The Great Debate UK
All merit is equal – but some merit is more equal
- Dr. Savita Kumra is a senior lecturer at Brunel Business School. The opinions expressed are her own. Reuters will host a “follow-the-sun” live blog on Monday, March 8, 2010, International Women’s Day. Please tune in.-
As we approach International Women’s Day, the usual excitement is in the air. A time when the contributions, progress and outstanding impact that women make to everyday society is celebrated is surely a time for some pride amongst us as women, but perhaps also a pause for some reflection.
While the great strides women have made in every aspect of public and private life cannot be denied, what can also not be denied is that there is some way to go in many walks of public life.
In 2008, 14.3 million women were in the UK workforce, compared with 16.9 million men (ONS, 2008). In the 2008 ‘Sex and Power Report’ published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, we see that in the UK women comprise 19.3 percent of members of parliament in 2008 compared with 18.1 percent in 2003. In business, 11 percent of directors (executive and non-executive) in FTSE 100 companies were women, up from 8.6 percent in 2003. Progress has also been made in public appointments, with women comprising 26.6 percent of civil service top management in 2008, compared with 22.9 percent in 2003, and 9.6 percent of Senior judiciary (high court judge and above) in 2008, rising from 6.8 percent in 2003.
“The Sex and Power Report” indicates that though progress has been made, the rate of progress is cause for some concern. When assessed against these measures, we see that it will take 73 years to gain gender equality in FTSE 100 companies at board level; 27 years to achieve equality in top management in the Civil Service and perhaps most worryingly of all, 200 years to achieve an equal number of women in parliament (EHRC, 2008).
The report notes that it is important to understand these findings in the context of the impact they have on women, but also in the broader context of what effects this failure to tap into the talent of women will have on the economy and the country overall.
Old fashioned and inflexible ways of working are preventing us from identifying and tapping into talent which comes in a variety of forms and can be found in a number of places. The nature of the world is changing and so is the nature of our economy and the way in which work is done; it is time for employers to catch up.
Glass ceiling remains unbreakable by all but a few
- Lindsey Nefesh-Clarke is the founder of Women’s Worldwide Web – an online charitable organisation designed to help empower women with access to micro-finance loans, education, mentoring and networking. She has an MBA from ESCP Europe Business School and is a Board Director of Enfants d’Asie. The opinions expressed are her own. Reuters will host a “follow-the-sun” live blog on Monday, March 8, 2010, International Women’s Day. Please tune in. -
As an educated European woman enjoying a fulfilling career, along with the majority of my female and male peers, the “angel in the house” curse and the “feminine mystique” malaise seem, in many ways, to have faded into history.
My peers and I can read the inspiring headlines “We did it” , knowing that women will soon constitute the majority of the U.S. workforce, knowing that there are nowadays more female than male university graduates in the U.S. and Europe, and that an increasing number of high-profile female role models are heading some of the world’s leading companies.
The courageous feminist struggles of our foremothers are not to be forgotten. But, in our new, post-industrial world, haven’t most of the critical legal and social battles for women like me been won? Isn’t it self-indulgent to bash on about the need to persist in the struggle for women’s empowerment and gender equality when my ostensible juggling act is to type a memo on my BlackBerry with one hand and operate the microwave with the other?
This International Women’s Day, I will be celebrating the heroism, resilience, resourcefulness, creativity and achievements of women worldwide, today and throughout history. Progress in women’s socioeconomic status over the past century has been monumental.
And yet, as we assess the hard-won accomplishments of women around the globe, one year before the centenary of International Women’s Day and following the 30th anniversary of the landmark Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women, I can’t help asking whether this year’s International Women’s Day is less a cause for celebration and more a moment for sadness and acute concern.
Some facts: approximately 1.3 billion people live in absolute poverty and the majority of them are women; women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours but earn only one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than one-tenth of the world’s property ; nearly a billion people in the world are illiterate and two thirds of them are women; it is estimated that a woman dies every minute as a result of problems in pregnancy and childbirth, mostly in the global South, and the vast majority are preventable; one in three women worldwide is beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused ; it is estimated that 100 million females are missing from the planet as a result of sex-selective abortion, discriminatory nutrition and health care in childhood and routine violence against women, a “gendercide” that « far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century » .
I’m looking forward to the “follow-the-sun” live blog on Monday, March 8th. It seems fitting, on International Women’s Day, to bring people together to ask how far we have come, in both hemispheres, and to think about how we can go further in our ambition to make the world a more fair place.
It’s exciting to see that the conversation is already inspiring connections between like-spirited people across the globe. Bravo to Reuters for initiating this blog.
Please stop playing this worn-out old record. Women born many decades ago may still have some disadvantages, but any young woman who blames her sex for her failures needs to get real, and the evidence that in Western cultures boys are now the disadvantaged sex becomes stronger every year. It is impossible to be fair to everyone – including males – while refighting old identity politics battles that have already been won. Do you think that women should get half the seats on FTSE 100 boards even if more men want them? If so you are not in favour of promotion on merit, but of sexual discrimination against men. International Women’s Day is sexist and should be scrapped.