Tag Archives: mummy blogger

Politics: What Women Want?

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There are a lot of things not to like about Mel Gibson, but “What Women Want“, his 2000 movie also starring Helen Hunt and Marisa Tomei was actually quite funny.

                                             

Throughout the centuries men have been asking what women want, and while the answer from Mel (not to be taken for granted) differs slightly from the answer that Chaucer’s Wife of Bath gives ( “Wommen desiren to have sovereyntee. As wel over hir housbond as hir love, And for to been in maistrie hym above”) the core is the same.

But despite the fact that the answer has been out there for so long,  it seems that this is again being asked, this time in the context of politics.
While the newspapers wage the war between what they describe as “real women” and “ardent careerists who should be in the kitchen having babies” (although I might have misread this last point), the politicians are vying for the female vote.

Netmums, Mumsnet and other female-led online communities are the battleground.  Yesterday – Mothering Sunday – Gordon Brown appeared live on Netmums.

There are 16 pages of discussion to read, if you want, but it’s interesting to note that while Mumsnet was accused recently of being the internet home of middle class Boden wearers, Netmums was keen to point out that a quarter of members that had filled in a survey were on under £15000, and half on under £25000.

So what are mums interested in?  Well a quick scan reveals the following topics got time and attention: tax credits too complex, what’s happening with childcare vouchers, children centres, cost of childcare, maternity services, decline in maternity services, child internet safety, more support for stem jobs, new plans for improving maternity services, childminders early years training costs and tax breaks for looking after own kids, breastfeeding, benefits – v- working , marriage, public sector jobs, mums returning to work, nightmare neighbours, supporting mums to stay at home with their kids… ok I got bored after 4 pages.

 A lot of the time, comments were about the posters’ personal circumstances, and the Prime Minister did offer to put a few in touch with the right minister to get the the information they needed.  A lot of the time the answers looked like standard briefing text – and fair enough, personalising everything in the time necessary for an online debate is a real challenge – but if, for example someone complains about childcare provision in their area and the difficulties it causes the in their day to day lives, telling the that there’s more childcare than ever and some of it is now paid by the state doesn’t actually help them. 

But what the various leader’s debates have shown, bearing in mind that the people that actually coment in these discussions are only a small subset of mums, let alone of women, is that the interests and issues affecting women are incredibly diverse. 
And that “women’s issues” are not a simple box that can be ticked.

The National Equality Panel report showed that there is almost as much disparity between top and bottom earning women as there are between top and bottom earners overall. 
Contrary to what the Daily Mail tried to say this meant, it doesn’t mean that there is no gender pay gap or that it is not important in terms of sorting out the inequalities in this country (it does however mean with inequality on this scale it is not simply restricted to disadvantage by gender).  It also means that women may not all individually think that the top priority for them is addressing the barriers to women reaching the boardroom, or even have a view on the level of income at which tax credits apply.

Women’s interests are affected by their differing situations, just like the interests of men, but with added experience of using the NHS, schools, childcare and all the things that get pigeonholed as “women’s interests” when actually everything is a women’s issue (yep, even men’s health. You think if something happened to my husband it wouldn’t be a priority for me?)  

And while the audience of the discussion forums can suggest that women’s issues are special and selective, women can have views on the economy overall (some of us are perhaps more likely to admit that it is not immediately obvious how something so complex actually works- but then isn’t that the problem that the banks didn’t admit to, that they didn’t know either?), heavy industry, the appropriate structure of the labour market and all the things that apparently are “male” issues and keep these thoughts in their pretty little heads along with which shoes goes with which outfit, the state of the Beckhams’ marriage, which kid is doing which after school activity when just as well as a amn can keep football scores, engine capacities and recipes for his most impressive pasta dish in his (because we’re not into gender sterotyping, are we?)  

The women’s vote in 1997, the apparent fact that women changed from moderate conservatism to supporting Tony Blair’s New Labour, was instrumental in bringing about a change of government.  With all the courting of the women’s vote, the striving to appear a nice an as well as a leader who loves his family, and the talk of a hung parliament it is clear that it’s thought to be decisive again. 
But don’t patronise us. 
We don’t need to know that you are a loving husband and father – if you have a wife and kids we should jolly well expect you to be.  
Some people might want you to be “ordinary” and know the price of a pint of milk and what’s happening on Corrie, but others may not be convinced those are great indicators of leadership.  If you actually understand economics, the way in which our various relationships with other countries and international institutions functions and amplify each other, recognise the professionalism of people doing their jobs and treat the that way, then you might be worth voting for. 
Of course you could just mainstream equality: recognise the value of the contribution that women make to the world as well as men, talk about the things that affect our lives more than those of men as normal not an add-on or a luxury.  You don’t have to be a woman to recognise the value of that (though a few more in parliament challenging ideas through that filter might be a good idea). 
Listening to us, and enabling us to do some of the decision-making too. Enabling us to make the decisions about who we want to be without barriers that are there not through design but overlooking because someone that knows best didn’t take that consequence into account.  I could go on, but I won’t for now.

