It's past time for Equal Pay

Today – 18 September – is International Equal Pay Day; a day intended to call attention to the gender pay gap and the longstanding fight to secure equal pay for work of equal value. Around the world, women are paid less for the work they do than men. The current global gender pay gap is 20%, meaning that women earn, on average, just 77 cents for every dollar paid to a man. This gap becomes even larger for women with children. In fact, research shows that not only are women penalized for having children, resulting in wage stagnation, men are routinely rewarded, seeing wage increases for each child they have.

This is a key issue on the path towards gender equality. Although women perform most of the unpaid care burden for children, men are the ones who are rewarded, while women’s career and wealth opportunities take a major hit. A gender pay gap isn’t just a day to day issue; it feeds long term inequalities in wealth. It means women earn less over their lifetimes and are likely to have a smaller pension pot when they come to retire. According to the Money and Pensions Service in the UK, the median private pension wealth of a man aged 45-54 is three times that of a woman of the same age, while for married men, it is five times the size of married women’s. Consequently, women are left vulnerable to poverty after retirement or reliant on their partners. 

Is it really so much to ask to be paid the same for the same work? Although significant progress has been made in the last 50 years to close the gender pay gap,  lot still needs to be done. According to the 2022 Gender Gap report, it will take another 151 years to close economic gender gaps. Much, much more needs to be done to create change for women. For a start, to help address the pay and wealth gaps, companies need to be more transparent about salaries, stop asking people their salary expectations during hiring processes, and offer more flexible working and parental leave arrangements. Governments also need to make progressive policy commitments and hold companies accountable to deliver change.

How we picture women and money

When was the last time you saw a picture of a man with a piggy bank? No idea? Me neither… yet depictions of women with a piggy bank are surprisingly common. You know the one I mean, where she is seen cheerfully dropping a few pennies into the back of a traditional (yet strangely rare in real life – especially for anyone over the age of 12) pig-shaped saving pot. Men on the other hand are more often shown pocketing wads of cash or frowning over a spreadsheet.

In 2021, Starling Bank and Brunel University published their findings from a review of more than 600 stock images in the UK linked to money, investing and finance which demonstrate clearly gendered, stereotypical representations of men and women’s relationship to money. “Men are shown as taking action, being in charge or even being worried about money, while women are often depicted as passive, as though they don’t really need to concern themselves with money.”[1] Women’s relationship with money was commonly portrayed as naïve and childlike, with depictions largely limited to them handling small amounts of cash. This is reinforced through images related to banking, in which women are more likely to be seeking help or advice from a male bank manager or advisor, with the tables rarely turned.

Is this true to life? Maybe. Does it matter? Definitely. Women have access to more money than ever before, although they will probably earn less than the men in their lives over the course of their careers. Nonetheless women’s relationship to money has changed. Until the 1970s, women in the UK and the US, especially those who were single, widowed or divorced, would normally have been required to have a man co-sign for them to open a bank account or mortgage (shout to France which allowed all women to open independent bank accounts from the 1880s).[2] That’s less than 50 years ago but it would be unthinkable now. Yet a lot of our ideas around women and money still need updating. Women in the US make around 70-80% of household spending decisions[3] but – for women in heterosexual relationships – their male partner is more likely to be responsible for the mortgage, investments and pensions. This is what we see reflected in the piggy bank image; women deal with the small stuff while men deal with the big, important decisions.

We have taught women they’re responsible for the pennies. As a result women tend to keep their money in savings accounts while men are more likely to opt for higher return (and higher risk) investments. And in a time where interest rates on savings are hovering around 0%, while the cost of living is soaring, women are going to lose out, as inflation will hit them harder. The old adage of take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves has never been less true. We already know women are more likely to be poor in old age due to the gender pension gap and this is only going to increase, further deepening the financial inequality between men and women. Furthermore, financial dependence also traps women in violent or unhappy relationships. If women aren’t in control of their finances and making smart investments for their futures, their lifestyle and retirement options will be limited.

We need to turn this on its head. Financial independence gives us all options and opportunities and women need to be better prepared and supported to invest their growing wealth smartly. So yes, pictures of women and money matter. As the Starling Bank report says, “Our world is not only represented through images, but it is also shaped by them.” Our images need to be updated to reflect the world we live in until it is equally unthinkable that women don’t manage their investments as it is to us now that women couldn’t freely open a bank account. Anything less is condescending and infantilising to women and their relationship to money.

