real-life article produced extremely recently.
Thankfully, there are those out there who refused to take such scaremongering articles seriously, and have instead concentrated on founding initiatives for getting more women into science in the twenty-first century. Least successful of these was the $128,000 EU initiative ‘Science: It’s a Girl Thing’, which showed blow-dried, high-heeled lady chemists in little dresses ‘doing some science’, most of which seemed to involve using massive beakers to mix up nail varnish while gyrating next to a wind machine. As anyone who’s ever lit a fag using a Bunsen burner or made their own MDMA knows, that is categorically not all we get up to in the science lab. Thankfully a bunch of female neuroscientists from Bristol University were able to provide us with a parody of the whole pathetic campaign by making their own YouTube version where one of them gyrates up against a CAT scan machine to the tune of LMFAO’s ‘Sexy and I Know It’. The European Commission were laughed out of the building. But it hasn’t been the only crap attempt at getting girls interested in science that we’ve seen in the last year or so. An article in The Guardian (no less) told how ‘cooking uses both maths and science’ and that ‘encourag[ing] your daughter to experiment in the kitchen’ will increase her interest in science. ‘Baking in particular … is a scientific activity,’ the article continued, before suggesting that making ‘your domestic scenario more scientific’ will help garner her interest, especially as ‘shopping is filled with maths problems’. If you’re not tearing your face off by now in despair, then perhaps you’ve fallen victim to the propaganda yourself: the notion that we’re only able to do sums when it involves adding up all the wuvely clothes we’ve bought goes some way to showing why the position of women in the working world still feels so precarious.
It’s not just the traditionalists who are irritatingly vocal about women’s career choices. The feminist movement was often rather disparaging of ‘capitalist feminists’ – they wanted a complete social revolution, a new world order where bourgeois gender roles were abandoned, and, presumably, everyone frolicked naked together while the men were all consigned to an island somewhere. When Germaine Greer said, ‘I wanted to liberate women from the vacuum cleaner, not put them on the board of Hoover’, she expressed the frustration that many feminists were feeling with capitalist power structures. Arguably, both models failed. All you have to do is look around you to realise that capitalist feminism has been a resounding failure. Capitalism has never looked kindly on its underlings, and unfortunately that’s what women still are, holding as they do only a tiny percentage of the world’s wealth. Our representation in government and public life in the UK and US hovers around that same low percentage mark (17–22%) regardless of the specialism or institution, and we are paid on average £413,000 less over our lifetime than men who follow identical career paths. Meanwhile, the feminist revolution never came. We are in no way a post-feminist society.
When one of our Twitter followers told us that her daughter said she wished she’d been born a man so she could be an astronaut when she grew up, it hit us hard. But who can blame her? The way women in public life are portrayed doesn’t exactly foster ambition in the next generation, and it goes all the way back to when you were first given that doll to play with while your brother got a Superman costume, and thus registered (probably unconsciously, because not that many toddlers are that perceptive, even when subjected to hours and hours of Baby Einstein DVDs) notions of what constitute specific ‘male’ or ‘female’ behaviours. These are reinforced by adverts such as a 2013 effort from Weetabix showing sibling rivalry between a doll-and-disco-dancing obsessed little girl and her (much cooler) superhero little brother. The idea that in order to achieve career success you have to be aggressive and ruthless – not qualities deemed traditionally desirable for ‘little ladies’ – demonstrates that there is still a deep mistrust of women who have made it to the top of the career ladder. Girls still shy away from science and maths subjects in school, finding themselves often discouraged from pursuing them by their own teachers and classmates; the fact that it is only in single-sex schools that a significant number of girls choose to take these subjects at A Level should speak volumes. The few who battle onwards and end up in, say, engineering careers often have to endure entrenched sexism from their male bosses and co-workers from the outset. So begins a lifetime of inappropriate comments, double standards and overlooked promotions that add up to the social equivalent of screaming at a nuclear physicist, ‘Why didn’t you just shut up and become a nursery school teacher?’ It’s a cultural environment which slowly and surely erodes our ability to choose.
Yes, sexism in the workplace is alive and well, folks, and allusions to PMT are the tip of the iceberg. There are fusty old dinosaurs wandering around the offices of this country who genuinely believe that women need to get back in the kitchen where they belong, managers who think that rating female colleagues out of ten for attractiveness and then putting the results on the wall is an acceptable workplace practice, and organisations where bum-spanking or pinching is still de rigueur. One of our readers told us that, while working for a male gynaecologist, she and other colleagues were not allowed in the operating room for fear of ‘perineal fallout’ (aka the charming little completely unscientific notion that because you are a woman and therefore wearing a skirt, germs will literally FALL OUT of your vagina and contaminate the hospital). That we have this to put up with as well as what is, let’s face it, an unfair amount of tedious housework just hammers home how important it is that we support one another. In the society we currently inhabit, none of the choices we make can be said to be truly autonomous anyway – having to leave your job because you can’t afford the childcare or not being able to leave your job because you can’t afford the childcare are not really choices at all. If your friend decides on a different path to yours, try to back her. The support we’ve received from older women since we started the Vagenda has been incredible, but it has also highlighted how important it is for us to stick together.
As a wise MP once told us, supporting the next generation of women is one of the best things that you can do – or, as Madeleine Albright put it, ‘There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women’ (interestingly, quoted by Taylor Swift in very different circumstances in spring 2013). Women are more likely to be underpaid, or more likely not to be paid at all (unsurprisingly, most interns are women) and are most likely to feel like cutting and running when they realise how much of a cock-heavy sausage fest many offices are. And once you start looking into the mechanisms that work against us, you stop seeing ‘I only want to get here on my own merit’ as a valid argument against quotas and temporary periods of positive discrimination. Because the fact of the matter is that enough racist, sexist, homophobic, privately educated ‘boys of the old school’ remain in powerful places to keep you from achieving on your own merit if you happen to be a woman, or not white, or not straight, or trans, or working class, or all of the above. Positive discrimination is a clunky solution to a complex problem, but it’s a solution that forces these sorts of people to think again when they appoint another employee in their own image, and to have to explain it when they do it one too many times.
Solidarity with your female colleagues is the first step towards a workplace with equal gender representation and hopefully one day the country will be so full of working women that female politicians will no longer be mistaken for secretaries in the lifts of the House of Commons, and the most prominent picture of a woman in a national newspaper won’t be a 16-year-old girl with her tits out (hopefully Page Three will have died a death by then), or of a murder victim or a princess, but of a broad taking charge of her own destiny and doing us all proud. In this ideal world, women who feature in news stories will not be defined purely by their marital status – (‘wife and mother of three’) – unless, of course, we start seeing similar headlines for men: ‘Husband and father of three switched his son to a healthier diet and found it had MORE sugar’; ‘Slim father-of-four devours 72 oz steak in three minutes’. Female GPs will be merely GPs, and won’t be regularly blamed by the right-wing media for the downfall of the NHS. Perhaps most importantly, parenting will be regarded as a jobshare. Until that happens, as far as the division of labour is concerned, it certainly helps to make sure you settle down with someone who’ll at least get up in the night with the baby, iron their own shirt and scrub their own shit off the toilet. It’ll save you a lot of problems later in life – and it might just end up being the leg-up you need on the way to the top.