Reading the Guardian I stumbled on a review of Natasha Walter's NEW book. Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. In 1998 she wrote "The New Feminism". The personal was no longer the political ...
Now Ms. Walters is admitting that she had been perhaps overly optimistic... Mo Mowlan, Clare Short and Harriet Harman were just elected to the British Parliament (and of course there was Helen Clark et al in New Zealand). Ms. Walters now says:
I really felt that we were on an irresistible journey. There was still this big gap to close, but I felt that we wanted to close it, and it was possible to close it, and therefore we would. We were in a virtuous circle. And what I feel now is that policy changes are not enough, because the culture is still very resistant to change. The book's subtitle is The Return of Sexism, and while I don't really think sexism ever went away, it's stronger than it was. It's as though something crept in by the backdoor – and we turned around and it's everywhere, and you just think, 'OK, we've got to deal with this again'The reasons for this change of heart are, of course, many. In the last ten years or so Ms. Walters has been praised and scorned for her earlier work... she has had a couple of kids... so on and so forth. For me, the key though lies with her age. She was born in 1967. In 2000 she was 33. She is now in her 40's and is likely only now discovering the surprising state of gender relations ...
It is not just the burden of house hold chores and child care which distort women's careers. For those women seeking advancement the glass ceiling is real... unmarried and childless women make up the majority of female executives in many places; yet despite decades of academic and vocational achievement, only few women hold top jobs.
In their 20's and 30's many women may enjoy a sense of 'equality' with men at work. They truly feel equal to men of a similar age (or rank) and they may even be paid the same and so on. But then, as now, the majority of the bosses are men.
And, as a friend suggested a number of years ago, for the most part the relationship between young women and men they work for remains characterized by what my friend called "sexual". Now this is a tricky label as the relationship between young women and their male bosses is not, I imagine, at all sexual, at least for the most part. A better label might be to call it 'gendered'. Although in a way the sexual label describes many aspects of the relationship between young women and men in the work place these days. This relationship is often characterized by women playing their assigned role as young women or girls ie looking or trying to look good, being smart but not intellectual, ambitious but not bitchy and, most importantly, being the subordinate helper. But for the sake of avoiding misunderstandings, I will call this role the "gendered role".
My friends point was that while they are relatively young, say in their 20's and 30's, women and men have a dominantly gendered relationship. But, her experience also suggested that this relationship changed as the women got older ... it sort of froze ...
One reason so few women are promoted, my friend suggested, was that women needed a new kind of relationship collegial relations among managers. The gendered role no longer worked - for a number of reasons. One big reason why it didn't work was that as women got older, the role was just not right. As women age, they find it harder to play the gendered role - even if they wanted to. Even with hair dye and face lifts, it is hard work because this role is reserved for young women.
As they get older, women need a new kind of role, one in which the relationship with men was no longer defined by gender. Until there was this role, my friend believes, there will be a certain discomfort or lack of ease which makes men want to promote men, rather than women. This lack of ease or collegiality was not necessarily apparent between individual men and women - individual men might have no discomfort working with women - but this dis-ease appears with groups and is felt at the partnership or Board meeting... when the guys get together.
Admittedly, this dis-ease is shared by women... ask a woman out for dinner with friends if the presence of a guy changes the nature of the event. But a dinner party is one thing, work is another. The difficulty in developing collegial relationships at work is bad news for women who wish to climb the ladder of corporate success. And like aging, it comes as a surprise.
When it happens, when you notice that you don't have the same kind of relationship with the men who run the organization as your male counterparts, you may just think again about feminism, sexism and the illusion of equality...
Recent Comments