I don’t think that’s too far from what the Wife of Bath’s Tale set out, is it?

Is society structured against mothers?

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(NB this lovely image is from www.allfreelance.com which currently has an interesting article on the issue of being a working parent… more soon)

Man Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel’s “contraversial” question about motherhood is now on Comment is Free in the Guardian Online.  She commented in the Sunday Telegraph that:

“I was perfectly capable of setting up a home when I was 14, and if, say, it had been ordered differently, I might have thought, ‘Now is the time to have a couple of children, and when I am 30 I will go back and I’ll get my PhD.’”

CiF asks for comments on whether she is right. 
Of course she is right. In part.

Not about setting up home at 14 - my idea of being grown up at 14 was so far from what I now know to be what being adult actually is actually about as to make my diaries from that time both embarrassing and naively charming.  
And it’s time spent “growing up” – either in the world of work or learning to live away from home at university that makes it possible to deal with the complex and multiple demands that you have to handle both in raising a child and running a household.

Commentators have tried to turn her words into a row about teenage sex.  Just to be clear, in my heart of hearts I don’t think that people should be having sex outside marriage (or civil partnership) and that a lot of heartache and pain could be avoided by people not doing so. But I also live in the real world and realise that they do, and will.  As a former student of history, I also know that 200 years ago people were betrothed and married in their early teens. What they were not doing was using sex as a form of social communication.  But I digress.

I think that Hilary Mantel’s point is not that people should be choosing to have babies on their own with no visible means of support aged 14, but that currently societal norms are structured against female biology. 
Women are most likely to have problem-free births and pregnancies in their 20s.  But if you have gone through school and university, in your early 20s you are only a couple of years into a career. 
There is in any case a gender pay gap that appears between male and female graduates within three years of graduation, but we also know that significant time out of the labour market early on in your career and the need to work part-time seriously affect your ability to “get on” in your career.

The jobs market is still broadly structured around the (convenient for men) idea that you get educated, take up a career (whether via an apprenticeship or not), work at it, taking on more and more responsibility until either the Peter Principle kicks in (or indeed the Dilbert Principle) or you become the boss.
Needing to take time out in the middle of that to ensure that there is a next generation that can pay for your pension when you are old doesn’t really fit and leave millions of women these days in a daft situation: have kids and accept that either you’ll take a lot of time out and perhaps never attain a position matching your ability level, try to work part-time in an environment of fine words but ultimately scepticism about whether your are truly “committed” to your career and straddle the two worlds uncomfortably, take the male executive route i.e. have kids but never see them, or don’t have kids.
This is such rubbish.

At the moment many women are putting off having kids until their late 30s, or later.  There are articles in the press about getting eggs frozen, about how it’s your “right” to have kids when you want, how many cycles of IVF you should be entitled to (or if you read the other sort of newspaper, how women should not be working but running the house and popping out babies and getting homecooked dinner on the table for their man). 
But the truth is that having a baby is more difficult as you get older, that it is harder and more risky for both mother and child, and the risk of Down’s Syndrome and similar increase exponentially. 
There was a story in the press a year or so ago about the rise in births of children with Down’s, saying that the “caring UK” was a more accepting place in which to raise disabled children than in the past.  But the rise of the older mother is also a factor, and while you love the child you have you do wonder if all of the people that put off having a child until so late in their reproductive lives fully realised the potential impact of that decision.

Besides, getting woken up at all hours of the night is hard at any age, but even harder as you get older. 
How much better to have your kids when you are physically at the optimal point to do so?  

Of course there are arguments too.  How would it be possible to afford to raise children without a decent salary behind you?  How will you ever get women at the top of businesses if they don’t even get going on their careers until their 30s?  What about more equal sharing of parenting responsibilities?

And doesn’t the structure of the modern relationship also argue against this alternative model? 
If I’d been having kids in my very early 20s, I’d have been having them with one of my university boyfriends and we’ll never know if that relationship would have endured with children involved (it didn’t with none, obviously, and that’s something of a relief for both of us). 
But while I’m a monogamist who believes in marriage for life, many people see it as until divorce does us part, a situation rendered even more painful and complex when children are involved. 
Would that, too, be changed by following a different life pattern?

The rush to condemn Hilary Mantel as condoning teenage pregnancy (a curious target which the government surely cannot really be held responsible for bringing down directly unless there are taskforces standing by to invade teenage bedrooms, bathrooms, parks and wherever else couples-of-however-transient-a-nature are trying to get it together…) risks overlooking her fundamental point that society still does not operate to the benefit of men and women equally.

