At last. At long last. In terms of sheer numbers of people there is no single equality issue facing Labour as great as the gap in power and money between men and women. Now, after years of campaigning, it looks as if the government may finally be grasping the scale of the issue. Tony Blair's weekend announcement of a women and work commission gives this generation its best chance so far of the great cultural shift millions of women so desperately need.
The commission was sold in the press as something rather less dramatic - a blow against the "sexism and the City" culture of the finance houses, which has led to large payouts after court cases about groping, and a sexist culture generally. Tackling that is worthwhile, though it is somehow no great surprise that the macho culture of the City is as bad, or even worse than, in the Football Association.
Nor should we underestimate the power of these stories to affect lower-octane, less highly paid jobs. Every designer-suited woman who fights for her rights with the Porsche-driving, transatlantic big boys of the Square Mile, and wins, is being observed by millions of ordinary female office workers, quietly applying the same logic to their own situation. But simply to focus more attention on a handful of premier league cases would be a terrible failure of nerve. It is very easy for a government to crossly point the finger at a few high-profile cases. The real politics of women and work is much more important, and much tougher too.
The pay gap remains a monstrous injustice, but it is an injustice that has become structural and embedded right across the economy. Tackling pay, and the childcare issues around it, will provoke a major protest from the very same business interests New Labour has been so careful to woo for so long. Even women working full-time earn on average 18% less than their male counterparts. For women working part-time the gap is an astonishing 40%. It has narrowed since Labour came to power, partly because of the minimum wage. But the narrowing has been, frankly, pathetic in scale.
With far more women working than 30 years ago - the female employment rate is now 70% against 42% in 1971 - Labour has come nowhere near achieving wage equality. And this failure has nothing to do with education, since girls are doing far better than boys at almost every level where it counts.
The commission will have to look both at the politics of the workplace, and at wider cultural arguments, particularly around childcare and what the good life really means. There is no doubt that the areas where women work - education, health, public administration, hotels, catering - tend to be lower paid than, say, manufacturing or financial services. But women are disproportionately stuck in certain sectors because the rest of the economy has been so bad at offering flexible working, and so insensitive about the physical demands of childbearing and rearing, regarded by too many male managers as some kind of weird personal hobby.
A stronger governmental drive on flexible working for fathers and mothers, pushing an agenda that accepts child-rearing as central to any healthy society, would get women into a wider variety of jobs and would, by that alone, begin to close the pay gap. It is fundamentally wrong that a limited number of public sector employees are taking the strain of offering decent maternity and paternity deals, giving much of the private sector a free ride.
This cultural change is the sort of crusade which could help snuff out growing female cynicism about New Labour. I only hope that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, when accepting Patricia Hewitt's case for the new commission, realised that it conflicts with their own favoured US economic model of long hours and burn-out employment.
Forget the odd Ukip Neanderthal who wants women to spend longer cleaning behind the fridge. The opposition will come from powerful business interests. But it may also come from some women.
I belong to the generation of women who grew up seeing their mothers frustrated and bored by domestic drudgery. They were often women who had been well educated and who had aspirations for more interesting lives but who found the post-war labour market didn't offer them anything like the opportunities we have today. They were the women whose lives, and in my case exhortations, formed the feminism of my generation.
Eloquent, often strident, but eventually glib, we thought we'd won the war in less than a decade. We would "have it all". We would hold down good jobs while simultaneously raising liberated, thoughtful children in partnership with the new men who would be happy to work fewer hours but more efficiently, and share the chores at home. Yes, there was a sex war. But we had won it.
This was, broadly speaking, a lie. We won many battles. We won legislative battles, battles over abortion and the grosser forms of sexual chauvinism. Many of us did get through university and did get good jobs. We are inclined to beat ourselves up over our children, but generally, we did a fair enough job there too. The trouble was, the labour market did not change enough, and men did not change enough, and because of that millions of women felt horribly let down. It was as if we had won the form of the victory without the substance. Our lives were very different from the myth of terrifying superwomen: a perpetual round of exhaustion and guilt.
Now the post-feminists are rising in influence, as eloquent as we once were. And as glib. They proclaim the values of home-making and child-rearing against the brittle, shallow world of work. Perhaps their misty-eyed view of domesticity, a Nigella-ish fantasy of freshly baked muffins, developed because they did not see the deep frustration of postwar mothers. They are revisiting abortion, asking whether childcare is the answer, and seem readier to accept that boys will be boys.
This inter-generational feminist argument can become angry and personal. No one should try to take away a woman's right to choose, to work full-time, part-time, flexibly or not at all. But without a stronger push towards equality, there won't be a proper choice.
We need the new commission to push forward because of the millions of women who need better lives, fairer pay, more interesting job choices and less drudgery. For my generation it is about keeping faith with our mothers and changing the culture that treats women as second-class citizens. It is about persuading the business world, and the post-feminist younger sisters, that life need not be so tough for working women. A government which tried to do that would be worth re-electing.
© Guardian News & Media 2008
Published: 7/29/2004
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