Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: From man-made mess to a better future – the truth about global inequality and how to unleash female potential. Catherine Mayer

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СКАЧАТЬ Germany, female voters are more likely than men to vote for left-of-centre parties. This pattern repeats in many parts of the world, including the US, where the majority of white women who voted for Trump was not as large as the majority of white men who backed him. You can see why that might be. Conservatism is inherently disposed towards maintaining the status quo, and some groups of female voters know this is not to their benefit, not least because of the right’s fondness for downsizing the state at the potential costs of state-sector jobs that employ women and services that support women, plus a tolerance for a wide income spread in a system that relegates more women to the lower tiers. Merkel bucks this trend by appealing across party lines to Social Democrat voters – and to women. At the last election, 44 per cent of all female voters backed Merkel’s party, compared to 24 per cent for the Social Democrats.

      She has done so in part by being a woman and showing what women can be in a country that until relatively recently in its dominant Western states envisaged only three spheres of female activity: Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, kitchen, church. Up until 1958, a West German husband could demand his wife’s employer sack her if she neglected the housework. These attitudes were still reflected in the education system Merkel inherited, in which a majority of schools in the west ended at midday so pupils could return home for a cooked lunch. When Merkel first led the Christian Democrats into an election, opponents and colleagues alike asked ‘Kann die das?’ Is she able to do this? ‘With a negative touch,’ says Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s first female Defence Minister. ‘Nobody is asking any more.’

      This does not mean Merkel’s record on promoting gender equality is perfect. Like many female leaders, her instinct has been to shy away from gender politics. She was uncomfortable with her first portfolio in Helmut Kohl’s government, as Minister of Women and Youth. Germany’s sluggish birth rate rather than any feminist impulse prompted Merkel to introduce a wide range of measures to support working mothers, including the provision of parental leave paid up to 65 per cent of salaries for up to 14 months, guaranteed daycare for children aged one or above, and an expansion of all-day schools.¹⁵ She only reluctantly gave in to deploying quotas to increase female representation on the boards of large German companies. ‘It is pathetic that in more than 65 years of the Federal Republic of Germany, it was not possible for the Dax-30 companies to get a few more women on supervisory boards on a voluntary basis,’ she said. ‘But at some point there had been so many hollow promises that it was clear – this isn’t working.’

      German society has witnessed significant changes. Female participation in the German labour force rose by two percentage points in the decade ahead of Merkel’s election and by eight points during her first ten years in government. It would be unwise to claim a direct correlation; many factors will have played a part. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that German women have risen under Germany’s first female leader.

      Theresa May’s elevation prompted crowing in Tory ranks. The Conservatives had notched up a second female Prime Minister before Labour even managed a female party leader. May, Merkel and three other female leaders in Europe, Norway’s Erna Solberg, Serbia’s Ana Brnabić and Poland’s Beata Szydło (and Szydło’s immediate predecessor Ewa Kopacz) are all on the right. Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović belonged to the conservative Croatian Democratic Union party before her election as Croatia’s President. This does not mean rightwing politics promotes better outcomes for women, rather that parties of the left are especially bad at promoting women.

      The paradoxical explanation for this phenomenon is that parties of the left have historically championed gender equality. This means they are often too convinced of their own virtue to recognise their failings. Those failings loosely group into two categories. The first is one of precedence. In their desire to solve all structural inequalities, these parties get caught up in unhelpful binaries of the kind that disfigured the Democratic primaries in 2008 – ethnic minorities or women, class or gender, pensioners or underprivileged youth – reflexively assigning the lowest priority to women even though most forms of disadvantage intersect with being female. Far-left activists aim not to fix parts of the system, but to change the whole system, again stranding women in an endless waiting game. They also mistake optics for action. Amnesty International’s 2015 report on Bolivia noted that the socialist government had set up a Gender Office and Unit for Depatriarchalisation and created a Deputy Minister for Equal Opportunities within the Ministry of Justice and Fundamental Rights, responsible for the advancement of women. However, none of these new institutions had been allocated the resources necessary to be effective. The Equal Opportunities brief, for example, received just 5.3 per cent of the ministerial budget.¹⁶ As the White Queen tells Alice, ‘The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.’

      The second category and reason for the ongoing failure to promote women sometimes still dares to speak its name in parties and organisations of the right: hostility towards women. In choosing to fight Conservative MP Philip Davies in the snap election, we highlighted a particularly flamboyant example of this. Davies joined Parliament’s cross-party Women and Equalities Committee and immediately proposed dropping the word ‘women’ from its title. He tried unsuccessfully to derail a bill to ratify the Istanbul Convention, an international accord to tackle violence against women, by filibustering in the hope that the bill would run out of time. On another occasion he gave a speech that inadvertently boosted sales of baked goods. ‘In this day and age the feminist zealots really do want women to have their cake and eat it,’ he declared. Women responded by posting photographs of themselves munching cake.¹⁷

      The left likes to imagine that it is exempt from such wrongheadedness. In reality, misogyny flourishes like knotweed, undermining foundations of parity and respect and periodically breaking into the open, rampant and destructive. The online abuse directed against female MPs who disagree with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has been different in degree and content to anything experienced by male dissidents. The invective may not emanate exclusively from the MPs’ left-wing opponents, but could less easily survive in a culture that made serious efforts to stamp out such abuse.

      Labour is by no means the only offender. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination unleashed toxic attacks on Hillary Clinton, not by Sanders but by a rump of his followers, so-called Bernie Bros. Two British hard-left parties, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party, both failed to curb sexual violence in their own ranks. The WRP disbanded after revelations that its leader Gerry Healy had sexually abused female members. The SWP responded to a rape allegation against a senior figure in the organisation by holding a kangaroo court that interrogated the complainant. Had she been drunk? Had she definitely said no?¹⁸

      George Galloway, a former MP who set up the Respect Party after his expulsion from Labour, dismissed rape charges brought in Sweden against Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder was guilty, said Galloway, of ‘personal sexual behaviour [that] is sordid, disgusting, and I condemn it’. This was, however, merely ‘bad sexual etiquette’. ‘Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion,’ Galloway added.¹⁹ In 2016, he campaigned to be Mayor of London. The Women’s Equality Party fielded a mayoral candidate at the same elections, party leader Sophie, together with a London-wide slate of candidates. WE attracted 343,547 votes – a 5.2 per cent vote share and a magnificent result for a first election. (The Green Party’s first electoral outing, at the October 1974 general election, claimed just 0.01 per cent of the vote.) The cherry on our feminist zealots’ cake was Sophie’s performance against Galloway. He started with an advantage as a public figure, a political veteran and one-time star of reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother; he had also presented shows for Iran-backed Press TV and the Russian-funded RT network. Sophie had come to politics as WE’s first leader, just ten months before election day. She outpolled him by almost 100,000 votes.

      We celebrated Galloway’s defeat but there was nothing to cheer in the weakness of the British left. Labour performed better than expected in the 2017 snap election, buoyed by an increased youth vote for Jeremy Corbyn СКАЧАТЬ