[1] https://www.starlingbank.com/docs/reports-research/StarlingGenderRepresentationReport.pdf

[2] theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/aug/11/women-rights-money-timeline-history

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescontentmarketing/2019/05/13/20-facts-and-figures-to-know-when-marketing-to-women/

The History of Women's Health

Creator: Agustin Vai | Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

The following piece was written for Coyote Ventures in collaboration with Jessica Karr, Founding General Partner at Coyote Ventures, for Women’s History Month 2022.

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The theme for Women’s History Month 2022 is Healing and Hope, calling attention to women’s role as caregivers and the hope they instill and sustain for the future. This feels particularly important after two years living through the pandemic in which women’s role as caregivers has increased even further. 

There’s another way of looking at this theme, and that’s about how we empower women in also taking care of their own health. Historically, women’s health has been marginalized and maligned by the medical community, researchers, and investors. As women’s history month draws to a close, it is important to reflect on and highlight how we collectively contribute to the healing of women in our society. 

The way our society approaches women’s health is influenced both by biological sex differences as well as the gendered roles and norms we impose on women because of their perceived female sex. The points discussed in this article are influenced by both sex and gender, but predominantly refer to people assigned female at birth and cisgender when we refer to women. Non-binary, trans, and intersex people experience many similar but also different intersecting challenges, and are arguably just as, if not more, underserved as cis women. When we work to improve health outcomes for women, it’s important to always consider the needs of these communities as well. 

There are multiple conditions that affect women which are significantly under-innovated and underfunded, yet which represent  huge potential markets. For example, endometriosis is a chronic condition that affects 1 in 10 women, yet it takes an average of ten years in the US for women to receive a diagnosis via invasive surgery (Invisible Women). This painful condition is frequently misdiagnosed, misunderstood and stigmatized and sufferers’ pain is dismissed, with women being told they are stressed, anxious, that it’s in their head and that there’s nothing wrong with them. Often it’s when there are fertility problems that endometriosis is finally diagnosed. 

The medical community has a long history of treating women with an air of skepticism and hand-waving. In fact, some of our cultural narratives about women’s health and wellness can be traced back as far as Ancient Greeks, where doctors conceived of women’s ‘wandering wombs’. The uterus was seen as a living thing which they believed could freely move around the body, and different symptoms signified the place it had relocated to (Unwell Women). Almost any symptom or illness a woman experienced was attributed to this phenomenon and numerous treatments were used to encourage the uterus to return to its proper place. 

The word ‘hysteria’ is derived from the Greek word for womb and has influenced the scientific approach to women for thousands of years, even to this day. While we no longer lock women up in asylums for hysteria, we tend to more easily view women as sensitive, anxious and prone to exaggeration. When women come to the hospital with pain symptoms, they are more likely than men to be prescribed anti-anxiety medications, and are more often written off as psychiatric patients. Meanwhile, research in the 1990s shows that between 30-50% of women diagnosed with depression had been misdiagnosed (BBC Future).

As the practice of medicine became more firmly rooted in science, the idea that women’s biology made them the weaker sex dominated medical practice and shaped the social fabric. In fact, it was used to justify and rationalize women’s exclusion from public life, often on false and misplaced ideas about women’s bodies. Much of this is also rooted in social class and racist beliefs, as it was thought that white middle and upper class women’s bodies were not fit for strain or vigorous activity, while little thought was given to lower class women who were not so ‘privileged’ (Unwell Women). We see the legacy of this today, where the pain of women of color is taken even less seriously. 

These ideas have left strong imprints on medicine and women’s health today in numerous ways. Women’s pain and (un)wellness is dismissed, taken less seriously and is less understood. This attitude permeates medical practice and research and continues to influence our understanding of women’s pain, women’s symptoms and the conditions that disproportionately or solely affect women. 

