Glossy magazines, broadsheet newspapers, websites, books and television documentaries all seem to tell the same story when it comes to discussing women’s experiences at work. We’re told that life is ‘still a struggle for working women’; that ‘four in ten American women face workplace discrimination’ and ‘gender inequality in the workplace goes beyond the pay gap’. Listicles specify ‘eight big problems for women in the workplace’ or ‘three key problems women in banking now face’. All working women, it seems, face an onslaught of obstacles, discrimination and microaggressions. They are paid less than the same men who speak over them in meetings (‘manterruptions’), take credit for their ideas (‘bropriation’) and then ask them to make the coffee (maybe deMANding?).
Yet a look at the statistics tells us that women’s achievements in education follow them into the workplace: not only are more women employed than ever before, they are entering the professions and taking more of the top jobs too. In this chapter we consider the experiences of women at work today and, in teasing out reality from in-between numerical successes and lamentable narratives, consider what, if anything, is really holding working women – and men – back.
Women’s lives do not grind to an undignified halt the moment they leave school; the progress girls have made in education is paralleled by increased opportunities in the workplace. In Britain and many other developed countries, more women are in paid employment than ever before. In July 2016, close to 70 per cent of British women aged 16–64 worked outside the home, the highest figure since records began.54 Among women graduates with no dependent children, this rises to almost 90 per cent.55 In both Britain and America, women now comprise just under half of the total labour force, 46 per cent in the UK56 and 47 per cent in the US.57 In historical terms, this growth in the number of women workers represents not just a dramatic economic shift but a real social change too: it means that women of all ages, with children and without, are now likely to be in paid work, working at all levels and across all employment sectors.
In America, a smaller proportion of women are in work than in Britain; just 57 per cent of women are employed outside the home.58 Black women are most likely to work and Asian women are least likely to have paid employment (60 per cent and 56 per cent respectively).59 In part, these lower figures can be explained by the larger age range covered by the statistics: in the UK employment stops being recorded at state retirement age. If we look specifically at American women aged between 25 and 54, we see that 69 per cent are in employment – almost the same as in the UK overall.
In Britain, as in many other European countries where legislation to extend maternity leave and women’s rights at work has been passed, the most significant change in recent decades is the rise of the working mother. British women with children are almost as likely to be in work (74 per cent) as those without (75 per cent).60 In America, the only developed country that still does not guarantee women paid maternity leave, 70 per cent of women with children aged under 18 were either in work or actively looking for work in 2015. This figure was slightly lower for married mothers (68 per cent) and higher for unmarried mothers (75 per cent).61 Elsewhere, the figures are higher still; 83 per cent of Swedish women with children work.
It’s not just that more women are working nowadays: they are taking more of the top jobs too. The increasing number of female graduates has had an impact in the workplace. In America, women now make up 57 per cent of workers in professional and related occupations62 while British women take exactly half of all professional jobs.63 Many of these women are employed in traditionally ‘female’ occupations; education alone accounts for over one million British women workers.64 However, whereas teaching was, not that long ago, one of the very few options available to women graduates, today the brightest women are more likely to reject teaching with its comparatively low wages and perceived low status.
More women are now entering professions that were once the preserve of men; in the UK there are now more women than men working as veterinary surgeons, doctors and lawyers. There are more women than men at junior levels in accountancy and academia while entrants to dentistry are almost equally split between men and women. The scale and pace of women’s entry into once male-dominated professions can perhaps best be illustrated with veterinary science. In the US, the proportion of female graduates in this area leapt from 11 per cent in 1970 to 80 per cent in 2013.65 This closely parallels the UK where, in 2014, 78 per cent of veterinary science undergraduates were female.66 As a result of the shift in student demographics, women now account for 60 per cent of practising vets.
Women are not as well represented at the very top of the professions and we will explore why this might be the case later in this chapter and in the two subsequent chapters. Nonetheless, women’s entry into the professions is significant: it suggests there are few practical or cultural barriers preventing highly educated, often middle-class women from choosing whatever career they are inclined towards.
