Bring on the crash test mummies

Low pay, glass ceilings – even car safety tests designed only for men. A compelling argument that women’s fight for equality is far from over...

Attack Of The 50ft Women: How Gender Equality Can Save The World Catherine Mayer HQ €28 ★★★★★

In the schlocky 1958 B-movie Attack Of The 50ft Woman, an alien turns the wife of a controlling husband into a giant. Doctors, police and her husband all try to shackle her down, but breaking free, she goes on a rampage.

Now, in her book which borrows its title from the film, journalist Catherine Mayer, who in 2015 helped to found the Women’s Equality Party (WEP), is issuing a rallying cry to women everywhere to rise up against ‘the skewed status quo’ and fight for a world in which women are truly, rather than theoretically, equal to men.

Many argue the battle of the sexes is long over.

Growing up in Seventies Manchester, attending an all-girls’ school, whose alumnae included the daughters of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Mayer also believed ‘the heavy lifting had been done by the women… who came before us’.

Men were still in the majority in the workplace and women did most housework and childcare, but Mayer was sure full gender equality was ‘shimmering on the horizon’, claiming she even coined an adolescent name for this utopia: ‘equalia’.

Yet four decades on, equality remains a mirage.

In not a single country in the world are women equal to men in terms of pay packets (women in management positions in Ireland earn 16 per cent less than men); in many, such as Saudi Arabia, they’re blatantly discriminated against. Women make up 40 per cent of the glo-

bal workforce, but own only one per cent of its capital.

Such statistics are startling, but I found Mayer’s smaller-scale nuggets even more telling.

Women drivers are more likely to be seriously injured in car accidents because, until recently, crash-test dummies were built to male dimensions only; some medicines don’t work for women because they’re tested on male animals only, to avoid accounting for hormone cycles; Apple’s virtual assistant Siri recognises and responds to ‘I’ve had a heart attack’ but not ‘I’ve been raped’.

Politically, Mayer sits in the centre (the WEP is non-partisan) but she’s unsurprisingly appalled that 53 per cent of white US women voted for self-confessed groper Donald Trump and is only cautiously welcoming of Britain’s second female prime minister, Theresa May, citing ‘glass-cliff syndrome’, when women leaders are called in to clean up political messes made by rash male colleagues, and – job done – summarily ejected.

Mayer’s great at illuminating problems women face, less impressive delivering on her hyperbolic promise to demonstrate how ‘gender equality can save the world’.

She cites various studies, such as one showing that companies with large numbers of women making key decisions are more profitable than those without, another that men in Scandi countries, where housework is most equally divided, also boast the highest happiness scores.

But they don’t translate into a clear battle plan. I was more enthused about Iceland’s 1975 ‘Women’s Day Off’, when 90 per cent of Icelandic women abandoned jobs and caring duties, leading to universal appreciation of their contribution to society.

Today, Iceland is the most genderequal country in the world.