For me, this is so obviously true, I can’t believe that anyone would even try to deny it or defend it as self-evidently the way things need to be. 
But it’s not just women alone that are being overlooked. 
Until we value motherhood (and fatherhood too) as necessary for the rearing of well-rounded children best able to achieve their potential rather than as an inconvenience that takes people out of wholehearted pursuit of money, and children are not treated as an irritation, a “choice that other people have made that I should not have to pay for” or worse, as a threat, then we will keep having this ongoing issue of arguing whether women should be in the workplace or the home, or whether there is a gender pay gap and if so why and can and should anything be done about it.  Can’t we just accept that raising the next generation is actually a very important job and value it as one?

Why Mumsnet politics matters

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mum in boden
Oh dear – Janet Street Porter seems to be upset about having been invited to a party to celebrate Mumsnet’s anniversary.

I’m a member- but not a regular user- of Mumsnet. Also of Netmums, and a couple of other parenting websites.
It’s a legitimate forum for parents to come together and share common experiences.

I have a bit of Boden in my wardrobe (not too much – Johnny seems to imagine that yummy mummies have breastfed so long that they have lost any semblance of cleavage so I can’t buy the majority of the tops).  I thought the dresscode of “Boden” she mentioned was very funny, very knowing (as in that’s what they think of us shorthand irony).  Yep, I wear it both to work and socially, but never to “hubbie’s office dinner” because – do you know what?- in our working lives to date, it’s been my jobs that have generated all the out of hours socialising-as-business events.  And some of those have been black tie… ah, but those days are over now.
   
But then I’m problably the suburban middle class mother that JSP would despise. 

The Mumsnet discussion of all this shows the diversity of the women involved.  The common thread is motherhood but age, job other than parenting, marital status, location, interests, and frankly spelling ability and ability to articulate are hugely varied.
Yes, as with all online forums there’s an element of bullying.  But I don’t find that there’s a received way of thinking – far from it (a debate with a politician felt like it got hijacked by the home-schoolers recently and while no one says why on earth would you do that, it was hardly a mainstream concern shared by all – but the questioners were about to make the points they wanted to and get a response on an issue that they could have spent years writing to DCSF about and not had anything as clear or direct).  
And Mumsnet can’t be said to speak for all mums.  My favourite stat is the if you had all the members together physically in one place, say a football stadium, rather than online no one could say that they should be overlooked- but of course the point is that you never could do all that and no one would expect them all to be friends or have a common view or purpose other than the specific one that’s brought them together. A bit like football fans actually.

But JSP is wrong to suggest that it’s the kiddie sick element of parenting that would form the main part of conversation at a party like that – if Mumsnet were inviting the sort of people that post it’d be so much more interesting than that. JSP herself says that it is likely to be “packed with high achieving women”.

And that’s the point.  Mumsnet and other online forums can’t easily be dismissed as JSP points out because it is expected that women will be the swing voters in the coming election.
Talking about being parents is not enough though – if the high achieving women of Mumsnet are intelligent too, they are unlikely to be impressed simply with an “I’ve got a family too and I love them” approach by politicians (although I have to say that unless you’ve been a parent or raised a sibling etc. you really don’t know what it’s like to be one!) unless we’d got evidence that they too had had childcare logistical arrangement trauma, needed both parents to work to meet the bills, fought to get into the right schools and all the other little day to day dramas that parents deal with everyday but which I could not have possibly anticipated would be so complicated until actually faced with handling it.
(As an aside, I once asked a schoolfriend of mine who had three children and was pregnant with her fourth whether she’d gone back to work.  Bless her, she didn’t actually cut of contact or shout at me but with just one I can now see how naive a question that was!) 

I would have thought that – if women are to be the battleground – vocabulary like “swingeing” public sector cuts would be dropped given that that is more likely to affect women than men as they are more likely to be working in the public sector. 
And far from calling it “smug”, why don’t we just acknowledge that women, whether SAHM (stay at home mums) or working like me, using their own little vocabs on the web like DH for darling husband (no worse than football fans, or car owner forums etc.), are a legitimate voting demographic?  
Yes, so are the “women over 40, single and divorced” - interestingly JSP’s own demographic on and off- both are valid.
But that dones’t mean mums are irrelevant.  And politicians
have found a direct way to talk with some of them, which both parties like (many politicians like to extrapolate from the specific to the general – Alan Johnson said on BBC4′s “The Great Offices of State” this week that he liked to get out and talk to policemen on the frontline rather than just read briefs compiled by civil servants, as if the specific expereinces of a few could be presumed to be similar to those of the whole – which is of course the basis behind sampling too).

But please, JSP, can you help celebrate that some women, and not just those working like men, or with lots of money, or for whom children didn’t happen and could focus wholeheartedly on careerbuilding at the crucial 20s-40s period and who have climbed the greasy poles are getting their voices heard too?  It’s shouldn’t be either/or, it should be “yes! And now let’s make sure the next group can also be heard! ”

Mums, whether working or at home are voters too, and the politicians are recognising it.  So the willingness of senior politicians to be participating in Mumsnet debates matters.
If it could be done in a non-patronising way that’d be great.