Conditions that affect only women haven’t been a medical priority

When medical students are studying to become doctors, they are taught ‘physiology’ and ‘female physiology’ (Invisible Women), embedding from the start the male body as the default.  Conditions that only affect women are not well understood and research is chronically underfunded. Take premenstrual stress (PMS) and period pain (dysmenorrhea), both of which affect around 90% of women. Despite the fact that these are commonly experienced by women once a month, the causes of PMS and period pain are poorly understood, under researched, and have limited treatment options. One study found 5 times as many studies into erectile dysfunction compared to PMS, while it is estimated around 5-15% of men experience ED (Invisible Women). 

Our perception of women’s pain shapes our attitudes and has been used to reinforce our social norms. For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, menstruation has been used to justify women’s exclusion from education, the medical profession and public life more broadly. While the women’s movement was growing in the nineteenth century, women’s menstruation became a key argument used to justify their continued oppression (Unwell Women). Opponents to gender equality started to warn of the dangers of women’s education and the deficiency of women’s bodies and minds to operate on equal footing with men. They argued that active work of the body or mind would interfere with their periods and natural rhythms – and, crucially, with their natural duty as mothers. It took a number of female doctors - Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Julia Ward Howe, Eliza Bisbee Duffy - to rebuke the claims made by male physicians, and Mary Putnam Jacobi, in particular, whose methodological research into women’s menstrual cycles which monitored women’s vital signs and energy levels across their whole cycle and used it to show that most women didn’t need to be confined to their beds for a week which was the believe at the time - thus challenging the standard belief that women’s periods did not incapacitate them for one week a month (Unwell Women). Over 100 years on, this seems pretty ridiculous, but these ideas and beliefs are still rooted in society and medicine. 

Women have been excluded and underrepresented in clinical trials

When it comes to clinical trials, women are routinely excluded or represent just a small percentage of the sample. Nonetheless, the results are assumed to apply to men and women, as the data typically aren’t analyzed to observe how results vary by sex, race, or other important distinctions. There are many significant and harmful racial disparities in health care, such as the history of gynecology that involved performing brutal surgeries on slaves (Medical Bondage).

In the United States, women were banned from clinical trials altogether from 1977 to 1993. In 1977 the FDA excluded all women of childbearing age from clinical trials because of a scandal caused by Thalidomide, a drug which was prescribed to women for morning sickness but was found to cause fetal deformities.  While the original intention was to protect pregnant women, this decision has resulted in extremely harmful effects for women by not studying how drugs affect them differently. Women are more likely than men to experience an adverse drug reaction. Why? Perhaps because, as a 1992 study found, sex differences have been analyzed for less than half of widely available prescription medications (Invisible Women).

If women are generally overlooked in clinical trials, pregnant women are routinely excluded altogether, giving limited understanding of how to treat health issues. Their exclusion from COVID vaccine trials led to (misguided) advice for pregnant women to refuse the vaccine, and resulted in needless deaths. We also still don’t fully understand the impact of the vaccine on the menstrual cycle because this was not considered during trials and further research.

Women’s hormones and hormone cycles are seen as an added complication in medical research, because women’s hormones change at different points in their menstrual cycle, as well as during and after pregnancy and the menopause. However these are realities for women which can’t be controlled for and need to be understood. It has been shown, for example, that some antidepressants affect women differently at different times during their cycle. Impacts have also been found for antipsychotics, antihistamines, antibiotics and heart medications (Invisible Women). By failing to consider this in clinical trials, we will continue to fail women. 

Moving forward: Investing in Women’s Health

The historic perception of women’s bodies can no longer be allowed to influence how we treat half of the world’s population. We need to move away from seeing the male body as the default, and properly invest in women’s health, treatment and medication, in relation to all health issues as well as those that solely or predominantly affect women. The issues that matter to women need to be funded and prioritized. When women drive decisions, we’ve seen it’s possible to make a breast pump that is functional, comfortable and discrete. We’ve seen a growing number of menstrual products that give women real choice, confidence and freedom, in addition to more environmentally conscious solutions. And we’ve seen a growing conversation and awareness on the menopause and tailored treatments and services to support women. 

Investing in women’s health is an ethical imperative. It is also a financial opportunity. Coyote Ventures and FemTech Focus previously published a report that calculated women’s health as a $1 trillion market opportunity (Crunchbase). This includes 97 health conditions that solely, disproportionately, or differently affect girls, females and women. Menstruation, maternal health, fertility and sexual wellness account for 51 percent of the total femtech startup landscape and there are many more issues to solve. All areas of women’s health are still in desperate need of research, investment and innovation. 