Women’s employment today represents, in historical terms, a significant social and cultural change. However, many working-class women always combined domestic responsibilities with paid work either carried out at home, in other people’s homes as domestic servants, in family businesses, or in particular industries such as pottery and textiles. Upper- and middle-class women who needed to earn money had fewer employment options available to them: they were limited to ‘suitable’ occupations such as teaching or nursing. The most significant recent changes, then, are not in the total number of women working, but in the rise of the middle-class career woman, the increase in the number of working mothers and the challenge to previously gender segregated employment practices.
In the twentieth century, women entered the workforce in large numbers during the two world wars. However, as soon as peace broke out, employers, trade unions and government campaigns endeavoured to get women back into the home. Women were legally barred from certain occupations, or from being promoted beyond a particular level. Women were prevented from working once married or pregnant. These formal restrictions were in addition to the myriad informal social barriers and practical obstacles that kept women from being employed. As we will explore in more detail in Chapter Eight, second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s fought for women’s right to work with considerable success. But even into the 1980s women’s jobs were considered easily expendable. When employers needed more workers, women were recruited but when recession loomed they were first in line to lose their jobs, with home, marriage and children considered a ready-made alternative to employment.
Today, thanks in large part to a previous generation of feminist campaigners, the days when women were barred from certain professions or their progress legally restricted are long gone. Nowadays, not only do women face few formal restrictions on the type of work they can do, many employers also seek to overcome informal barriers to women’s progress through mentorship schemes, recruitment drives and ‘family friendly’ working policies. This is not to suggest that women, especially when they have children, face no obstacles to career success; rather, as we will explore in Chapter Four, the problems women face combining motherhood and work today are very different to those they encountered in the past.
Women’s employment prospects have altered fundamentally in a very short space of time. As a result, it’s easy to forget that older women today entered the workplace when all kinds of obstacles to their employment still existed. For example, it was only in 1977, when the Employment Protection Act came into effect in Britain, that women had a legal right to return to work after having had a baby. Before this time, pregnancy was a legitimate pretext for dismissal.67 Women who began their working lives before 1995 entered the workplace at a time when female graduates were still in a minority. Today, these quite stark generational differences mask the full extent of recent changes.
The workplace is changing from the youngest members up. So, while a majority of accountants, doctors and lawyers over the age of 50 are male, the reverse is true for those under the age of 40. This generational lag needs to be kept in mind when discussing inequalities higher up in the professions. Although women comprise 62 per cent of lawyers, fewer than one-third are partners; but as the new female entrants progress through their careers, they will eventually swell the senior ranks too. Much is made of the apparent underrepresentation of women in senior positions today but to get to the top of any profession often requires many years of experience and several incremental promotions. People are unlikely to have amassed such a portfolio in their twenties or thirties. Feminism, with its focus on younger middle-class women, finds it difficult to account for the experiences of older women.
Women began to enter the workplace in ever greater numbers at the end of the 1980s. The nature of work itself began to change at this time with a shift away from manufacturing and heavy industry towards services and work that required ‘soft skills’ rather than physical strength. The employment sectors traditionally dominated by men were now in decline. Factories, steel works and coal mines were on the way out; in came call-centres, retail parks and care homes. Men have borne the brunt of this structural change: in Britain only 79 per cent of men aged between 16 and 64 are working today, a sharp decrease from 92 per cent in 1971.68
In America, proportionally fewer women are employed today than 20 years ago. After climbing for six decades, the percentage of working women aged between 25 and 54 peaked in 1999 at 74 per cent,69 while latest statistics suggest just over 69 per cent of women in this age group are in work.70 There are several possible explanations for this fall; what’s immediately significant is that over the same period, male employment rates also fell, and to a far greater extent.
In both America and Britain, structural economic changes have disproportionately impacted upon working-class men.71 As a result, there are fewer well-paid jobs for men without formal qualifications than there were in the latter half of the twentieth century. Employers in the service sector look to recruit women rather than working-class men. More jobs nowadays, from medicine and business to retail and restaurants, seem better suited to women.
