Chapter 46

Sidetrack (ix) - Girl Power: ‘Sisters are doing it for themselves’

I spend a lot of time running around the streets of Bristol.  I notice things as I jog along: the new housing development, the closed down pub, the disappearing fields, the growing number of dog-walkers.  One trend really sticks out.  More and more women and girls are now ‘on the streets.’  In fact I see significantly more of them than I do the guys.

In the eighties, the only joggers I’d encounter were blokes or the rare speeding woman super-athlete.  It wasn’t much different a decade later, although often, on the return leg of my daily commute, I started to notice a woman, let’s call her late-middle aged, running determinedly along the Badminton Road in Downend.  Thirty years later I still occasionally see the same woman; she’s reverted to fast walking now but still pretty good for someone who must well into their eighties. Wonder if she recognises me as the young chap who used to acknowledge her back then?  But something has happened since the Millennium.  There seems to have been some collective decision that running might actually be a sport that the female half of the population could embrace.

The numbers speak for themselves.  Over a million women out of a total female population in England of 22 million now claim to run four or more times a month.  At nearly 5%, this is closing on the 7% figure for men and, at the more serious end of the sport, the number of women entering the London Marathon has climbed to 34%, up a third in the last decade.  Catalysts like Race for Life, This Girl Can, and Park Run (up to 43% women participation in 2019) have made it acceptable, normal even, for the girls just to show up and give it a go.  It doesn’t have to be about pace, although there’s plenty of fleet-footed women out there; it’s fine to plod along chatting if that’s their thing.  For some it’s become just another opportunity for a social get together.

And it’s not just running.  British Triathlon, with a membership of 165,000, report a 25% increase over five years in the proportion of female membership which now stands at 32% of the whole.  In cycling it’s even more impressive.  From a figure of 550,000 regular women cyclists in 2013, British Cycling claim there has been an increase of a further 1,023,000.  Take a peek into a sports centre these days and the gym is full of women working out, the sports hall bouncing to aerobics and Zumba, the studio full of the yoga enthusiasts.  Running, cycling, triathlon, exercise classes; they’re all activities that tend to be picked up in adulthood.  For the younger girls there’s another boom going on: fighting for space on the playing fields, demanding modifications to changing rooms and pavilions.  The appeal of football, rugby and cricket is now seeing fast growth in junior clubs which presumably will filter through to more adult women’s teams in the not too distant future.  And there’s now no shortage of female role models to encourage this changing landscape.  Forty years ago, with the best will in the world, the likes of Virginia Wade, Mary Peters and Rachel Heyhoe-Flint were unlikely to over inspire. Roll forward and there’s a glut of strong British women bringing a mix of glamour, determination, grace and downright competitive spirit to the pool, the track, the gym and the pitch.  Chrissie Wellington in Ironman(?);  Jessica Ennis, Denise Lewis, Dina Asher-Smith, Paula Radcliffe, Kelly Holmes on the track; Nat Sciver in cricket; Sharon Davis and Rebecca Adlington in the pool; the Lionesses, the hockey and netball girls, the irrepressible Laura Kenny. Their efforts, their performances, their ability to entertain are on the same level as the guys.

My personal view on equal prize money?  It’s not about effort, or even skill levels.  It depends on the sport and the numbers prepared to pay.  Clearly a woman jockey, sprinter, triathlete should earn the same prize money as the guys if they’re at the same event.  Women footballers, cricketers and boxers aren’t at this position (yet).  They need to wait a bit longer for the improving skills, infrastructure and numbers to bring in the crowds and revenue.  And tennis?  I don’t think the women should receive the same until they too play Grand Slams to five sets.  Playing to just three effectively means they’re actually earning more per shot or time on court.

It’s not all a success story.  Engagement levels in sporting activity at school are lower than they should be and noticeably lower than that for the boys, and the mid-teen dropout rate in girls is high.  It seems clear that, apart from the sporty types, most teenage girls give up on exercise before then deciding to come back to it a little later in life.  Hardly surprising; unflattering gym kit, open plan changing rooms and showers and a limited variety of sport options don’t exactly help. It makes you wonder what the adult participation numbers would look like if they’d kept more active throughout their teens and twenties

And it’s not just sport and exercise.  Take a look at business and industry.  My steady rise up the corporate management ladder was never challenged by female candidates; they just didn’t exist in any sort of numbers in engineering, sales, finance or production above a junior supervisory role.  If I’d started twenty years later I’d have been increasingly up against it if I’d fancied a career in HR, marketing or finance, the softer sides of an organisation.  And if I was embarking on a similar path today, the female ‘threat’ has spread into logistics and production; it’s now only in traditional engineering where the guys have retained an advantage and there are exceptions in this field too. (in ‘Work 4 – ‘best team ever’ I mention Elena who used to work for me and is now an Engineering Manager at GKN).  Step away from industry into the commercial world of banking and retail and the trend is even more obvious.  Walk down a high street, visit a shopping mall or check out the names of medical or legal practice partnerships; the world of small business is now shared by growing numbers of female entrepreneurs.

