Feminism is a numbers game and 50% is one of our most hallowed benchmarks. So the fact that one in four FTSE 100 board positions is now held by women represents real progress – up from just one in eight five years ago – but also shows just how far there is still to go to achieve gender equality at the top of British business. This is particularly true given that most board positions held by women are non-executive: it’s easier to appoint women to these oversight roles than fix the longer-term issue of the executive talent pipeline.
It’s these sort of metrics – the proportion of women setting corporate strategy and the proportion making our laws – against which the success of the feminist movement is often judged. And with good reason. No society can claim to be committed to gender equality if the dial isn’t shifting in the right direction at the top.
But we shouldn’t forget that, as a set of benchmarks, they tell a very partial tale of women in the workplace. There is another group of women for whom over-, not under-representation, is the problem. Two-thirds of low-paid jobs are done by women. And women make up the bulk of the workforce in many low-pay, low-skill sectors: around 90% in caring and domestic services. For many of these women, the reality of work is poor pay, low levels of training, few prospects for progression and job insecurity.
It’s thanks to feminism that we’re having this debate. One of its biggest victories has been the redefinition of female identity – away from what goes on behind closed doors in the home to the public sphere of the workplace. A couple of generations ago, few women, regardless of class, had jobs or careers. Today, a woman’s identity is much more likely to be tied up in her professional life.
But women have benefited differentially. The female executive who one day aspires to the City boardroom and the female cleaner she employs to clean her house represent different sides of the same story of female employment. When women started to move into professional jobs, they created a swath of new service-sector jobs for other women.
Too often, the debate about gender equality at work glosses over the fact that women’s experiences of the workplace can be very different. For the female exec, work is likely to be a critical part of her identity. On her mind may be worries about the extent to which the male-dominated culture at her firm will make it harder to progress; how much the six months she is planning on taking out to have her second child will set her back; and how to juggle expensive childcare with her long hours.
For a cleaner, working part-time and unsociable hours on a temporary, minimum-wage contract, work is more likely to be a means to an end: a way of boosting the household income to get by and support her children. Far from thinking about progression – opportunities are virtually non-existent with the agency she works for – she worries about whether there will still be work when her contract comes to an end.
Both of these women’s experiences fall short, but in different ways. If you asked them what would make a real difference to their lives, you’d probably get quite different answers. The gap between professional and unskilled women is much greater than that between professional and unskilled men: professional women make 198% more than unskilled women; for men, this gap is just 45% .
Improving the quality of jobs in low-income, insecure sectors such as care could vastly improve the lives of women working in them. There is no doubt it would take real political will: it would involve more training and better pay and the government, by far the biggest customer of care services, would therefore need to be prepared to pay more for them. But this currently feels low down on the list of political priorities.
Contrast this with the government’s recent pledge to expand the amount of free childcare for three- and four-year-olds from 15 hours to 30 hours a week. Who does best out of this? In truth, professional families stand to gain more than the low paid, who could have claimed up to 85% of childcare costs back under universal credit anyway . And this expansion comes at a cost: it is widely acknowledged to be seriously underfunded, with the hourly rate that government pays providers for the free offer set too low.
In practice, many childcare providers make the sums work by cross-subsidising government-funded hours from the hours for which they charge parents. Expanding the free offer means that will no longer be possible. It is hard to see how the childcare workforce, 98% of whom are women, won’t suffer as a result of squeezed pay and less investment in training.
Feminism has achieved its most momentous victories when the movement has found causes that unite the interests of all women: winning the vote, winning the right to work. But now these have been won, have our interests started to diverge? Feminists can continue to try to find the causes that unite all women, such as getting women on banknotes or getting rid of the 5% VAT on sanitary products.
These are not insignificant issues, but compared to some of the other challenges facing women they perhaps feel a little lowest common denominator. Can we honestly say they are the things that are going to have the most material impact on women’s lives? And if not, should we be prioritising them, given there is limited time for parliamentary debate and a limited number of column inches?
Feminism’s battles are far from over : not just because only one in four FTSE 100 board positions is held by a woman, but because working conditions in low-paid sectors dominated by women leave so much to be desired. But given the heterogeneity of women’s interests, we need to look beyond numbers to ensure there is also a greater diversity of female voices: one woman’s voice is not the equivalent of another’s.
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