During her brief but entertaining period as acting PM over the summer, Harriet Harman suggested that if it'd been 'Lehman Sisters' rather than 'Lehman Brothers', the banking crisis might never have happened.
Her comments drove momentum for a Treasury select committee inquiry earlier this autumn, which touched on the same issue. During that session, Nicola Pease of JO Hambro Asset Management spun the session on its heel with her forceful yet eloquent insistence that mother-friendly legislation, such as year-long maternity leave, had made women of a certain age unemployable.
Despite the rank injustice of women' failure to equal men in pay and progression (in all sectors, incidentally), Pease's words felt uncomfortably true. Since that hearing, I've started to wonder whether my next employer might judge me not just on my CV, but on how likely it is that I'll pop a sprog 18 months into the job. Do they really want to employ someone who might suddenly (and unsackably) disappear for a year and return with distractions and demands for shorter or weirder hours?
Clearly I'm not the only one who heard Pease and started to twitch a bit. The past few weeks have seen an avalanche of op eds, magazine features and broadsheet columns on the impossibility of working motherhood, the crippling guilt, the pointlessness of working when you should be at home with the kids. Earlier this month, the Guardian's excellent political editor Gaby Hinsliff gave up the struggle, explaining her decision in a heartbreaking article.
So I was heartened to read Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's indignant riposte in today's Indie, asking why women are suddenly 'in retreat'. I think I might have an answer. Helped along by that fiery testimony from Nicola Pease, there's been a real backlash to this idea that the financial crisis is a golden opportunity to regulate women into equality at work. There's a serious argument to be had here - but all these articles are frankly starting to break my spirit a bit. I'm sure I'm not the only one getting sick of being told I should give up now, rather than bothering to struggle against the inevitability of a stifled career.
Monday, 23 November 2009
Unintended consequences of 'Lehman Sisters' critique
During her brief but entertaining period as acting PM over the summer, Harriet Harman suggested that if it'd been 'Lehman Sisters' rather than 'Lehman Brothers', the banking crisis might never have happened.
Her comments drove momentum for a Treasury select committee inquiry earlier this autumn, which touched on the same issue. During that session, Nicola Pease of JO Hambro Asset Management spun the session on its heel with her forceful yet eloquent insistence that mother-friendly legislation, such as year-long maternity leave, had made women of a certain age unemployable.
Despite the rank injustice of women' failure to equal men in pay and progression (in all sectors, incidentally), Pease's words felt uncomfortably true. Since that hearing, I've started to wonder whether my next employer might judge me not just on my CV, but on how likely it is that I'll pop a sprog 18 months into the job. Do they really want to employ someone who might suddenly (and unsackably) disappear for a year and return with distractions and demands for shorter or weirder hours?
Clearly I'm not the only one who heard Pease and started to twitch a bit. The past few weeks have seen an avalanche of op eds, magazine features and broadsheet columns on the impossibility of working motherhood, the crippling guilt, the pointlessness of working when you should be at home with the kids. Earlier this month, the Guardian's excellent political editor Gaby Hinsliff gave up the struggle, explaining her decision in a heartbreaking article.
So I was heartened to read Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's indignant riposte in today's Indie, asking why women are suddenly 'in retreat'. I think I might have an answer. Helped along by that fiery testimony from Nicola Pease, there's been a real backlash to this idea that the financial crisis is a golden opportunity to regulate women into equality at work. There's a serious argument to be had here - but all these articles are frankly starting to break my spirit a bit. I'm sure I'm not the only one getting sick of being told I should give up now, rather than bothering to struggle against the inevitability of a stifled career.
Monday, 23 March 2009
Statements of the morally obvious
I was distressed to see that there was a parliamentary statement on "rights and responsibilities" due today. A bit fluffy and Blairy, I thought. It turns out to have been Jack Straw's Bill of Rights Green Paper, a list of statements of the morally bloody obvious including:
- parents' duty to look after their children
- not claiming benefits when able to work
- obeying the law
- reporting crimes
- co-operating with the police
- paying taxes
Without going into full Daily Mail rant, this is pretty silly, isn't it? If you aren't managing to stick to those five points, is Jack Straw and his rolled scroll full of suggestions really going to help? The Tories totally failed to make any light hearted hay of this - the best Dominic Grieve could come up with was that the proposals are "for the birds". Hm, cutting. The full ridiculousness is here; it doesn't really compare with the laugh-out-loud comedy of Ed Balls' Play Strategy.
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