The Girl Power puzzle: What women really, really do (and don’t) want | City A.M.
Girl Power seems to be the feminist mantra these days – on T-shirts, mugs, and across a whole shelf of sparkly notebooks in Paperchase.
Does this phrase make anyone else feel a little bit nauseous? (And this from an original Spice Girls fan.)
Let’s start with “girl” – what’s so bad about that? Well, nothing, if you are a girl (under 18 years old, in my view), but the term is a bit infantilising if you’re a fully grown woman.
Read more: DEBATE: Do we need apprenticeship gender quotas?
The phrase “women and young girls” is continually used in modern feminist statements around initiatives designed to protect or promote us. I resent the grouping. “Girl Power”, while an admirable sentiment for a child, disempowers a woman and lumps her with the weak and defenceless girl. As an adult woman, I have much more in common with adult men then I do with young girls.
And what about “power”? The feminist narratives around the glass ceiling and gender pay gap seem to define power solely in terms of earnings, status, and management.
My question is whether this, with its inherently long hours and stress, is actually what we (really, really) want.
Yes, there are fewer women at the top, and yes, we’re earning 18.4 per cent less than men. But – and it’s a big but – these disparities are hugely affected by a potential positive: female choice.
From my privileged, white, middle-class perspective (one which, I note, many of the most vocal feminist campaigners also come from), let me highlight a couple of key choices that I have experienced personally and observed among other professional women.
First, career choice post-graduation. I chose the scrappy, poorly paid life of startups over banking. I witnessed legal graduate friends choose family law over corporate, retail grad schemes over consultancy, teaching or medicine over industry and engineering. Not all my female friends did, of course, but we certainly made these less lucrative choices in higher percentages than male graduate peers. We’re bright. We knew what we were doing.
Second, choice towards family-work blend. In the last couple of years, I have elected to “lean out” of an intensive, high-powered entrepreneurial life as a mother of three small children. Self-employed, I now work three or four days a week – and I’m not alone. Many previously high-achieving women do likewise, with some choosing to quit altogether. We have willingly reduced incomes already lower than our partners by an average of 20-40 per cent.
According to ONS data, a massive 42 per cent of women choose to work part-time. It fascinates me how many friends who have made similar choices continue to bemoan the national gender pay gap, while failing to note that their own gaps in comparison to their partners’ work hours and earnings are much more stark – and are partially responsible for bringing the national average down.
What is “power” if not choice? And why is the choice to enjoy time with young families never presented as a positive, for women or men, but only ever portrayed alongside the negative ramifications it has for the pay gap and representation in the workplace?
Yes, family time limits earning potential, and yes, sometimes our ambitions start to shift away from the stress, office politics, and long hours of top-flight careers. But raising a family, exhausting though it is, can also be vivid and colourful, evoking delight, amusement, and a deep sense of being valued. Arguably, society remains much more accepting of a woman’s choice to lean out than a man’s – and it is perhaps here that the debate needs to be refocused.
Power for girls and boys, women and men, lies in individual choice, not in our chromosomes. It lies in meritocracy, not in quotas that undermine the successes of those who do choose to climb the career ladder. And it lies in recognising the roles that women continue to hold in much greater percentages than men, in homes and schools, wielding immense power over the hearts and minds of the future.
Read more: How we actually get to a world where half the CEOs are women