Hillary will finally settle the gender issue when she takes the keys of the White House
SPEAKING as a woman, here are four challenges I face in politics that men do not. Number one is my appearance. I have never regarded myself as any kind of clothes horse – far from it – but nevertheless, each public appearance requires me to give careful consideration to my outfit, my shoes, my hair and my make-up.
What I want to do is talk about the finer details of my new education policy for underprivileged children, or analyse the deep and evolving trade challenges facing Britain in the era of Brexit.
But I run the risk that none of it will be heard if I match the wrong skirt with the wrong blouse, or if I am judged in any way to have deviated from the accepted dress code, or changed my hair. As Nicola Sturgeon responded when told that Barack Obama had removed all unnecessary choices from his life, including the colour of suit he wears, in order to focus solely on the important ones a president must make, ‘I’m a woman, I don’t have that luxury.’
Having to treat such a peripheral issue so seriously consumes both mental bandwidth and physical time, and to be honest with you it can be a bit spirit-sapping.
Number two: Online abuse. Those of you who regularly engage in political discussion on Twitter and Facebook will get your share of it. But, trust me, you don’t get it like I do. I’m not just wrong, or bad at my job – I’m a witch or a bitch or a cow or a slut. I am sent rape and murder threats.
This comes from rage-filled men who launch their misogynistic bile from behind pseudonyms and who are therefore almost impossible to identify or trace. Who knew there were so many of them? How do they treat their partners or daughters, if they have them? Or their mothers? My male colleagues’ gender does not figure in the abuse they receive, for some reason.
Number three: The cads. There are lots of good people in politics, from all generations and backgrounds. But there are also some whose approach to having women in their midst remains what we might call ‘unreconstructed’. I’m thinking of one notorious former minister who treats women as an intellectual sub-species in formal meetings, and on social occasions insists on stroking their hair and rubbing their shoulders. He has even been known to try to order for them in restaurants. Female civil servants would only go into his office in twos, for safety, but he was such a powerful bully they were afraid to speak out.
Number four: The ‘dog on its hind legs’ issue. When told that a friend had heard a woman preach in church, Samuel Johnson remarked: ‘Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’
We’ve come a long way towards gender equality since then, but still, whenever a woman is elected or appointed to a significant new post for the first time the moment is greeted by acres of comment and analysis – look at this column, for heaven’s sake. I look forward to the moment when public life is largely gender blind. On the upside, we’re making progress towards that.
You will have drawn a number of conclusions from the image at the top of this page: that I have a soft, smooth complexion; that my eyes are deep pools of compassion that hint at a high degree of emotional intelligence; that I am, notwithstanding such qualities, a man and not a woman. I concur with each of these judgements. Equally, I did not want the last of them to exclude me from writing about the approach of what would undeniably be a major moment in the long journey towards gender equality: the election of Hillary Clinton as the 45th President of the US.
IDID not want to appear patronising or be accused of mansplaining, and so spoke to some of the women I know who hold prominent positions in public life. The points made above are an amalgam of some of what they said to me.
‘If women ruled the world…’ We’ve all heard the old line rolled out whenever some bloke in power has gone head to head with some other bloke in power and brought about a near apocalypse. It’s a line that’s about to be retired, replaced by ‘Now women rule the world…’ Just look at the line-up: in November, Mrs Clinton will become the single most powerful individual on the planet (unless America chooses the alternative, in which case I suggest we club together with the Mexicans and pay for a circular wall from sea to shining sea): Janet Yellen at the Federal Reserve; Angela Merkel, the most powerful person on the continent of Europe; Christine Lagarde at the IMF; Park Geun-hye in South Korea, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen, the veteran Sheikh Hasina Wazed in Bangladesh, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil (though dodgy Dilma has been suspended from power and may be heading for the pokey, proving virtue at least is not gender-specific.)
All this is before you get to the UK’s own freshly feminised political culture: Theresa May in Number 10, Nicola Sturgeon in Bute House, Ruth Davidson and Kezia Dugdale running the Holyrood opposition. And, of course, there’s the Queen, currently on the 13th prime minister of her long reign.
What is fascinating about Mrs Clinton’s elevation to the White House is how little attention is being paid to her gender. This may be because she’s been around the top end of government in one form or another for so long that she’s seen as one of the boys; perhaps it’s because she follows Barack Obama, who smashed through a considerably thicker glass ceiling eight years ago; maybe it’s because she stands as all humanity’s champion in the way of a truly planetshaking and grotesque outcome.
Or perhaps it’s because we no longer regard a woman taking the big job – this, the biggest of big jobs – as a matter worthy of comment.
In her speech on Thursday at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, Mrs Clinton devoted just six short sentences at the tail-end to the matter, and moved on.
I can understand why women might not want to make a big deal of what seems to me a clear tipping point, and to simply allow this overdue process of normalisation to take place without fuss. And it’s lazy to squeeze all women into the same box of character traits and expect immediate changes to the way global politics is run – Marine Le Pen, Europe’s highest-profile leader of the far Right, is currently ahead in the French presidential polls. Gender is certainly no guarantee of decency or competence.
But as a father of three daughters, I can’t be unexcited by what’s happening. I remember Miss Sturgeon telling me of the most rewarding aspect of her early months in office: ‘It actually took me quite by surprise when I became First Minister, just the number of women and girls, including quite young girls, that got in touch – and it was nothing to do with party politics or me necessarily as a person – it was just to say in different ways how much it meant to them because it meant they believed these things were possible.’
There’s a tonal difference too. Miss Davidson says that no matter how heated debates become in the Holyrood chamber, ‘we’re always civil to one another. We’ve never spoken about it but I think we have come up through situations and experienced abuse that has given us a shared idea of what are acceptable and non-acceptable criticisms, of what we want to perpetuate and demonstrate, of what would diminish us and what we’ve achieved.’
THERE remain generational battles to fight. Online misogyny continues untamed and on a disturbing scale. A survey by the Brexit-supporting pollster Lord Ashcroft found that 74 per cent of Leave voters in the recent EU referendum – the people who have decided our constitutional future for decades – see feminism as a ‘force for ill’.
Ultimately, the greatest counter to this knuckle-dragging is for women to get on with running things to the point that it’s seen as eccentric to even mention gender in that context. As a female academic friend puts it, ‘we internalise what we see around us. Having few women in top jobs means we question our own ability to achieve, often sub-consciously.’
She sees the possibility of culture change, too. ‘We need to be wary about assuming women are different to men in relation to how they lead, not least because if it’s only a few women who rise to top positions they do so in a world with quite set ideas about what makes a good leader, and women who succeed often have those characteristics – think Thatcher and May. However the more women we have in leadership positions, the greater chance of having diversity of leadership styles, which is healthy.’
So, that’s something else to shoot for. Perhaps, in the end, we’ll even stop caring about what they wear.