25-09-11, 09:55 AM
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Join Date: Jun 2009
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Having ovaries doesn't make you a better person
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For the first time in years, I found the Liberal Democrat conference rather riveting. It wasn't the policies that drew me in, or the tub-thumping jeering at their Tory coalition partners. Nor was I particularly fascinated by the image of a delegate almost entirely covered in tattoos, which was reprinted ad nauseam in various newspapers as evidence of just how weird Lib Dem supporters are these days (he's got tattoos! On his face! Get him to a freak show immediately with some eight-year-old cage-fighters!).
No, the reason I found it more entertaining than usual was because of the women. There was Miriam Clegg, resplendent in a canary-yellow Topshop dress and blow-dried hair so bouncy it could singlehandedly prevent a double dip recession. There was Vicky Pryce, spurned ex-wife of the energy secretary, Chris Huhne, walking perilously close to Carina Trimingham, the scarily tall Other Woman. And there, was Lynne Featherstone, equalities minister, spouting some ridiculous claptrap apparently picked up from a Beyoncé song about how girls should rule the world.
Her actual argument, delivered to a fringe meeting, was that if you leave things to men, "you get terrible decisions". "Look at the mess the world is in, and look who has been in charge," she said.
Leaving aside the fact that, over the past 50 years, there have been quite a few women running fairly important things like, um, countries (Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, the newly-elected Helle Thorning-Schmidt), what galls me most about Featherstone's comment is that it falls into the trap of inverse sexism, of treating women and men as a homogenised mass of "femaleness" or "maleness".
She is not alone in this unfortunate generalisation. Since the economic crisis of 2008, it has become fashionable to argue that everything could have been neatly avoided if only there had been more traders in possession of vaginas. Harriet Harman said: "If it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, there might not have been so much difficulty", while neuroscientist Dr John Coates blamed the financial meltdown on testosterone and the male appetite for risk. "Women have only 10% of the testosterone men have," he said before going on to point out that older men also have considerably less, a point ignored by Harman, presumably because "Lehman Codgers" was a less sexy sound-bite.
It's patronising and objectionable to be told that women, as a whole, are somehow less risk-averse, more empathetic and more able to compromise than men. Several women I know (not least my sister who rides motorbikes, shoots rifles and flies aeroplanes, though thankfully not all at the same time) are exhilarated by the idea of risk, just as many men of my acquaintance admit to welling up when they're watching X Factor.
I'm sure there are some women who would be good traders or chief executives. But I'm equally sure that others would make terrible bosses, either because they go out of their way to prove they can be as ball-busting as their male counterparts or because they feel threatened by other women. Similarly, some men make great employers. Others do not. Whether people are effective in their job or not has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with their capabilities.
The notion that women are not as aggressive as men, that we would all just sit around a table eating red velvet cupcakes and talking out the world's problems rather than firing off phallic-shaped nuclear weapons is a complete fallacy. And you can imagine that if the opposite argument had been made – that men would be far better at running Mumsnet, say, because they'd thrash out any disagreements on the rugby pitch rather than allowing bitchy, anonymous blog posts – there would have rightly been an outcry.
There should be more women at the top of their professions, but let's not automatically assume the world would be so much better just because they've got a pair of ovaries.
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Having ovaries doesn't make you a better person | Elizabeth Day | Comment is free | The Observer
Finally, someone's said it.
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