This is why Coyote Ventures have chosen to focus on women’s health. Coyote Ventures was set up one year ago to help right this wrong; by choosing to invest in companies with innovations and solutions for conditions that solely, disproportionally, or differently affect women. Let’s use Women’s History Month this year to reflect on how we can better heal women and give them the hope they deserve for the future. 

Have you asked your wife?

Illustration credit: Lo Cole/The Guardian

Having worked in women’s rights for over a decade, I’m very aware of the extent to which gender equality still exists in our world. While it is still very much present in our society, it is relatively hidden and easier for people to overlook or pretend it doesn’t exist. Sadly, although we have laws and policies in place to protect women and create equality, achieving that in practice still requires work. However, in some parts of the world, gender inequality is much more apparent and clear. I recently heard this story from Burundi which summarises this quite well. A colleague of my friend was on a field visit to an agricultural project, which supports farmers to manage their land, improve their yields and make a plan for their futures. During a meeting with some of the farmers engaged in the project, one of the farmers was speaking about how well his farm was doing following the training and how the situation of his family has now improved. His six children were better fed and he said he planned to have six more. The visitor, quite naturally, asked how his wife felt about that. He and all the other men gathered all merely laughed. Hearing this story immediately sparked a number of thoughts for me relating to women’s rights that are worth considering.

Firstly, all the people gathered for this visit were men. The law in Burundi doesn’t allow women to inherit land, which means that projects often engage with men as the title holders and land owners.  However, women often perform a heavy burden of the labour on the farms, in addition to household chores and child care, which largely goes unrecognised. Men benefit from the profits and decide how those will be spent. Although this project engages women in some of the steps to integrate their voices in the farm planning, no steps were taken to ensure that female farmers were included or that the men’s wives were present and recognized for their contributions. If projects fail to find ways to engage women meaningfully, they will simply reinforce the status quo of male dominance and decision making, no matter how good their intentions in this regard.

Secondly, in Burundi, the idea of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) is highly taboo, which is partly what provoked the reaction of laughter, and talking about those incredibly personal decisions is very unusual, which is understandable. There aren’t many people who would feel comfortable having that conversation with a complete stranger. However the point is that ‘family planning’ isn’t really a thing here. Although the projects work with the farming families to develop a family plan, this side of the picture is missed out. It is admittedly very hard to talk about sexual and reproductive rights; the Catholic Church is very powerful and people believe that God decides the number of children they will have. Contraception use isn’t encouraged and many women will take it in secret if they choose to do so. As a result, the fertility rate is more than 5 births per woman and there are over 1,500 live births per day. Yet, agricultural – or any community development – projects provide a unique opportunity to address sexual and reproductive health and rights in a meaningful way. How can we hope to improve food security if families double the number of children they have as their farms become more successful? Addressing food security, nutrition, value chains and the climate crisis, requires finding ways to take these topics hand in hand.

And finally, while they may have laughed partly from the awkwardness of the question, the men also laughed because the idea of involving your wife in that decision is so completely alien.  It would never occur to think that their wife might have an opinion and deserve a say on this decision. To me, this truly shows the extent of the belief that women are there to reproduce, to do chores and look after the family, without having a say about the number of children they will raise or push out of their bodies.

This story demonstrates just how much there is to change. It is important to think about WHO we engage and HOW in order to identify ways to disrupt the status quo and avoid replicating harmful norms and structures. I believe that by using women-centred approaches which bring women’s needs and priorities into focus, we can help everyone work towards a better future.

On male entitlement

Everywhere I turn right now I’m confronted by stories of male violence against women. The news seems full lately of horrible stories of women who have been raped and killed by men. We’ve also seen a drastic increase in the rates of domestic violence and abuse against women over the past year during the pandemic. So much so that this violence has been termed ‘the hidden pandemic’. Just a few weeks ago, a report was published in the UK highlighting just how prevalent sexual harassment and abuse is against young women and girls in schools. Despite all the progress we think we’ve made, violence against women continues to affect us all. 

