The same old story of women in the workplace

There is female frustration at the failure of attempts to make the workplace a more humane place

Yesterday's report from the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), Sex and Power: Who Runs Britain, may contain the first wide-ranging data on women in senior positions in the workplace. But it told us nothing that we didn't know already. The cold, hard, figures are depressing, nonetheless. Even though more women are working than ever before, they're still not reaching the top of their professions.

Women make up 45 per cent of the national workforce, and 30 per cent of its managers. Up in the boardroom though, women are still barely represented. They make up a mere 7 per of the senior judiciary, 7 per cent of senior police officers, 9 per cent of top business leaders and 9 per cent of national newspaper editors.

Julie Mellor, chair of the EOC, is trenchant in her interpretation of the problems underlying the statistics. "No one can argue any more that it's just a matter of time until more women make it to the top - there have been talented women coming up in business, public life and politics for years.

"Recent media commentary on the honours system has also highlighted the low numbers of women to receive senior honours. This reflects a wider problem that won't be resolved until Britain's leaders act to make sure women are not prevented from getting to the top."

What the Equal Opportunities Commission wants of Britain's leaders is leadership on work-life balance, a challenge to the country's long-hours culture, and promotion on flexible working. It also wants a dollop of positive discrimination - to be used where women are under-represented in public life.

The last of these demands is controversial. After all, women who make it to the top are already and unfairly subject to whispered resentments about how they got their jobs because of their gender. If there is an iota of suspicion that this is really what's happening, then such petty envy will become all the more virulent. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted, just that there are dangers inherent in going down that road.

But the rest of the EOC's demands, which boil down to the idea that work, however committed to it we may be, should only be one part of a fulfilling life in a healthy society, should not be controversial at all. The astounding thing is that they are. Shorter hours, flexible working - these seem like wheezes that should appeal to all of us, as we complain about stress and "time famine".

But instead, despite the lip service that is paid to such ideas, there actually seems to be massive hostility to them. During its first term, the Government worked hard at challenging the long-hours culture, yet even the civilising changes that were introduced in the House of Commons itself are now being murmured about as "unworkable". What's more, despite the fanfare which greeted Britain's signing up to the European working times directive, the long hours culture has become more rather than less entrenched in employment practices, with more than ever notching up more than 45 hours each week.

And of course, while there has been a move towards more part-time work, figures attest that part-time workers are lower-paid workers, and are overwhelmingly women. The truth is that as more women have come into the workplace, their need for flexibility as they run homes and families has been taken advantage of.

The workplace has changed to accommodate women. But it has changed in a negative way. Those who need to work flexibly are punished for their needs, while at the same time working harder and more productively to justify those needs. As for those who wish to signal that they should not be counted among such uncommitted malingerers, they are encouraged to work against their flexible colleagues, and to advertise at every possible opportunity that for them work always comes first.

Sometimes women do manage to negotiate these toxic politics - if they are particularly good at their jobs, highly motivated, have the flexibility at home that money can buy, and a sympathetic employer. But even so, there is plenty of evidence that even under these unusually auspicious circumstances, women still find lives dominated by work to be less than satisfying.

A plethora of best-selling novels, Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, and Maeve Harron's Having It All to name but two, all tell the same story of fabulous and fabulously successful career women who eventually have the same epiphany. They realise that life is demanding too much of them, that children and homemaking are important, and that running your own successful business part-time (and employing other women also part-time) is greatly preferable to working for a huge corporation and never having any time for baking cakes.

Entertaining and wise as these unashamedly populist reads may be, the real-life subtext to them all is the same. Women get so far in the media (they're usually former journalists) and then turn their hand to more flexible and lucrative work (in this case writing mass-market paperbacks) instead of doggedly carrying on with their climb up the greasy pole. (Which may partly explain why so few of the gifted women working in the media make it into the top jobs.)

The walking-away-from-corporate-success argument makes perfect sense to the readers of these books, even if most women don't have the sort of choices that spread themselves before the impossibly glamorous women in these novels. Conservatives sometimes point to the collapse of the career woman's belief that she can "have it all" as proof that women simply aren't cut out for high-flying work. But what they really document is female frustration at the failure of their attempts to make the workplace a more humane and accommodating place for men as well as women.

As such, these books are saying much the same thing as Julie Mellor of the EOC is saying. Except that while she is still part of the fray, fighting on, the dream vocalised in the stories is that the women can start again from scratch and build a whole different employment network, with a different value system underpinning it.

Sometimes, indeed, it seems as if this is the only way forward. For the fact that women are not making it into top jobs is testament to the fact that not only is the corporate ethos unsympathetic to women, but also that it is becoming more so. The undeniable point is that the corporate structure was designed to suit men, and that faced with competition from women the reaction has been to hunker down in a bunker mentality, rather that embrace a change that would benefit everyone - men, women and children.

Above all, what is rewarded in the boardrooms for Britain is an obsessive mentality - the ability to focus on only one thing - work - and build one's life around it. Even for the successful men who win at this game (usually with the help of a multi-tasking woman), it ought to be obvious that this is no way to run a life. For their pains in the office, men miss out on their offspring's childhoods, place a huge strain on their families, and finally die younger.

The fear that makes them cling on to the rituals of a narrow, work-obsessed life is of a failure in the wider, more complex world of home, family, culture and society. It says a lot for women that they continue to reject this soulless existence and choose life instead.

d.orr@independent.co.uk