We need to get over our assumption that women don’t deserve to be rich
When women do become wealthy they are dismissed as unworthy
When I was 17, I interviewed Jeremy Paxman for my local paper. He was kind, probably because I asked questions like “What Winnie-the-pooh character do you most resemble?” (Eeyore, apparently). It was hardly the Spanish Inquisition.
Afterwards, Paxman sent me a fax – this being a more innocent time before smartphones, email or Twitter DMS – saying that he enjoyed our encounter and that if I’d decided on a career in journalism, he was sure I’d make a success of it. However, he cautioned, I would never be rich. On the plus side, I’d have a wonderful time and get to work with irreverent colleagues.
And so it has come to pass. I am not rich. But, then, I didn’t nurture that ambition as a teenager. As an adult, I’ve never asked for a pay rise and I’m not alone: recent research by Mintel showed that, on average, 42per cent of men feel confident about asking for a salary increase compared with just 22per cent of women. Is it that we don’t think we’re qualified for the big bucks? Or simply that we feel it’s somehow impolite or overly “aggressive” to ask?
I was thinking of this this week when the BBC revealed that its top 12 earners were all white men. Gary Lineker is at the top with a £1.75million salary. Claudia Winkleman, the highest-paid woman, lags behind, earning between £370,000 and £379,000
(not including
Strictly). The gender pay gap at the BBC is symbolic of a deeper cultural issue. Because if I were to ask you to imagine a rich, successful person, you would probably picture a white man in a suit.
I grew up in an era where popular representations of wealth were almost exclusively male, typified by Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street, who declared that “greed is good” as he prowled the trading floor in a pair of striped trouser braces.
Over the years, the notion that rich was a male attribute gained momentum. In music videos, it was always male rappers who flashed the cash and drank champagne on superyachts. On Dragons’ Den, there seemed only ever to be one token women. And it is a male hedge-fund king at the centre of the television drama, Billions, not a female one. In America, a study conducted by the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism in 2013 found that, of 11,927 speaking roles in the top-grossing films and TV shows released between 2006 and 2011, only two female characters were shown in the executive office of major corporations. Not a single woman was depicted at the top of the financial sector. Cultural representation is important because if high-flying women are not depicted onscreen, then it’s more difficult to imagine ourselves into a position of realistic aspiration. Simply put: if you can’t see it, you’re less likely to think you can be it. Which is probably partly why I never considered being rich as a viable ambition. It also goes some way towards explaining why women are not conditioned to believe we deserve a fat salary.
Against this, is it any surprise that female chief executives in the FTSE 100 are outnumbered, still, by bosses called David?
When women do break through and become wealthy, they are routinely dismissed as unworthy or trashy. Just look at the outcry surrounding Kylie Jenner, who is on the cover of the latest issue of Forbes for having built up a £685million cosmetics fortune in less than three years. (They dressed her in a suit, of course, because male tailoring remains the easiest visual shorthand for power).
Instead of applauding her success, Jenner was derided because Forbes had the temerity to call her “self-made” when she comes from a famous family (Kim Kardashian is her half-sister). Yes, Jenner has been on-screen from the age of nine, but she didn’t inherit a cosmetics company from her parents. I can’t remember a similar slew of criticism being directed towards Travis Knight, the son of Nike founder Phil Knight, when he was handed control of more than 38 million shares of Nike stock (a stake worth $2.3billion).
If anything, we need more Kylie Jenners to counteract the prevailing notion that it’s only men who deserve to be rich. We need to reshape our cultural perceptions so that all women feel more comfortable asking for a pay rise – and we don’t have to wear a suit to do it.