pregnancy, Caesarian sections, post-natal depression, domestic violence, sexual assault and rape.
Wagner has been unlucky in one respect. Political commitment to gender equality is often little more than skin deep, but a great many politicians get away without their commitment being so publicly tested and found wanting. This is not to paint all politicians as hypocrites. Many of them believe in women. It’s just that when push comes to shove, they believe in other things more – and they also make the mistake I once did, of assuming that gender equality is already well on its way, without any extra help from them.
If there is a sliver of a silver lining to Trump’s victory, it is that it dented this myth. It did not destroy it. Clinton’s defeat seemed to contrast a regressive US with feminising cultures elsewhere. Patricia Scotland had recently taken office as the Commonwealth’s first female Secretary-General. Estonia had its first female president. Rome and Tokyo for the first time had elected female mayors. After a campaign dominated by male voices tore up the UK’s membership of the European Union and Prime Minister David Cameron stepped down, Britons wondered if women might save the day. Some looked with envy at Germany and its unflappable Chancellor Angela Merkel. More than a few English voters discovered a new reason to beg Scotland not to secede; they wanted the country’s clever First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to be Prime Minister of England too. Britain’s two biggest parties, the governing Conservatives and Labour opposition, turned hopeful eyes to senior women in their ranks. There was, after all, precedent. In 1979, the British economy seemed locked into a downward spiral of a weakening currency and blooming inflation, amid industrial unrest that saw even gravediggers down tools. Then a general election returned Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street, the first female Prime Minister not only of the UK but of any major industrial democracy. Within a few years, her economic policies had laid waste whole communities and sectors but galvanized other quarters and, more than that, revived a sense of potential that had long been missing.
She set a template for the female leader who sweeps in to sort out the mess created by men. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman. The press dubbed Merkel Germany’s Margaret Thatcher. Inevitably Sturgeon became Scotland’s Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May transmogrified into Margaret Thatcher in kitten heels or, when that comparison wore thin, Britain’s Merkel. ‘Women are such rare creatures that they can only be understood through the prism of one another, like unicorns or sporting triumphs by the England football team,’ observed the journalist Hadley Freeman.12
This barb held true after May entered Downing Street as Britain’s second female Prime Minister, called a June 2017 snap election aiming to increase her mandate to negotiate Brexit and instead lost the Conservatives their parliamentary majority. This left her government dependent on the backing of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a party led by another woman of tarnished reputation, Arlene Foster. Northern Ireland’s delicate power-sharing agreement had foundered over Foster’s role in a scandal involving an over-generous incentive scheme to boost renewable energy that handed taxpayers a hefty bill. May and Foster display many weaknesses as politicians. Their critics attack them as female politicians. The journalist and broadcaster Janet Street-Porter typified this approach, writing a piece entitled ‘Theresa May’s incompetence has set women in politics back decades.’
Women aren’t immune to making sweeping assumptions about women, about female difference – whether that difference is female failure or, just as often, female superiority . ‘If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, today’s economic crisis clearly would look quite different,’ IMF chief Christine Lagarde told an interviewer in 2008.
The idea of women as the antidote to male leadership is a familiar discourse in public life. Whenever economies falter or politics stutters, the refrain starts again. Men plunder the environment; women manage it. Men start wars; women make peace. We need more women in high and influential positions. We need more women to tower. Bring on the new breed of 50-foot women!
With so many people apparently inclined to this argument, not just rebels and advocates of social justice, but great swathes of the political classes, pillars of the establishment, corporate bigwigs and analysts focusing so hard on the bottom line that they walk into lampposts, surely we must be able to make substantial progress towards gender equality? With the dangers of failure laid bare in countries that are shredding hard-won rights, surely we have no choice but to redouble our efforts? Where are the traps and barricades obstructing the road to Equalia? Does anyone even know the way? And will it take 50-foot women to get us there?
In 2015, I kicked off a process that would provide fascinating and unexpected answers to those questions.
I accidentally started a political party.
Westminster’s first-past-the-post voting system reliably delivered single-party victories until a Conservative–Liberal Democrat government emerged from the 2010 elections. Five years later, as fresh elections hove into view, the coalition partners sought to win voters’ favour by vilifying not only the Labour opposition but each other.
For that reason alone, the political debate I attended at London’s Southbank Centre on 2 March 2015 felt excitingly unorthodox. As part of the Women of the World (WOW) Festival, the Conservatives’ Margot James, the Lib Dems’ Jo Swinson and Labour’s Stella Creasy described overlapping experiences and ambitions. They debated companionably, listening intently, nodding appreciatively and applauding each other’s points.
This should have been thrilling. Instead it was dispiriting. In 66 days we faced a choice not between these vibrant women but their parties.
The Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008 had ushered in an age of deficit-cutting measures that often hit the poorest hardest, and that meant a disproportionate impact on women. In the UK, as in most other countries, the male-dominated mainstream that steered towards the crisis also took the wheel to direct the recovery.
There were significant dividing lines, of course. Tories, Lib Dems and Labour disagreed over the degree, speed and targets of proposed cuts, but not one of them made serious efforts to apply a gender lens to the discussion. They needed only to look over to tiny Iceland to see the difference that could make. Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir did attract international attention – she wasn’t just Iceland’s first female Prime Minister, she was the world’s first openly lesbian premier. Less noted, and at least as noteworthy, her coalition took a consciously gender-aware approach to the economic crisis. The country’s three largest banks had failed, its currency collapsed, the stock market plummeted and interest on loans soared. As businesses bankrupted, jobs vanished. Cuts in state spending were inevitable, but in planning them, Jóhanna’s coalition tried to diminish the pain by spreading it thinner.13 Where other nations cut state sector jobs and prioritised capital investment, effectively supporting male employment at the expense of sectors employing and serving women, Iceland took a different tack. It asked a simple question: why build a hospital, but cut nursing staff?
‘The typical reaction of a state to a crisis is to cut services because they’re seen as expenses,’ says Halla Gunnarsdóttir, who served as a special adviser in the Icelandic coalition. ‘The state puts money into construction because it’s seen as investment. So basically it cuts jobs for women, and also takes away services and replaces them with women’s unpaid labour: care for the elderly, care for the disabled, caring for children and those who are ill. Then it creates jobs for men so that they can continue working.’14 This is often done through public–private partnerships in which the state takes the risk but the private sector benefits. Women’s unemployment goes up as the state focuses on preserving jobs for men.
Such perspectives – and women themselves – were conspicuous by their absence in the 2015 election and the broader landscape looked bleak. Of 650 electoral constituencies, 356 had never elected female MPs. Labour did better on getting women into Parliament, but the Tories remained the only major party to have chosen a female leader, and that had been
