February 28th, 2011 by 
It’s hard to get your head round how different it is to be a woman living in the 2010s to being one living in the 1910s. Next month, however, we will have good grounds to reflect on how far we have come since it is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. Loads of events from a celebration of women entrepreneurs to a free exhibition about flexible working are planned all around the world.
In just 100 years, women in the UK have won the right to vote, they have shown their mettle in times of war by taking on “men’s jobs” and doing them well, they have become more sexually liberated as advancements like the advent of the pill have unshackled them from the constant fear of pregnancy (and 100 years ago early death) and they have begun to rise up the political and jobs ladder.
In the last 20 years, that progress, particularly in the workplace, is beginning to transform the way we work.
Women who had children 20 years ago will barely recognise today’s workplace where women now have the right to request flexible working and where technology enables most people to work flexibly around their various other commitments. Changing social attitudes, combined with technological breakthroughs, mean that dads are wanting to and able to take a more hands-on approach to childcare.
For every tiny step of progress, however, there is a huge undertow trying to pull things back to how they were. LSE researcher Catherine Hakim, for instance, recently argued that women have different career aspirations than men and therefore attempts to level the gender pay gap and talk about discrimination in the workplace are misguided. Women are just not that interested in work. Indeed, she says, they carefully plot to “marry up” to someone richer than them precisely so they can just do a part-time or no job and look after the kids. This suggests that the 1950s housewife model was the nirvana for women and kind of runs against reports from women who lived through that time that they spent much of their time bored and horribly depressed. Hakim’s views have, of course, been widely reported because they are controversial with much discussion about whether women end up married to better off men precisely because of the gender pay gap.
Even so, the trend is for more and more women to become the main breadwinner in their family. A recent survey by Aviva said one in six women are now the main breadwinner in their family, meaning it makes economic sense for them to keep working after having children and for the man to go part time to look after the children. Meanwhile, research still suggests many organisations have a long way to go to overcome myths about working mums. A poll by Regus found the number of companies planning to hire working mums has fallen from 38% to 26% in just a year, fuelled by prejudices such as the idea that working mums are less committed than their counterparts.
In the private sphere, the last 20 years have seen the resurgence of nature in the nature/nurture debate. Huge progress in the field of genetics has led to the return with a vengeance of simplistic sexual stereotypes which we embrace with a vengeance because of their familiarity. Girls, then, love pink, shopping and gossip and dressing up because it is in their DNA to do so. Boys hate reading, love the outdoors and like hitting each other. There is no in between despite the fact that, more or less, that is precisely where most of us reside.
This simplistic acceptance of genetics as the be all and end all of sexual politics will change too, though, as we develop a more grown-up attitude to the research and come to grips with how little we understand the human body and therefore the combined influence of nature and nurture.
The next 100 years will see new changes for women despite short-term concerns about a female jobs recession. The majority of graduates will be women and more women will be represented in senior management because of shifting demographics. This will in turn make women more powerful in every sphere. Already it is calculated that women make up to 80% of consumer decisions. If they are earning more than their partners, their power as consumers can only increase.
However, we cannot rely on the onward march of progress on its own. Progress does not happen passively as can be seen by what is happening all around the world. Witness the recent case of a 14-year-old girl who was whipped to death in Bangladesh on the orders of a cleric for allegedly having an illicit relationship with a married cousin. Women are buffeted by huge political processes which are in turn reactions to historical events, such as colonialism and globalisation. Historical progress is not a given.
Many, though, want to work wholly from home and see the solution as going freelance or retraining and setting up on their own as, say, a child psychologist or an alternative health specialist, charging by the hour. The problem is that charging by the hour often equates to fairly low returns, especially if you are working round school pick-up times and holidays.
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