NEWS
Jobs for the boys
www.guardian.co.uk
For women, class stubbornly remains one of the most important factors in determining career success
Melissa Benn
Monday January 5, 2004 The Guardian
One of the less enviable tasks of the Equal Opportunities Commission is to keep stating the fairly obvious to the largely indifferent at frequent intervals. But today's report, fetchingly entitled Sex and Power, deserves a wider airing; for here is a short, sharp reminder of how few women, even now, have reached the top in modern Britain. In 2004, women make up just 9% of newspaper editors and senior business leaders, 7% of top police officers and senior judges, and 18% of Westminster MPs.
As the report calmly states: "No one can argue any more that it's just a matter of time until more women make it to the top - there have been talented women coming up in business, public life and politics for years." Sex and Power fingers the main culprits as employers who have failed to offer women the chance to work more flexibly (and so rise up the ranks), and a host of old - and new - boys' networks.
Certainly, the main problem now facing ambitious women is the politics of work and time. Most committed parents are unable, or unwilling, to put in the absurdly demanding hours expected of so many jobs as you climb to the top. One of the few cheering statistics in Sex and Power concerns the civil service, where 23% of senior posts are now filled by women; here, at least, women are finding it possible to combine family with seniority. But in the rougher and readier worlds of journalism, policing, and the City there are still very few women and even fewer mothers who make it right to the top.
But let's reverse the proposition just for a moment and ask, not what hinders a woman from rising to the top of her profession but, instead, what factors might help her to do so. Suddenly, a whole new set of elements emerge, such as the role of class, connections and confidence, all of which fall outside the remit of the EOC - or indeed of modern mainstream feminism. Yet you can't talk about gender inequality without talking about class.
Britain has a long history of women from well-connected backgrounds achieving great things in national life, figures from the 19th and early 20th century such as Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Emmeline Pankhurst and Beatrice Webb. Such women were often reformers and advocates for their sex. A hundred and more years on, women from similar backgrounds are still likely to be prominent in a number of different roles.
It is striking, for instance, how many political women - like so many political men - come from influential or directly political backgrounds; Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt, Hilary Armstrong, Gwyneth Dunwoody, Margaret Jay, Estelle Morris - to name but a few.
In journalism, for every working-class Julie Burchill you are more than likely to come across the byline of a Lawson, a Wintour, a Toynbee (or, just occasionally, a Benn). One of Britain's rare leading legal ladies, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, comes from an eminent legal family. Two of Britain's most prominent businesswomen - Sarah Hogg, the first woman to chair a FTSE-100 company, and the dotcom entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox - were endowed, early on, with exceptional connections.
This is not to impugn the skills and drive of any individual, simply to point out the indelible, often incredible, advantage that the accident of birth and money, usually topped by an Oxbridge education, will bestow. Education remains, unsurprisingly, the key. Even in 2004 Britain is a society that sorts its children, essentially according to class, by the tender age of 11.
Education remains such a contested area precisely because everyone understands how it connects to class, which in turn connects to confidence, possibly the single most important ingredient for career success, particularly for girls.
This is not the usual stuff of EOC reports either, but it has formed the heart of virtually every private conversation I've had on women and ambition. Once upon a time, Margaret Thatcher's story was at the heart of the debate: how did a humourless girl from Grantham find the daring that eluded so many of her peers? Nowadays it is more likely to be the sobering story of Estelle Morris, a kind of Thatcher's tale in reverse.
Yet Morris's experience is so important because it also tells us something profound if apparently more personal about women at the top.
Here, after all, was a skilled child-free woman, with a strong family background in politics, who had the patronage of her leader. Yet she gave up her cabinet post, a decision which had little to do with flexible working but everything to do with the alchemy of pressure and temperament.
There will be few women who do not recognise that still, small internal voice, the one which hovers between an irrational fear of being "found out" and a recognition of raw worldly unfairness. Sex and Power is just one more confirmation that the game truly does remain stacked against Britain's most talented women.
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