AA’s equality U-turn drove me round the bend

Now enshrined in most parts of the law, equality of the sexes has long been the goal of most institutions and workplaces. But in the haste of some to demonstrate equality, sometimes the actual nature of reality is neglected. Very often, dunderheads and the immature misapply “equality”, taking it to mean men and women are identical and should be treated identically. They thereby ignore very important differences.

Sometimes, this has dangerous consequences, as in the case of the AA, which revealed last week, on the phone with a shocked female caller, Dr Helen Mott, that it did not discriminate between men and women when it came to the urgency with which it collected them from their broken-down cars on the side of the road. Ms Mott was told she would have to wait “alone, in the dark for 90 minutes or more”. She tweeted that the call handler had told her the AA treated men and women the same, “because that’s equality”.

Female members vented their fury and now the AA has said it prioritises “anyone at risk”, allowing that, “more often than not, it will be lone women”.

It’s a step in the right direction – but the insistence on the wording “anyone at risk” still smacks of pussyfooting around the nub of the issue. Granted, it’s hard to imagine the AA talking about sexual violence, but it would have avoided this trouble if it had acknowledged that women need assistance first because, bluntly, they are more likely to be sexual prey.

The AA incident has offered a small glimpse of a wider problem: as long as the idea that equality means ignoring reality in order to treat women “the same” as men, and the fear – a product of the trans rights discourse – of actually acknowledging women as women remains, they will continue to be prey. And there’s nothing equal about that.