Despite women’s resounding success at entering the workplace and dominating the professions, and the decline in male working-class employment, a narrative of sexism and female disadvantage persists. Instead of celebrating women’s victories, we hear about sexist bosses, misogynistic air conditioning and men ‘microaggressing’ women through ‘manspreading’ in the office and ‘mansplaining’ in meetings. The message, coming at women and girls from every direction, is stark. As the authors of The New Soft War on Women put it: ‘while women are doing spectacularly well in universities, in the workplace it’s an opposite picture. Women are stalling out, and the higher they go, the harder it gets. A whole network of landmines is exploding women’s progress as they try to move ahead.’72
The rise of the working woman has been met by constant reminders that the workplace is a battleground where women have to negotiate sexism at every turn. A plethora of books offer women ‘battle tactics’ to combat the ‘sexist, subtly sexist, overtly sexist, and sometimes just oblivious behaviours that exist in even our most progressive offices’.73 Self-help manuals urge women to ‘Lean In’ and exercise ‘Feminine Authority’. ‘Glass wall success strategies’ compete with advice on how to shatter glass ceilings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, one survey tells us, ‘83% of women think gender discrimination exists in the workplace’.74
While metaphors of combat, war and battlegrounds may be over the top, the market for such books and the stories of workplace discrimination suggest something is not right for working women. There appears to be a growing chasm between women’s statistical success and personal experiences.
With few obstacles in the way of many women choosing professional careers, focus has shifted from the gender balance of entrants to the number of women at the top of any sector. The economist Vicky Pryce notes, ‘Even today 93 per cent of executive directors are men’, and ‘among the FTSE 250, women’s representation in the boardrooms is only just over 17 per cent’.75 One often quoted fact is that there are more Chief Executive Officers named John leading the UK’s top 100 companies than there are women.76 This truism hinges upon the fact that John was the most popular UK and Irish male Christian name throughout most of the twentieth century before slowly falling out of fashion in the 1970s. It reveals as much about the age of CEOs as it does their gender.
As we have already noted, pointing to a lack of women at the top of any profession misses the historical legacy that persists when the workplace changes rapidly. What’s more, a myopic focus on absent women from senior positions ignores both what has happened to men and the experiences of women who do not work at the very top of the career ladder.
Feminist self-help manuals for working women focus primarily on the concerns of women in elite occupations. In the case of Jessica Bennett’s Feminist Fight Club, this is largely New York women with high profile media careers. Bennett outlines problems women face at work such as ‘manterruption – a man interrupting a woman while she was trying to speak’ which has the effect of ‘causing us to clam up, lose our confidence, or cede credit for our work’. Or, ‘The Bropriator’ who:
… appropriates credit for another’s work: presenting the ideas of his team as his own, accepting credit for an idea that wasn’t his, or sometimes even doing nothing at all and still ending up with credit – a convenient reality of being born male, where credit is assumed.77
Challenging ‘manterupptions’ and ‘bropriators’ may make women in high-powered jobs feel better about themselves – although we can wonder at the need for a book to tell people how to have a simple conversation. But such advice is unlikely to be of much use to women with jobs rather than careers who are expected to carry out, rather than question, instructions.
Most women do not have corner offices to aspire towards. Neither do they receive bonus payments or have the flexibility to leave work early and then ‘pick up on email after the children are in bed’. Although the current crop of self-help career guides for middle-class women make token mentions of the particular problems experienced by women of colour, there is, for the most part, little attempt at understanding the experiences of working-class women.
At best there seems to be a hope that concentrating on middle-class women and getting more women into the top jobs will have knock-on benefits for all women. However, there is little evidence that this is the case. In universities, for example, women academics meet to discuss why there are so few female professors and how more women can be helped to secure promotion. Often they do so in a room booked by a woman and cleaned by a woman while eating sandwiches prepared by a woman – yet these women are rarely invited to sit at the table and discuss their career prospects.
For some campaigners, encouraging women to get promoted goes beyond ‘fight club’ tactics and circle time meetings. Pryce, writing in Why Women Need Quotas, suggests women are underrepresented on executive boards and that, ‘There is no way the current situation can be transformed except through legislation to fundamentally change society’s norms of what is and isn’t acceptable.’78 She argues companies need to have quotas in place to ensure women are represented on boards of directors.
However, as we have seen, even in the absence of legislation women are entering the workplace in greater numbers. In this regard, the demand for quotas to ensure a certain number of posts are filled by women appears to be a solution in search of a problem. Worse, quotas, like other forms of positive discrimination, undermine women with the implication that promotion has been granted on the basis of biology rather than merit. Women are quite capable of making it to the top without such special measures being put in place.
