Closet feminist?

Am I becoming a closet feminist? A picture in the press of the beautiful Yingluk, Prime Minister of Thailand, got me to thinking that wherever we look these days we see smart, glamorous (some of them) and feisty women.

The Foreign Minister of Pakistan, surely one of the most stressful jobs imaginable, is a beautiful woman in her thirties. The Chairman of the Tory Party is a highly intelligent woman of Pakistani origin who is our surrogate Foreign Secretary when dealing with Pakistan because all doors are open to her and she speaks the lingo.

On David Dimbleby’s new series on Africa, he interviewed a very bright young Ethiopian woman (US educated) who, seeing that coffee, Ethiopia’s most valuable export crop was subject to monkey business from middle men to the detriment of the farmers, established the Ethiopian Coffee Exchange where farmers sell their crop directly from the auction floor. All deals are on the shake of a hand and there are 3 every second. She has transformed the farmers’ lives and prosperity.

In Kenya, he met another such who had established a workshop for leper women to make eco-artefacts from scrap, such as tyres and old hessian sacks. The products are flying off the shelves in the ‘green' shops in the West.

In the media, we have the doyenne of female anchors, Zeinab Badawi, who has been around for nearly 30 years. She has the most perfect received English, and there are others on all channels, many of whom have very dangerous assignments in war zones..

In business there seems to be no limit. The boss of DuPont, the largest business of its kind in the world, is a youngish woman, and there are many more examples of women in positions that would have been unthinkable in past years.

And, of course, we have Hillary who has settled to the job of Secretary of State as to the manner born, and female Prime Ministers of Australia and Denmark.

The downside is that we constantly hear complaints that women get paid less than men (but we are never given any concrete examples) and that there should be quotas to get more women onto the boards of big companies.

The first is obvious nonsense. When a job becomes available it carries a specific salary. There are not two salary scales, one for men and one for women. That would quickly get you into court. What the whiners really mean is that over their working lives women earn less than men. That is true, and the reason is very simple. They have shorter working lives! They have more sense than to devote every waking moment to work. They have families. They retire earlier. They have more intelligent interests than the golf course.

The second is the same kind of patronising nonsense that brought us the dumbing-down of affirmative action. I can’t imagine any-self respecting woman wanting preferential treatment on the grounds alone of her sex.

Thirty-odd years ago, I appointed a Deputy Chief Executive, an extremely capable and well-educated woman. I was appalled to learn that as a single woman, no matter what her earnings, she was not entitled to get a Building Society mortgage. I fixed one in-house.

Sometime later she applied for a Chief Executive vacancy. She wasn’t short-listed, so I ‘spoke’ to the outgoing CEO to make sure she was. She got the job, which was a ‘first’ for a woman. But she said that she had been asked a lot of questions that would not have been asked of a man and which she found offensive, such as ‘Why are you not married?’, ‘Are you going to get married?’, ‘What will you do if you have children?’. Most of these questions were asked by the women on the panel.

Thereafter, she raced past me career-wise, ending as a big-shot with the World Bank before turning to consultancy.

We have sure come along way.