These stories are never not shocking. They never leave me unaffected. But something really has to change. How can we continue to live in a society that accepts this as normal? As a fact of life? I don’t think I’m the only one feeling this way right now. Just look at the outpouring of anger and emotion following the rape and murder of Sarah Everard in the UK (March 2021). Women know they cannot continue to live in fear. Fear of what will happen if they walk home along at night. Fear of what will happen if they accept a drink from the wrong stranger. Fear of a guy not taking no for an answer. The deep breath of walking past a group of guys on the street. The texts to friends to let them know you got home safely. The strategies used day in, day out, to maintain your safety.

But we spend so much time dwelling on women’s fear – to say nothing of judging their choices – we so rarely analyse what is driving those men’s choices. Sure we talk about the patriarchy. And sure we occasionally talk about motive in the rare times cases get heard in court but we fail to focus on the entitlement. This is what I keep coming back to right now; the sense of entitlement that leads to these actions. I acknowledge it’s not the only factor and much of violence against women cannot be boiled down with such simplicity but entitlement is a facet to all of this. The entitlement of men who feel they deserve to be loved, no matter the cost. Their entitlement to have sex because they want it, regardless of how the other person feels. Their entitlement to constantly demand women’s attention when those women are just trying to mind their own business. Male entitlement is the poison that drives so much of this. I don’t completely understand where it comes from but I do know we need to stop raising men to feel this way.

We need to question the society we live in which raises men to feel such entitlement. Entitlement which causes women to live their lives in fear.

P.S some wonderful women have published some excellent work on this which I’m currently working my way through. If you’re interested to learn more, consider checking these out

- Kate Manne’s Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women seeks to shed light on just that. Bringing her signature framework of misogyny, to show how the idea that men are owed something is embedded in our cultures, and the devastating consequences that has for all of us, but especially so for women and girls.

- Laura Bates went undercover in some of the darkest corners of the internet to write her latest book Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: the Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All. In doing so she explores this movement, the rhetoric they use, the ways they draw in new members and shines light on how organized this seemingly disconnected movement truly is.

Shame on you, WHO

This time last week, WHO published their latest (proposed) advice on alcohol consumption. In this draft action plan, they suggest appropriate steps should be taken to preventing alcohol consumption by women of reproductive age. This advice is not only sexist and paternalistic, it shows a huge disconnect and lack of understanding of women’s rights and their lives. Women are not baby making machines. Not all women want to bear children. Not all women can bear children (for reasons unrelated to their alcohol consumption). Furthermore, women should not be expected to live 40-50 years of their lives based on the possibility that one day, they might possibly want children.

As noted by Clare Murphy, Chief Executive of BPAS, there is NO current consensus regarding whether low to mid-level alcohol consumption during pregnancy is actually harmful. So to talk about pre-pregnancy, without even stopping to understand women’s own wishes and intentions, is frankly absurd. Meanwhile, this advice overlooks overlooks scientific evidence on the impact of alcohol on male fertility. Imagine a global body trying to suggest men should avoid drinking alcohol until their 50s when their past their peak parenthood years (some men have children in their 80s so perhaps men should be banned from drinking alcohol altogether?!)? It is unthinkable! Imagine the outrage! However, society is so accustomed to messaging about what women can and cannot do, should and should not do, this kind of messaging is seen as completely normal.

The veil has slipped – this is about nothing more than controlling women's bodies.  

For other interesting and insightful reading on this topic, I recommend Barbara Ellen's piece in The Guardian.

Gender equality in a time of crisis

At the start of the corona crisis, I felt a small glimmer of hope that something positive might come out of this in the way of redressing gender inequality in the household. With more men at home, perhaps the work of maintaining a clean and functional household would be visibilised, creating an opportunity for women’s care burden to be alleviated. And while it was clear that the impact of Covid-19 on men and women would be different (men carry a higher risk of mortality from the virus, while women faced greater economic consequences, risk of violence, and were at the front line of the health response), and that there was a risk that women’s care burden would be increased, the prospect of this potential win for gender equality carried me through.

In the face of these odds, let me explain my hope. Facing a situation where both parents (this article refers primarily to heterosexual couples) and their child(ren) were stuck at home, day in, day out, it seemed possible that the schooling and care needs of children and mounting housework would become more visible to men, thereby resolving the double (even, triple) burden faced by women. Indeed, research has shown that major changes to domestic routines can have the potential to equalize the domestic burden. And potentially, once the viability of remote working became clear to employers, men’s demands for more time working from home, in order to play a more meaningful role in the lives of their children, might be met.