Feminist journalists and commentators do acknowledge that not all women experience the workplace in the same way. Some women are at more of a disadvantage than others. Pregnant women are a particular target: surveys tell us a fifth of women have been harassed at work while pregnant and ‘maternity discrimination is pushing people out of work’.79 Meanwhile, older women ‘are being forced out of the workforce’ while another study shows that ‘women face weight-based discrimination in the workplace’. Muslim women experience ‘triple discrimination at work’ and transgender women ‘face challenges when looking for work’. For some women – just like some men – the journey from graduation to Chief Executive Officer may be seamless. Other women may not have such ambitions and, even if they do, may find they face setbacks and obstacles on their way.
One problem with differentiating women into ever more fragmented groups is that it ignores the experiences of the majority of women who are not fighting for a place on the board of directors. Alison Wolf, author of The XX Factor, reminds us that, ‘Most people, including most women, work to live rather than live to work.’ She explains this means that there are ‘two quite different groups of women’. While a small and elite group of women compete with men as equals for the top jobs with high salaries and bonus payments, a majority of women still have traditionally ‘female’ jobs that first and foremost provide the necessary income to keep home and family together.80
The middle-class preoccupations of feminist campaigns and the tendency to see women’s problems in the workplace as primarily caused by male behaviour preclude solutions that would help improve the lives of all men and women. Higher wages and a more flexible approach to working hours, for example, give people more freedom and control over their lives. Extra money can pay for the child care; cars and convenience food that help life run more smoothly.
Rather than fighting for higher wages for everyone, feminist campaigns represent the concerns of a small group of middle-class women. One of the more bizarre examples is the demand that companies have ‘period policies’ to allow women to take days off while menstruating.81 Such ‘progress’ might be great for women who work in creative industries – although it rehabilitates the sexist assumptions of hormonal and irrational women in a radical feminist guise. Perhaps fortunately, then, such campaigns are unlikely to be extended to women who work as secretaries or receptionists. If women in less prestigious or flexible jobs take a day off because of their period they may lose a day’s pay.
The dominant feminist narrative suggests all working women have interests in common: they all face sexism and discrimination at the hands of sexist bosses and colleagues. At the same time, we are also presented with an identity-driven division of women on the basis of weight, skin colour, age and sexuality. In this way, the problems faced by the most disadvantaged women appear to apply equally to the most privileged of the sisterhood. In reality, women in lower paid jobs have far more to gain by fighting for their interests alongside men in a similar position than they do hoping for crumbs from the feminist top table.
It can seem as if feminism today has little to say to women who have jobs rather than careers. Wolf reminds us that, ‘In 2010, fewer than 2000 people worldwide worked for Facebook. Walmart’s workforce that year numbered over 2 million; a million more than at the century’s turn and up from 21,000 in 1975.’ She points out that for many men and women employment is still quite rigidly segregated along gender lines; ‘Take the US. If you pick the twenty top female occupations – meaning the ones that employ the largest absolute numbers of women – you find that, in seven of them, the workforce is over 90 per cent female.’
A majority of women today still work in what have long been considered typically ‘female’ occupations. In the UK, women make up 82 per cent of the workforce in the caring and leisure industries, 77 per cent in administrative and secretarial work and 63 per cent in sales and customer service. Pryce notes that one-third of all the women who worked part time in 2013 were employed in sales and customer service jobs earning relatively low median earnings. Although Scandinavian countries are held aloft as models of best feminist employment practice, they are also the most segregated along gender lines because, as Wolf notes, ‘they have gone the furthest in outsourcing traditional female activities and turning unpaid home-based “caring” into formal employment.’82
In Scandinavia, as in much of the developed world, the labour market is separated into an elite group of both men and women who work as equals in professional occupations and the vast majority of the population who work in lower paid and gender-segregated traditional jobs. Yet feminism, and its preoccupation with the concerns of a minority of elite women, focuses our attention on a tiny fraction of the workforce. There are more campaigns concerned with getting women into senior posts than there are into improving the pay and conditions of women who work for the minimum wage – perhaps cleaning, cooking and child minding for the Chief Executive Officers.
