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Has the fire gone out in our belly?
07 / 10 / 08
Radio 4’s “In Business” reported this week on the success of Norway’s boardroom quotas for women and asked why something similar wasn’t possible for the UK given our appalling record on equal pay, representation at senior levels and inequality in the amount of domestic labour carried out in the home. Indeed, the presenter Peter Day expressed his incomprehension that women in Britain weren’t screaming for change.
It’s 30 years since Britain’s first sex discrimination legislation. Has the fire gone out in our belly? Where are the young feminists? Where are the angry old women? Perhaps our silence can be explained by satisfaction that some visible progress at least is being made, perhaps by our aversion to kicking up a fuss and upsetting those who still hold the power in the workplace. Or perhaps we believe that since equality of the sexes has been accepted in principle, indeed enshrined in law, then the battle is won.
Practice follows principle at a snails pace, we’re told by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and we may have to be patient. Yet most of the revolutions we have witnessed throughout history, from the French revolution to Women’s Suffrage, have accelerated when pressure swelled from the ground up. Surely it is time to get back onto the streets and say “Enough of telling us we’re welcome in boardrooms and then choosing yet another white male. Enough of paying us 20% less for the same work. Enough allowing us to do most of the domestic labour, so our working week is 13 hours longer than yours.” Thirty years on, enough is enough.
