Below I've extracted
a terrific, brave piece by
Elizabeth Farrelly in the Sydney Morning Herald. When I say "brave", I realise of course that nothing here is outrageous - it's what the majority of women and men who are honest about their personal experiences and feelings know to be true; little more than a series of truisms. Women are biologically constructed to have babies and nurture them and this affects the way they approach life. A simple fact of blinding obviousness.
(And no, that doesn't mean they can't be high achievers like Liz Farrelly. It doesn't mean they have to stay home and have babies and give up any idea of having careers. We left those ideas behind in the
Mad Men era, where they belong.)
That won't stop her being pilloried by ideological feminists, who are agitating for quotas for higher representation of women on boards as we speak - never mind asking how many women actually want to make the selfish sacrifices to family and personal life that success in the corporate world entails.
Extract:
'...Lets us pretend women are just men with breasts. Oh, and babies...
Ignore the fact that, despite decades of educational and statutory equality, women are still seriously under-represented at the pointy end of every profession except the oldest. In architecture there's Zaha Hadid and Kazuyo Sejima, and after that it's down to ''first female'', ''first black female'', ''genius behind the throne'' stuff. We blame conditioning (us) and the boys' club (them). Women, we're told, want what men want; sex, money, power. Anyone who suggests otherwise is accused of ''essentialism'' and women's literature is packed with ''my right to happiness'' stuff.
'For the boys-with-breasts mob, "50-50 by 2020" is a self-evident good goal, and unequal achievement simply further proof of the need for affirmative action at the top. Quotas. Mentors. Assisted childcare. But there is an inherent contradiction here.
'Positive discrimination presumes not just that gender balance is good for women, but also that it's good for the professions; that women bring something special, something extra.
In architecture, for example, it is tacitly assumed that women are ''greener''. Eco-conferences don't do specials on Men in Architecture. Other standard
Guardian-reader assumptions are that women listen and talk better, intuit better, are more client-responsive and collaborate better. This last is clearly rubbish.
'Men collaborate - I give you football, war, organised crime, the boys' club. But even if female communication superiority is, as I suspect, real (unless we're putting this, too, down to conditioning) there's still a contradiction. Women are either different from men or they're not.
And there's still childcare. For yes, it's unfair. But what's to be done? Perhaps the Dutch have this sorted, what with state childcare and parental leave.
But how to manage it?
'Clearly we can't require bosses to reward those who, for whatever reason, achieve below their colleagues. Paid paternity leave is a gesture, but little more since, in truth, the first few months of a baby's life are much the easiest.
'But there's something else. Even if childcare were fully funded; even if it ran all hours - all night, if necessary; even if it weren't so often run by cretins and shysters, is that what we really, deep down, want? In the end it's about love. Sure, men love babies. But (tell me I'm wrong) women love them more. Essentialist, perhaps, but god help us if it ever changes.
'So the issue is not whether women ''want it'' as much as men, but whether they want it as much as they want to nurture their chicks. I'm as ambitious as anyone I know, male or female. I put both my kids in childcare as littlies, and wept each time I left them.
Yet I'm conscious of having made deep and ongoing career sacrifices for their sake. Yes, it's hard. And yes, it still makes me furious.
'Yet I cannot regard it as the fault of some system - unless it's a system called nature. In all honesty, even if I had a 24/7 nanny, I'd give him the housework, the secretarial, but not the kids. Because that stuff matters...'
