The FishTank

Caroline Flint’s departure from the Cabinet seems to have started a spate of discussions about the glass ceiling. Some say there is still a conspiracy to keep women out of the top jobs; others that the biological imperative remains the true bar to progress. But is there another, subtler reason? Why, four decades after the pill, do we still not appear to have equal employment?
It’s certainly not education. Reports over the last years have suggested that girls are regularly outperforming boys in school. The reasons for this are manifold and poorly misrepresented as ‘girls are smarter than boys’ but the fact remains that, with the current mix of subjects and teaching methods, girls are scooping more of the prizes. Shouldn’t this translate into better career prospects?
In fact, evidence suggests that it does. Statistics suggest that, amongst the 18-30 category, women are – on average – paid more than men. This isn’t a like-for-like comparison, scoring women in a given role against men in the same role, but then neither are the statistics that say there is a pay gap: Harriet Harman’s claims of a 23% pay gap are largely predicated on the fact that more women work part time than men – and no sensible person would suggest that a woman working a few hours a week in a bar or a supermarket should be paid the same in total as a man who works forty hours as a teacher.
A detailed analysis may be inconvenient to Ms Harman’s gender-centric agenda, but it’s actually vitally important. Understanding where women are working may help to explain why they aren’t working in the – apparently much desired – boardroom jobs on which the whole glass ceiling concept is predicated. For example, if many women under thirty are actually working in small businesses, they have little prospect of being promoted onto the board of a completely different company. No more prospect, in fact, than the men who work in other smaller businesses.
So far so hypothetical, but given that some 80% of Britain’s GDP comes from small businesses, the raw statistics would suggest that there’s where those better paid young women are likely to be. The attractions are obvious: control of your own hours and destiny are vital to someone who doesn’t want to sacrifice their every waking moment for a pittance granted by a dictator who thinks there is nothing outside of their business that matters. Because, let’s be totally honest, that’s what it takes to rise to the top of a large company: you have to get yourself noticed as a ‘team-player’ and that invariably means demonstrating a willingness to put aside personal life in favour of personal ambition.
There are some women who do this. There are women in the top ranks of some FTSE companies. Not many, it’s true, but that doesn’t demonstrate that women can’t do it, simply that most don’t. Conventional wisdom dictates that this is because women want children, that somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties their biological clock takes precedence over the one on the boardroom wall. There’s something in that, of course, but what of those women who don’t have children? Why aren’t they in the boardrooms? Or what of those who somehow manage to have both? Where do they fit in?
It’s easy, living in our complex modern society, to believe human beings have gone beyond their animal origins. Animals don’t commute, they don’t clockwatch and they don’t have careers. But, scratch away at the designer labels of the business suits and every human being is still an animal underneath. Even if we don’t realise it, our animal traits still inform our thinking. Feminists tend to miss this point when they derisively ascribe the success of men in high-intensity industries to testosterone, but fail to recognise that maternal instincts prevent many women from putting aside family in favour of career. Underneath it all, genetics still matter.
And when you think about the societal groupings of mammals carefully, a lot begins to make sense. All mammal species have certain common traits. They tend to form tight family groups with two parents. One, usually the mother, takes the role of nurturing and defending the young. This makes them empathic, but aggressive when under fire. The other, usually male, parent is left to provide, requiring tenacity and a degree of aggression in acquiring prey. Natural selection favours those who excel in their given role and thus pre-programs one sex to act in a particular way and the other to be attracted to those who do it best.
Applying that to our modern world, you will see that women favour men who aspire, who are prepared to dominate in order to provide. This is as true in the boardroom as it once was in the hunting-ground, making rich or powerful men attractive despite what might be seen as physical deficiencies. It also means that men are more likely to aspire to be rich or powerful, putting themselves through a great deal of physical or psychological stress in order to make the grade and maximize their attractiveness.
Conversely, men tend not to be attracted to women in power. It’s not that men are afraid of powerful women, simply that a woman who usurps the bread-winning role is one who is more likely to put personal gain above the needs of her young. This means that natural selection tends to favour women who do not take risks to aspire to positions of authority.
All this might seem like stereotyping, but that’s precisely what natural selection is. Male greenfinches are green not because it’s fashionable, but because in their evolutionary niche female greenfinches will tend to avoid the ones who are less green. Many of the advances that have allowed women to avoid the roles in hearth and home have taken place relatively recently: the bicycle, the vaccuum cleaner and the pill are all products of a single hundred year period – a mere nanosecond in evolutionary time. People have changed as a result, but as the selection pressures fade it will take many generations before mutation produces a significant number of women with more interest in aspiration than family, and if they choose not to have family their genes will never become common.
So what does this mean in terms of policy? It means that the glass ceiling is largely self-imposed. Not entirely, of course – there is still some discrimination – but positive discrimination will not persuade women who lack aspiration to put themselves forward, merely allow forward those whose ability discriminates against them. You can’t force women with potential, to put themselves through the mill when they have no interest in it, so there’s no short-term fix for the problem. In the long-term, if we feel we want a society in which more women take top jobs, the right policies will be those which enable women to balance their time better, to have their children later and to have a decent work-life balance. There will also need to be policies that enable men to spend more time with their children without sacrificing their careers. This might mean society makes sacrifices – fewer hours worked – but if it leads to a happier, more balanced society, then it may actually boost productivity.
And where does all this leave Caroline Flint, minister with transparent portfolio, and what the Press call her L’Oreal promotion? Well, I don’t know the honourable member well enough to assess her abilities thoroughly, but I would say that the hopeless manner in which she has managed a succession of cabinet roles suggests not a woman who is being held back, but one who has been pushed too far forward. There are capable female politicians out there, but she’s not one of them and I think, if her promotions have been the result of positive discrimination, our current equal opportunities policy may need something of a rethink.