Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

Press, 26 July 1986, Page 14

Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

By

KATHARINE WHITEHORN

No woman who really cared about money would dream of trying to earn it herself.

When a top woman director recently revealed that she spent $13,600 a year on clothes we all gasped, of course; but go to the Paris salons where you can pay $13,600 ■ a dress, and it’s stuffed with the wives, daughters and mistresses of rich men.

And at the other end of the scale, if you want to find someone who simply doesn’t have enough to eat, look for a woman bringing up children on her own, working parttime for someone who may even believe that women just work for pinmoney.

In spite of all the legislation, women still earn about 73 per cent of what the men earn, and the success rate of equal pay tribunals is only 15 per cent.

Even in trades where women work alongside men, their pay is less — sales staff, data processing operators, travel clerks; and "The Observer’s” managing direc-

tor (male) thinks it would be interesting to consider why.

Some reasons are obvious enough; women often, though not always, take time oft to have children, which slows their progress; they often, though not always, settle for work they like, instead of grinding relentlessly upwards (the Peter Principle, which says everyone gets promoted till they’ve reached a job they can’t do, does not apply to women).

Equal pay rules apply to basic, and men like the overtime that women often can’t do; and too many union meetings are held out of working hours, when the women have rushed home to cook.

For they always have to cope at home — and not just with young children. If a son and daughter both work, the daughter’s the one who will spend time with an elderly mother — though the “busy man” probably doesn’t even have to iron his own shirt. There is, too, the harsh

fact that women are sometimes hired only because they are cheaper, and they know it.

I understood male chauvinism a little better when I recently read a book about an early Coop, which described the hostility of the men to a girl recruit because if the bosses once realised a low-paid girl could do the job, they might get rid of the men altogether.

When it comes to the

higher ranks where the big money is made, there are still intangible pressures at work.. Fathers expect sons to be trainees, daughters to be secretaries; advertise a job at $68,000 and no women may apply; try it at $27,000 and they will — though it’s probably been disposed of on the old-boy network anyway. Expectation has an enormous amount to do with how women get on. The men who hand out jobs and promotions don’t think of choosing a woman, unless there’s some special reason for doing so — need to cater to a female market, an exceptional candidate, pressure from women’s interest groups; what they feel natural with is men. Does our managing director feel odd if he goes to a city lunch and there are no women present? Or to our chairman’s dinner, 200 people, all male? A board meeting? He does not. He’d feel jolly peculiar if there were more women than men. It’s that fundamental

feeling that women being in charge of things is not natural that we have somehow to tackle.

And if anyone thinks it’s simple, look at the “caring” professions — top nursing jobs going to men, though most nurses are women, female social workers slogging round the slums while male administrators sit serenely behind their desks.

You might think things were better in America, where you certainly see far more women in commerce.

But there’s a book currently causing a stir called “The Lesser Life,” in which Sylvia Ann Hewlett deplores the fact that even there, women earn only 74 cents for every male dollar.

She has endeared herself to the patriarchy by blaming the women’s movement: she thinks they’ve gone on too much about abortion and con-scious-raising and should have been concentrating on better child-care, as they do in Europe. Gutsy St Louis columnist Ellen Goodman, however, says rats to that;

European women don’t have decent day-care, and what’s at fault is not the movement but lack of movement. She points out that there have been feminists “behind every parental leave bill, every child care bill, every flexible work plan.” One thing we might do is try to be better capitalists. Over here, the most committed feminists are often also Left-wingers, unilateral-disarmers and even vegetarians; that’s to say, they want to change the whole scene, and not just the way women relate to things as they are.

And that is not, it has to be said, the way to make money. In America, there are Republican feminists and lawyer feminists and stacks of banker feminists, and whatever Sylvia Ann Hewlett says, they are working their way up towards the big corporate boards where the massive money is made. They even have the odd woman newspaper publisher — which leads me to the one truly untapped resource that women have. After the Nairobi con-

ference, a statement was issued which said that women work two-thirds of the world’s work hours for one-tenth of the pay and own only 1 per cent of the property. But not in the West, they don’t. In Britain and the U.S., what with inheritance and widowhood, women actually own nearly half the property.

And if there is all that money in female hands, why don’t they do more to see that more of it gets paid to women workers?

Women with enough money could stop toying with charitable work and start financing ventures organised by women; major shareholders could influence firms; indeed even noisy ones can: witness the fuss that was made at Tesco when Daisy Hymas retired, until they finally appointed Detta O’Cathian to the board.

Wealthy women are not impervious to heartfelt appeals; it could be that the next stage towards more money for women is a simple mission to the rich.