Feminism today, with its elite concerns, comes to be about enforcing a new etiquette through regulating people’s interactions with each other. One example of how this plays out in practice is provided by the self-styled ‘fearless feminist’ and barrister Charlotte Proudman. Proudman made headlines in 2015 after she made public a private message sent to her via the professional networking site LinkedIn. An older male solicitor had got in touch with Proudman to tell her he thought her profile picture was ‘stunning’. For the crime of sending this misplaced and unwanted compliment, Proudman exposed the man to ridicule, first on Twitter and then through the pages of the national press and television news studios.
The message to men in the workplace is to think twice before engaging with female colleagues. The message to women is, perhaps ironically, far worse: you are constantly at risk at work, if not from misogynistic insults then from sexist compliments. You can’t be expected to laugh such comments off or joke with colleagues. Instead you must be traumatized and display your trauma to the world. Meanwhile, human resources departments have another example to use for their equality and diversity training workshops and there is an increase in the micromanagement of relationships in the workplace.
Challenging this perception of women as oppressed at work is a risky strategy. In 2016 Kevin Roberts was suspended from his post as chairman of the global advertising company Saatchi and Saatchi for suggesting gender bias was not an issue in the advertising industry.83 Roberts argued that women are working in advertising in ever greater numbers, but they choose not to apply for promotion. For this he was taken to task by high profile women in the industry who poured scorn on the idea that women’s absence from the top jobs was down to choice. They accused Roberts of offending women and argued he should simply not have been allowed to say what he did.
But Roberts has a point: women are doing well in advertising. They account for 46.4 per cent of all those employed in the sector and 30.5 per cent of senior executives. The proportion of women creative directors rose from just 3 per cent in 2010 to 11.5 per cent in 2014.84 It is clearly worth investigating why more women do not choose to become creative directors – although the long and anti-social hours that make the role incompatible with family life probably provides us with a big clue. This is worth discussing.
If any debate about gender equality in the workplace that does not start by paying homage to women as perpetually disadvantaged is closed down immediately, then an honest appraisal of women’s working lives today will be impossible. We need to be able to acknowledge the progress women have made – as well as what still needs to be achieved. Part of this discussion needs to be about individual choice. Women are not a homogenous group who either all want to be the next CEO or are all frustrated stay-at-home mums.
It shouldn’t be outrageous to suggest that some women may want to concentrate on their careers in their twenties and thirties but then take a step back for a while when they have children. As Roberts argued, it’s not just women but young men too who are deciding that they have priorities other than making it to the top of the business hierarchy. No longer do young workers think lifelong loyalty to one company is a worthwhile commitment or that sacrificing a social life or family life for a promotion is aspirational.
Over time, people’s priorities have changed and the world of work has changed. It might be entirely positive that younger workers are rejecting long hours and loyalty or it might suggest that work is uninspiring or that young people are unable to commit to projects beyond their immediate self-interest. What’s certain is that for many people work is simply not the source of emotional fulfilment and mental stimulation that both bosses and campaigners may expect us to believe. Ultimately, what matters is not so much the personal choices individuals make but that people have enough money and support – including access to good quality and affordable childcare – in order to be able to make these choices as freely as possible.
There is more that can be done to allow people greater freedom and control in juggling work with family responsibilities and personal interests. However, claiming that women have no choices to make, or are limited by a patriarchal and discriminatory working environment, is disingenuous and does women themselves few favours. Women at work have proved they are equal to men; it is now feminism that is telling them they are not and never will be.
Feminist campaigners present a view of the workplace as hostile to women primarily because of the behaviour and attitudes of individual men. But this does not stand up to scrutiny and may well contribute towards putting some women off applying for the top jobs. The determination to view the workplace solely through the prism of gender helps no one. Experiences of work vary far more according to the type of job someone does than their gender – people working in low-skilled and low-paid jobs in catering or in retail, for example, experience work differently to women working in advertising or accountancy, for instance, who are better paid but may be expected to be permanently available for clients. The interests of women are better secured in conjunction with their male colleagues rather than by opposing them.
A more nuanced discussion of the difficulties we all face in our working lives is not possible while feminist campaigners insist on scoring workplace victories according to gender. We need to move beyond a battle of the sexes in order to get more opportunities and freedom for everyone. In the next chapter we explore the position of women at work further through the particular issue of the gender pay gap.