Women make up more than half the voting public. We've been protesting about the unfairness of our lack of representation in the upper echelons of decision making for 60 years. Yet we are still being dismissed and ignored.
There was a period when some laws changed and we began to see progress. Those of us who were young in the 1970s thought it inevitable that a gradual rebalancing was taking place, as the old guard retired more women would become politicians, high court judges, law lords and take their seats on the boards of governing bodies, until a natural ratio of 51% women and 49% men shared power at the top, and the female perspective would be given equal importance whenever decisions were made.
Then came the backlash. Feminism was frumpy and old fashioned. Trendy young women aspired to become glamour models, and Women’s Studies departments were taken over by Gender studies and Queer theory. Prostitution was empowering, so disapproving of legalising brothels and pimps meant you hated prostitutes. Disapproving of porn meant you were were a sex hating prude. Black was white, the struggle for sex equality had been won, and women were now going too far with their ridiculous attempts to control the world.
Caroline Criado Perez book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men lays out very clearly that despite 60 years of women demanding a voice, the people in charge of planning and rule making are still blithely ignoring us. And there are no structures in place to punish them for disregarding the interests of 51% of the population, because women don’t get to decide the laws. There aren’t even effective structures in place to protect us from stalking, domestic violence and sexual assault/murder in the guise of rough sex gone wrong, despite all the knowledge we have accrued around those issues, because our perspective is dismissed as irrelevant when guidelines are decided.
It’s very interesting to find out that it is still the case that when girls and women speak more than 30% of the time in a mixed group they are seen as being pushy and dominating the conversation. This was known in the early 80’s, and we were supposed to be working in schools, businesses and all through society to change attitudes. So how come it is still exactly the same nearly 40 years later?
Political parties put systems in place to combat the skewed tendency of male power structures to pick males for promotion, in an effort to increase the number of women MPs. Then they relax and congratulate themselves, and feel quite content once 30% of their number are women. Preferably inexperienced young women, who won’t cause as much trouble as older harridans, and who can be sidelined if they become a nuisance.
We are still far from the 51/49% ratio of proportional representation and now, without consulting us, women’s shortlists, awards, and programmes aimed at boosting women’s skills have been thrown open to people of the male sex. Transwomen, who have benefited from being raised male in a male dominated society. Their voices have been heard, their egos have been massaged, some of them may have even been raised praising god every morning for HIS goodness in having not caused them to be born female. Why does their demand to be treated as female outweigh the never-yet-realised rights of the female sex to be fairly represented at the higher levels of existing power structures? Why are women who try to draw attention to this fact castigated as being so vile and full of hatred that they must be shunned, sacked, cancelled, bludgeoned with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat, kerbstomped and burnt to death in a grease fire?
Sometimes a truly ambitious women will dry up her milk of human kindness and fight her way to the top by blending in perfectly with the power hungry men. Despising the weaker females whose health fails or who drop out of the race to raise children and take on the care of disabled dependents. Those power hungry women have no more empathy than the males they emulate and manipulate to gain power, so they don’t do the rest of us any good. They are used to show the rest of us that the path to power is open if only women were good enough to tread it successfully.
So long as males dominate all the decision making they can dismiss our concerns. I’d like our think tank to do a lot of hard thinking about how we can change this situation. What can we do that we haven’t already tried in the past 60 years?