So the traditional bastions of sport, health and business are levelling-up fast.  Elsewhere chugging up on the outside, knocking the buffers out the way, are the growing bands of women politicians, head teachers, and journalists, all noisily, unashamedly getting their faces on TV and voices on the radio.  Nothing wrong with that, although I‘ve got to say that smug, self-righteous, campaigning women, can be just as irritating as pompous narrow-minded blokes.

Meanwhile, out in the community, the battle is already over.  Charities, parish councils, social clubs, cafes, libraries, nurseries, keep-fit classes are now firmly under the female thumb.  And there’s no easy escape to the pub these days; many of these are actually managed in practice by the landlady and it’s the husband or partner whose landlord role is now more focused on chatting to the regulars and pulling the pints.

What happens if these trends continue? The multi-tasking, family-raising, superwoman doesn’t tend to take too many prisoners, so our sons and grandsons will have a choice.  Don’t moan about it, stay on their toes, make themselves useful, push the boundaries, keep fit, and try and hang onto the stuff that the guys are ‘generally/genetically’ better at.  Any complacency and the inevitable will happen; one form of second-class citizens will be replaced by another.

Of course this levelling-up trend is 100% the right way for a society to evolve; the benefits are obvious and quantifiable, hidden and immeasurable.  And there will be setbacks along the way.  For example, not all women politicians or business leaders will be as good as they think they are.  The recent female heads of the Post Office and the Met’ haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory, and a woman is just as likely to be corrupt, racist or sexist as a guy; just take a look at Marie Le Pen or Priti Patel?

And there’s still a long way to go.  Most of the societal change is happening in the middle-ground, amongst those with a half-decent education and some financial security.  And it’s a trend that the women and girls at either end of the socio-economic curve won’t have really have noticed much difference yet.  The well-heeled woman shopping in the designer stores in the morning, lunching at the sports-club and speculating during the evening when the best time might be to stay at the French villa has never been troubled by a lack of opportunity; she’s inherited or married well and made the best of her good fortune.  Down at the other end, there’s still a sizeable chunk with no aspiration, no encouragement, no visible ladder, no money, no qualifications and dealing with the likely consequences of poor health, early motherhood and missed opportunity.

Maybe a few of the sisters who are doing alright for themselves should occasionally spare a thought for those that aren’t.  Most do but some don’t.  When I was working for Indesit and Whirlpool, both large international operations, they made a big thing out of celebrating International Women’s Day.  On the continent IWD has effectively become an unofficial bank holiday and for the rest of us trying to contact anyone to get something sorted with a supply issue or admin problem was a complete waste of time.  In Europe, and increasingly in the UK Head Office, IWD effectively meant the girls finished work late morning and headed off to join all their other sisters in the cafes of Milan, Moscow, London or Peterborough (!) to drink lattes and eat cakes all afternoon.  I don’t think there would have been much thought given to the predicament of many of their fellow women and every year this would bug me a bit.  I never noticed any IWD campaigns that encouraged donations or campaigns to help developing world women still trying to get off the bottom rung in their fight against misogynistic traditions or religious barriers.  Then again, maybe I’m just being a bit of an IWD grump. Let’s hope that enlightened governments, charities, organisations, campaigners, celebrities, writers, musicians and so on can keep cranking up the pressure and help promote change. Surely all those oppressive regimes, religions and societies will one day wake-up and recognise that, if they’re going to survive into the next century, they need to free up the restraints that are holding back half their number.

Meanwhile I’ll keep plodding around the local streets, turning up at the gym or pool, helping out on the odd committee, and trying to keep the flag flying for the guys whilst simultaneously cheering on the gals.

Images removed: Laura Trott, Denise Lewis, Lionesses

 Deborah Meaden, Jacinda Arden