the workplace just means more poorly paid female employees. This argument does not hold water. In the 1980s it was certainly true that the biggest increase in the numbers of women working was at the lower-paid end, especially in part-time work. But this was no deployment of some reserve army of labour which could be speedily withdrawn at will: this was a shift to more women permanently in the labour market.
This is still not the full story. In the 1990s there has also been a steady increase in the numbers of women working fulltime and even at the higher-paid end of the economy. Indeed, women appear to be making dramatic progress in the professions; in 1997, 52 per cent of new solicitors were women; 32 per cent of managers and administrators; 34 per cent of health professionals; and 27 per cent of buyers, brokers and sales reps (Demos Report, Tomorrow’s Women, 1997). Given that professional jobs are growing faster than any other occupational group, with women forecast to have 44 per cent of those jobs by 2001, this does not sound as if women are confined to the poorly-paid sector. With girls currently outperforming boys at school and universities, the education gap is also closing and women are likely to be more highly qualified than men. ‘The high skill end of the economy… is finding as many candidates among young women as young men and since the mid-eighties …it has been jobs for women in the full-time sector, in the professional and technical occupations, that have been on the increase’ (Heather Joshi, interview with author, 1998).
Women’s increased role in the economy means that women have more personal wealth than ever before. Two-income families, while often necessary to deal with rising costs, now have great advantages over one-income families. The number of women earning more than their partners has trebled from 1 in 15 in the early 1980s to 1 in 5 by the mid-1990s. Among childless couples with degrees, it is normal for women to provide half the income. In 1996 it was estimated that more than 20 per cent of couples had the woman as the main breadwinner (Focus, March 1998). Women have also made inroads into the corridors of power. There are more women on boards than ever before, and a larger number of women running successful businesses. These are the statistics behind the fact that, for most educated couples now, sexual equality at all levels of life is simply taken for granted.
Although many of these changes may appear to affect only the higher paid, it does not mean they are any the less significant. The old feminist equation that being a woman necessarily entails low income and low status is no longer always true, even if it sometimes is. Feminists cannot have it both ways. Maybe not all women are in well-paid full-time jobs, and maybe it is still more usual for women to be in low-paid part-time work, but not all are, and nor do they of necessity have to be. So one of the vital foundations of feminist argument – that women are always financially disadvantages – has been seriously shaken. As we have seen in the previous chapters, these economic changes also coincided with changes in law and morality which mean that, for the first time in recorded history, women have at least in theory the opportunity to be economically autonomous and to earn money at the same level as their male counterparts. These developments cannot be dismissed just because the poorest women are still at the bottom of the heap; if feminism was premised on the idea that women are always structurally disadvantaged, what happens to that premise if it is no longer true?
In theory these developments do not necessarily have any implications for the relative position of the sexes, but at the beginning of the 1990s, as the recession deepened, the public began to notice the differential effect of these changes on men and women. In the past, a recession would have signalled that the part-time, less protected workforce was about to be laid off. On this occasion, it was the full-time ‘men’s jobs’ which went. At first this was picked up by the media as a temporary phenomenon, the stuff of a classic recession. They began to describe the estates where men hung about idle and depressed, and to interview men who stayed at home while their women worked. Rioting in the early 1990s on several estates in Newcastle, Cardiff and Oxford drew attention to something worse – dangerous anger rooted in enforced idleness. Gradually recognition filtered through that there were communities in which traditional forms of male employment might never return.
Once questions had been asked about how these changes were affecting men and women rather than how they were affecting communities or families or different social classes, it was impossible not to notice that men and women had gradually been affected in opposite ways. Endless articles in the 1980s had documented high-achieving women and women’s new economic and social clout. This had been, in the media cliché, the ‘women’s decade’, with Margaret Thatcher delivering the message that nothing stood between a determined woman and her ambitions. The fact that the markets suddenly began to deliver the kinds of work and working patterns for which feminists had campaigned added to the perception that women were on a roll. Simultaneously, though more difficult to prove, individual women seemed to be buoyed up by a sense of overthrowing the old obstacles to women’s achievements and suddenly finding themselves the prototype employee for global capitalism.
By the late 1980s men were appearing in the opposite light. The huge increase in male unemployment, both in heavy industrial and small businesses, accompanied by visible signs of recession, suddenly revealed men as disproportionately affected. Psychologically they were unprepared. The media began to note the effect on households where unemployed men refused to consider taking ‘demeaning’ women’s jobs as well as refusing to help in the home while the women struggled with both. Feminism had given women the confidence to move into masculine areas, combining work and motherhood, seeing new opportunities in new work patterns. Men, by contrast, were experiencing their work changes, this so-called feminization of labour, more like a smack in the eye.
Evidence of male difficulties came from every quarter, including statistics on suicide and male homelessness. It also came from the so-called lucky ones, the employed. Frustration and resentment were rife, especially over any calls for positive discrimination. The Equal Opportunities Commission began to receive complaints from men; by the mid-1990s it was receiving more complaints from men than women.
The concept of a male backlash does not begin to address what was happening here. A report published in 1995 by Parents in Work showed that men were suffering from very real insecurity, not some imagined loss of prestige. Britain had the longest working hours in Europe and the lowest productivity. Some feminists joked about these statistics; they proved women’s suspicions that overtime is often empty macho time, an ethos expressed clearly in an advertisement for an engineering firm spotted by Professor Pahl: ‘people with outside interests need not apply.’ But these long, unproductive hours were evidence of a desperate desire to hold on to jobs at all costs. At the time, Ray Pahl said: ‘People are scared of not being seen as good workers although in a rapidly changing market, they are not clear what that means. The traditional male career has collapsed. One response is extreme competitiveness, ruthlessness about getting to the top and getting vast salaries. But the other is anxiety and even disillusionment about work altogether.’ According to surveys conducted in the mid-1990s, such distrust and anxiety was endemic, a crisis of confidence which spread across all classes and age groups (Demos Report, No Turning Back, 1995).
Demos, the left-liberal think-tank which conducted a survey of attitudes among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, elsewhere referred to these changes as merely ‘women’s enhanced role in the economy’ (Tomorrow’s Women, 1997), a gradual evolution towards a more level playing field. The public, however, did not always see it that way. By the time knowledge of these changes entered public consciousness, they already had a particular spin on them, connected with general anxieties about society and what was happening to the family. None of this was happening in isolation. Other social changes were pushing men into the forefront of social concerns: recession and unemployment; depression and school failure; changing family patterns; the increase in violent crime with young men as both its perpetrators and victims; and a preoccupation with yobs and their ever-younger counterparts, ‘evil-boys’. Each crisis further undermined the old feminist way of viewing men as potentates. Increasingly they were appearing as both cause and symptom of a society in crisis.
Perhaps these economic changes would not have been taken up as so critical for men had they not coincided with growing