And yet, more than 3 months into the pandemic, reports across Europe show that the crisis is increasing gender inequality, threatening to derail women’s careers. The risk that women’s care burden would be increased, rather than reduced, has become the reality. In the UK, for example, The Guardian reports that “the proportion of mothers responsible for 90 to 100% of childcare increased from 27% to 45% during lockdown.”[1] While men are also contributing more in the household, this does not seem to be the gender equality ‘win’ that some may think. A survey conducted for the New York Times shows that 70% of women report being fully or mostly responsible for housework and 66% for childcare.[2] Similarly, research in The Netherlands into the division of labour between parents in lockdown found that, from a survey of more than 800 participants, 65% of mothers report doing more in the household than their partner.[3] These figures roughly equates to the same proportion as outside of lockdown. And why? Because we still see housework as a woman’s responsibility.

At the same time, women’s opportunities outside the house are being limited too. Over the past few months, we have seen that women’s work is more vulnerable and they are more likely to have lost their job, be furloughed, or have reduced working hours. And the impact is still not over: as governments roll back economic support schemes, we can expect more layoffs, which are more likely to affect women. The American bank Citigroup has calculated that we may see huge layoffs among women, comprising 31 million of the 44 million people who are at risk of losing their jobs due to the corona crisis.

Furthermore, with all of us spending more time at home, and limited space at schools and nurseries, women are more likely to be caring for children and responsible for home schooling, whether they are working or not. If they are working, they are still more likely to be interrupted and have to balance work and childcare or education. In the New York Times survey, nearly half of fathers with children under 12 report spending more time on home schooling than their spouse. Just 3% of mothers say the same, while 80% say they spend more on time on home schooling than their spouse.[4] This correlates to findings from the University of Sussex which found that 72% of mothers described themselves as the “default” parent for all or most of the time during lockdown, and 70% of women reported being completely or mostly responsible for home schooling.[5]

Consequently, mothers are only doing a third of the uninterrupted paid-work hours that fathers are.[6] This imbalance in caring responsibilities is compounded by employers attitudes, who are less understanding of interruptions to the work of their male employees compared to female employees. In fact, research conducted in the UK by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and UCL found that the only households where mothers and fathers are now sharing childcare and housework equally are those in which the father has stopped paid work while the mother is still working for pay.[7] Even today, men are characterized as the breadwinner while women are expected to carry the burden of care.

The greater value that is given to men’s work means women are more likely to be pushed back into the home environment, taking us back to a 1950s style society. The closure of schools and nurseries has increased the care load in the household; a responsibility primarily filled by women. And with this happening against the backdrop of the militaristic rhetoric that has been “deployed” to “fight the virus,” the door has been opened for machoistic behaviours and attitudes. Just in the past few days, Boris Johnson has been photographed doing push-ups in order to assuage rumours about his health, while Tony Blair has boasted of the fact that he hasn’t done any housework since 1997. What kind of society do we live in where that is a legitimate boast? One which devalues care work, thereby making this a statement of power.

So instead of progress we are actually seeing a regression towards traditional domestic gender roles. Of course, everyone has just been doing their best to muddle through this mess and that’s meant taking the most straightforward and economically sound decisions to ensure the bills get paid and there’s food on the table. Yet, as long as the attitudes of leaders and employers reinforce those decisions, this will be a trap that is hard to get out of; the repercussions of those decisions and gender stereotypes embedded in our social structures could mean long lasting implications for women’s careers. During times of crisis, we still see women’s work being threatened and deprioritized, thereby reinforcing traditional gender roles. We need to make this the conversation, rather than how many push-ups a prime minister can do.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2020/jun/18/uk-society-regressing-back-to-1950s-for-many-women-warn-experts-worsening-inequality-lockdown-childcare

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/upshot/pandemic-chores-homeschooling-gender.html

[3] https://www.trouw.nl/binnenland/coronacrisis-raakt-vrouwen-het-hardst-thuis-en-op-het-werk~bb0a017b/

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/upshot/pandemic-chores-homeschooling-gender.html

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2020/jun/18/uk-society-regressing-back-to-1950s-for-many-women-warn-experts-worsening-inequality-lockdown-childcare

[6] https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/14861

[7] ibid

It's time we talk about Churchill

Last week, Black Lives Matter protests in the UK culminated in attacks on some controversial statues and the defense of statues feared to be ‘at risk’ of damage. After some graffiti tagged Churchill as a racist, the statue on Parliament Square was quickly protected and Boris Johnson rushed to the defense of his hero.

