the UK, 17.91 per cent in the US and 18 per cent in Australia. Women have long been blamed for this gap. We don’t ask for raises often enough or we don’t ask right. Studies identify the real culprits: job segregation and discrimination.1
Jobs traditionally performed by men attract higher wages than those held by women. The paradigm of the husband as the head of the household remains firmly lodged in the public imagination. One reason some employers pay men better may be that they think the men have greater need of the money. In the US, men in nursing are vastly outnumbered by their female colleagues, by nine to one, yet earn $5,100 more on average per year than female nurses.2 These disparities are echoed across the world.
Every woman lives with the constant tinnitus hum of low-level sexism. Most of us have been leered at or leched over and told we should be flattered by the attention. Almost a fifth of US women will be raped in their lifetimes, with close to half reporting other forms of sexual violence. One in three women worldwide will be subjected to violent sexual attack.3 The response to this epidemic is muted and muddled.
US prosecutors ask a judge to send a college athlete to prison for six years for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman; the judge decides on six months, concerned a longer period of incarceration will have a ‘severe impact’ on the perpetrator. He is freed halfway through his sentence. In India, a woman is gang-raped to death; one of her rapists says: ‘A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.’ The majority of the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by terrorists in northern Nigeria are still missing; those who escape bearing tales of mass rape and slavery find themselves social outcasts. Egyptian lawmakers finally approve a draft bill that would dole out five- to seven-year jail terms for people carrying out female genital mutilation (FGM), an operation to remove part or all of the clitoris. The procedure – often called circumcision by those trying to minimise its brutality – has been inflicted on more than 90 per cent of the country’s women and girls. ‘We are a population whose men suffer from sexual weakness, which is evident because Egypt is among the biggest consumers of sexual stimulants,’ an MP protests. ‘If we stopped circumcising we will need strong men, and we don’t have those.’4 Up to 1,000 women are sexually assaulted on the streets of the German cathedral city of Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015; the attacks trigger condemnation not of women’s oppression but of migration, reinforcing the false narrative that sexual violence is imported, rather than native to white European society.
And on 8 November 2016, US voters choose their President. The front-runners are a female candidate and a man who has been recorded boasting of assaulting women. ‘Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,’ he says.5 After the recording emerges, ten women come forward to accuse him of assault. He insists that they are lying. After all, two of them were too ugly to grope.
Many other aspects of his candidacy should also repel any voter who values equality. The candidate appears to believe only in himself, but panders to Christian social conservatives by promising to roll back women’s reproductive rights. He pledges to ban Muslims from the country and force Mexico to build a wall to keep its own citizens from crossing the border into the US. He refuses to condemn his supporters for racist violence.6 He publicly invites the Russian secret service to hack US government emails to damage his opponent and announces he will unpick years of international negotiations to limit climate change – which he calls a ‘hoax’.
He is the worst would-be President we have seen in our lifetimes or read about in history books – dangerous, incoherent and vain.
He wins the election.
A majority of men votes for him, by 53 per cent to 41 per cent.
A majority of white people votes for him, by 58 per cent to 37 per cent.
Eighty-one per cent of white evangelicals and born-again Christians vote for him.
Women vote against him, by 54 per cent to 42 per cent. Yet a majority of white women supports him: 53 per cent.7
A dual US and UK national, I cast a ballot in my home state of Wisconsin. I am not one of the white women who helped Donald Trump into the White House, but like all white American women, I am implicated. Through researching this book, I also understand the mechanisms that encourage turkeys to vote for Christmas.
This book aims to set out those insights and to make something else abundantly clear. The skewed status quo serves almost nobody – certainly not most men.
The world is full of decent men who strive to be allies to women. It’s a safe bet that most men who are engaged enough in these issues to read these pages fall into this category, though you may not always be sure how best to support us. Many of you want change, for women and girls and for yourselves, but you don’t always understand that ‘women’s issues’ are your issues. You observe your own sex suffering within patriarchal cultures and structures but don’t always join the dots. Because of these structures, boys struggle at school; suicide rates are highest among young males, who are also more likely to murder and more likely to be murdered; and men drink more heavily and more frequently end up in prison. Fathers yearn to be with their children, but the enduring pay gap means they cannot afford to stay home, while social norms sometimes deter them from pushing for change. Businesses, institutions and economies underperform.
The twenty-first century wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Late boomers like me grew up believing history was going our way. We assumed progress to be linear, counting ourselves lucky to be born to an era that had all but vanquished the great scourges of humanity. Racism and homophobia proved susceptible to education and so would wither. Wars were still prosecuted, but at a distance. Hunger, too, seemed confined to far-away lands, and technology must surely deliver fixes, just as it would soon banish cancer, ageing, death and clothes moths. As for women’s rights, the heavy lifting had been done by the women, and their male allies, who came before us. A liberal consensus held sway and growing up in comfort, largely surrounded by the white middle classes, I had no idea of the limits or vulnerabilities of our progress.
After a peripatetic early childhood, I attended a girls’ school in Northern England that proudly counted among its alumnae all three daughters of the magnificent, if flawed, Emmeline Pankhurst. We learned that the Suffragettes’ achievements marked the beginning of the end of the gender wars. In 1918, as Europe made its fragile peace, the Representation of the People Act granted some British women the right to vote. A decade later that right was extended to all adult females. New Zealand had led the way in 1893. The US followed suit in 1920. When I was seven and still living in the US, the doughty women of Ford Dagenham fought and won the battle for equal pay. Women’s libbers and the Pill were finishing the job. As teenagers my contemporaries and I saw shimmering on the near horizon a fully gender-equal society in which every inhabitant could stand as tall as the next person.
I named this place ‘Equalia’, and like a querulous child on a family outing, I’ve spent much of my life asking ‘When will we get there?’ There’s always someone prepared to claim we’ve already arrived. Such people rarely describe themselves as feminists because they misunderstand the term as a doctrine of suppression.
The media maintains lists of pundits who can be relied on to declare that Western women already have enough equality. After all, the largest and second-largest economies in Europe are run by women, and most Western countries have legislated for equal pay, even if the legislation hasn’t achieved the desired result. The laws and their application cannot be faulty; women must be choosing their lower status. Sex discrimination and sexual harassment are outlawed, so women must deserve this treatment. We never had it so good. We should stop whingeing and worry about Saudi Arabia. (It is axiomatic among these useful idiots that you cannot advocate for the rights of women in your own country and in Saudi Arabia.)
