of this book is just that – not to answer these fundamental questions but to begin to answer them. There are clear limits to how definitive any such inquiry can be, not only because of the paucity of hard information, but because of the confines of my own experience. I am a product of my own background and socialisation, of a particular confluence of genes and influences, of luck – or privilege – and half a century of racketing about the planet. For this book I travelled as far as time and resources permitted, interviewed as widely as possible, read and kept reading, thought and kept thinking. I needed to learn in order to find out how much I didn’t know. The Equalia I describe, and the pathways I discovered, are located in the cultures that produced me. It may well be that the routes and outcomes look different in other hemispheres.
My quest took me to Iceland, the nation that comes closest to Equalia, and to countries and continents that have made less progress on gender equality, to ascertain the factors and people promoting or retarding change. Under Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship, Germany has become a better place for women – yes, even for the women of Cologne. Is she the kind of giantess we need, a 15-Meter Frau? For now it’s May every month in Downing Street but this looks less like a sea change than proof of the so-called glass cliff, the phenomenon first identified by researchers at the University of Exeter that sees leadership opportunities open up to women at times of crisis when the odds against successful leadership peak. If she’s still in office by the time you start this book, she might not be by the time you finish it. And what should we make of Hillary Clinton’s fate and the rise of Trumpism and related strains of populism in Europe? These signal fresh challenges for women and minorities and to any consensus on gender equality. In France this movement is led by a woman, Marine Le Pen, who in May 2017 made it through to the second round of the country’s presidential elections. Yet the first day of Trump’s presidency also triggered the biggest women-led marches in history, with 3.5m protesters on US streets and millions more in 20 other countries determined to resist the rising world order.
We will survey the predictable changes heralded by science and technology, and by global shifts in power and population. China’s growth is endangered by the legacy of a one-child policy within a Confucian culture that values boys more than girls and, in acting out these preferences, has ended up with a surplus of discontented single men. India has 43 million more men than women. Rwanda’s population tilts in the other direction because genocide killed off scores of men. It now ranks higher than Iceland, indeed highest in the world, on female representation in politics. So, is it a paragon of gender equality?
We’ll examine the media, its power and potential. We’ll go to Hollywood and Facebook. We’ll visit citadels of privilege and ghettos of oppression. We’ll talk to experts, leaders, people in public life and in their most private pursuits. The personal is political and for that reason let us start this journey in that most personal of spaces, at home.
Please join me at my kitchen table.
Chapter One: Gate-crashing the club
DOWNTRODDEN PEOPLES CLAIM superior qualities to compensate for inferior status. Women cling to a belief in essential, female difference. We are emotionally intelligent. We are nurturing. We work together rather than against each other. We can multitask. Want something done? Ask a busy woman.
The early months of the Women’s Equality Party appeared to reinforce this thesis. Each successive gathering of our newly formed steering committee brought a banquet to the table, of energy, ideas, sweet concord and food – so much food.
Sandi came with herrings: pickled herrings, herrings in a sweet mustard and dill sauce, herrings in soured cream, and pumpernickel already cut to carry satisfactory consignments of herring from plate to mouth without need of forks. Others baked cakes from scratch. I supplied alcohol.
Each meeting also brought long lists of tasks completed without reminders, despite multiple commitments tugging at sleeves. One of the most time-consuming jobs involved answering the unstanchable flow of emails that news of WE had triggered. Volunteers often worked through the night, their exhaustion mitigated by the enthusiasm of the correspondence.
‘Thank you for giving me something to believe in again.’
‘At last, something to get excited about in politics!’
‘For the first time in my 14 years of not bothering to vote I am inspired.’
‘I am 16 years old and passionate about feminism. I would love to be a bigger part of the worldwide fight for women’s equality!’
‘I am so excited about this party – I’ve waited my whole adult life for it.’
‘YES PLEASE, this is just what we have needed for such a long time. I’m on board, we have much work to do, please delegate.’
To delegate, you need a structure. We created an organisation from scratch and then scrambled to update it as needs and priorities changed, sprouting subcommittees to formulate policy and deal with press, social media, outreach, fundraising, finance and the demands that bureaucracy ladles onto the political process.
Britain is generous with its portions of red tape, far more so than many other nations. In July 2015, I met up with Sunniva Schultze-Florey, who had also co-founded a new political party four months earlier. Inspired by Sweden’s Feminist Initiative, she and a small group of friends started a Norwegian offshoot, Feminist Initiative Bergen-Hordaland, and they were already preparing for their first elections, for local government, in September. They didn’t need to do much more to make the party official than to announce its existence; they didn’t have to raise money for deposits to run, just collect a certain number of signatures. Norway’s proportional voting system meant the entry level for new parties didn’t seem too daunting – only a few thousand votes to win a council seat.
As our Norwegian counterpart plunged into campaigning, we jumped through hoops just to secure the right to campaign, an exercise as questionable as a dolphin show at a water park – and as anachronistic. Politics in the UK doesn’t just look and sound like a club. It is a club, with rules designed to exclude the wrong type of person as defined by the type of person who already belongs to the club. A new party cannot open for membership or put up candidates for election until registered with the Electoral Commission. That involves writing a constitution and rules of association and appointing officers. You must also establish a company and then find a bank willing to accept your business, because a party is also an enterprise. Quite a few bankers sucked pens and stared skywards when confronted by a start-up enterprise without a business plan or guarantee of income.
You can see why they might worry. The club rules ensure it’s hugely expensive to do politics. There are deposits to be paid for each candidate – £10,000 to stand for Mayor of London! A further £10,000 to appear in the official brochure that goes out to voters! Turn again, Whittington: the road to London’s City Hall is truly paved with gold.
Campaign costs are eye-watering, especially in first-past-the-post elections such as Westminster’s, where the overall number of votes across the UK matters less than the concentration of votes in individual constituencies. In the May 2015 general election, UKIP picked up one in eight votes, almost 3.9 million in total, but won only a single seat. The Scottish National Party gained 1.5 million votes and 56 seats. To successfully challenge old parties, newcomers must finance not only profile-raising marketing and PR campaigns but also street-by-street, door-by-door drives, reliant on volunteers and paid expertise, and underpinned by pricey technologies.
There’s another way in which money talks. One reason politics is dominated by affluent men in suits