Condemning the actions, Johnson stated that we should not censor our past and that the statue is a “reminder of his achievement in saving this country – and the whole of Europe – from a fascist and racist tyranny.” This rhetoric plays into the glory of Britain’s past and downplays the contribution of our allies in defeating the tyranny of fascism. A rhetoric which not only fed into and propagates many of the myths behind Brexit, but which goes to the very heart of the issue at hand: the British past.

Johnson admitted Churchill held some views which would be considered controversial today and asked “Would it not be better and more honest to ask our children to understand the context, to explain the mixture of good and bad in the career of Churchill and everyone else?”

So let’s talk about his past honestly. Churchill’s political career spanned 7 decades during a period that turned some conventional, long-held ideas on their heads. Yet it is fair to say that Churchill had a patchy record on women’s rights and racial equality.

Churchill was appointed Home Secretary in January 1910, just as activists in the suffragette movement were turning to militant means (led by the Women’s Social and Political Union [WSPU]), and it was he who was responsible for putting down their protest. His support for women’s suffrage was minimal at best, making him a frequent target of their militant action. And yet his views remained unchanged. He is alleged to have said: ‘The women’s suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers and husbands.’

By the end of the First World War, following years of women’s active contribution to the economy and the war effort, the debate on women’s suffrage had come a long way. In 1918, Parliament, Churchill included, voted to grant the vote to women over the age of 30 and of certain social status. This Parliamentary act also extended the vote to all men over the age of 21, in recognition that working class men returning from the front lines could hardly be denied the vote after defending their country. Similarly, Churchill was swayed on the issue of women’s suffrage in recognition of their contribution on the Home Front.

Some argue that by the time of the Second World War, he was much more supportive of women’s rights, expanding opportunities for them to engage in the war effort. Yet, in 1944, he used his influence to reverse a vote that would have given equal pay to women teachers. Overall, his views and voting behaviour seem to have been dominated by political tactics rather than strong convictions in favour of women’s rights.

His position on empire and race is much harder to swallow. He was a staunch colonialist and even though he ‘fought the tyranny of fascism’ (and please, let’s not pretend Britain did that on its own or deny the role the British colonies played in doing so), he was against independence of Britain’s colonies and oversaw multiple abuses of power and racist acts.

He was heavily involved in the Boer War in the early 1900s, supporting the establishment of concentration camps – for both Boers and black Africans - during a war that resulted in thousands of deaths. He wrote about his hatred of Indians and was opposed to Indian Independence, as well as any concessions to their freedom. During the Second World War, he diverted food away from India, contributing to the 1943 famine that killed more than 3 million people. And, when PM for the second time, he bore overall responsibility for the brutal repression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. “Britain’s Gulag” detained between 80,000 and 320,000 people, and subjected them to systematic torture, forced labour, rape and murder. Not only has this disturbing reality been largely left out from Churchill’s narrative, the forced detention and murder of thousands of men, women and children was deliberately suppressed by the state for more than 50 years.

Finally, in the run up to the 1955 election, he proposed a campaign of “Keeping England White”, in response to growing migration from the Caribbean, stating to the governor-in-chief of Jamaica, Sir Hugh Foot, that this would create ‘a magpie society’ which ‘would never do’.

So if, as the current Prime Minister suggests, we are to avoid editing our past, we must acknowledge the negative along with the positive aspects of Churchill’s track record. Admittedly the yard stick has changed in the past 100 years. And Churchill’s career spanned a time which saw huge changes in the world order, growing social mobility and greater social justice. Perhaps the kindest thing we can say was that he was slow on the uptake.

If we really want to teach children about our past, these aspects deserve scrutiny and should not just be swept under the rug in favour of his glorifying his role in defeating Hitler. Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting the statue be removed but proposing that we acknowledge these contradictions and use the lessons of the past to shape our values of the future. And I urge Boris Johnson to listen to his own words: “To explain the mixture of good and bad in the career of Churchill and everyone else?”