Aug 28

The minefield of celebrating female achievement

I came across a fantastic site recently: a list of 22 inspirational female Australian entrepreneurs. You can find the site here; it is a blog attached – slightly anomalously – to a website about credit cards, but this doesn’t detract from the content. Here, you can read some interesting stories, including that of:

  • Gina Rinehart, the richest woman in the world, who learnt the ropes of her father’s mining business from the bottom up, and who named a mountain range after him;
  • as well as … Caroline Treacy, the managing director of the architecture firm CORE, based in Queensland, who also spends time supporting and mentoring local and young would-be architects and businesswomen;
  • and also … Michelle Wright, the owner of Mishfit, a personal training service that educates and provides safe exercise care to pregnant and post-natal women, who was prompted to develop the service when she suffered from post-natal depression herself.

All the stories are fascinating, and in themselves a celebration of women’s achievements … the statement should end there, but it doesn’t, because the introduction to the website almost undoes the good it has done. Introducing the list of female entrepreneurs, the author writes:

“Move over men! Long gone are the days when women stayed in the shadows, forging a career in ironing, cooking and childbearing. More and more women are developing their own business empires, and some are even leaving the men trailing far behind. Read on to find out about some of Australia’s female success stories. Men, be scared. Women, be inspired.”

We want women to be inspired, and we want to hear their stories. We want, too, to recognise that women should no longer stay in the shadows of life, as they have had to do in many, many cases, for centuries (and still do in some cultures). BUT … this is not a competition between the sexes. This is not about men being “scared”, but men and women working together, equally and fairly. It is also about enabling women – and men – to have choices and for us all to celebrate those choices, whether it is working inside the home or working beyond its bounds. Biologically, women bear children; it is together, however, that parents should be able to decide how to raise their children. It is together, too, that they should be able to decide on work and life patterns.

Is this an over-sensitive response? Perhaps. But it strikes me that at a time when we are still working – hard – towards real social change in how men and women are viewed and treated by our society, then we have to be sensitive to nuance, and to anything that might undermine our progress. Misunderstanding, resulting in entrenched positions and a retreat into unhelpful stereotypes, is so easy. We must be on the alert – we must be genuinely open, fair and utterly dedicated to real equality.

And then we really will be able to celebrate.

 

Aug 24

The deep horrors of motherhood. We Need to Talk About Kevin

I recently read – in one intensive, all-encompassing go – We Need to Talk About Kevin. I know that Lionel Shriver wrote it in 2003, and we are now almost a decade on, in 2012; I know too that it was made into a film last year, so I am well aware that I am behind the times. I did not read it when it was published – or even when it won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005 – and I did not see the film when it came out. But I have read it now, and it has made a deep impression; so deep that I am glad that I didn’t read it in 2003 when I was in the midst of having children, as it means that I have had nine years of innocence, not having read it, and I am glad too that I have not seen the film, because I think now that I will choose not to see it, my eyes opened by this terrible, dreadful, completely captivating and painfully engrossing tale of a mother’s relationship with her children, and with her son in particular.

It is of course extraordinarily well written – rich in nuance and story-telling, and entirely gripping. I would recommend it wholeheartedly; I hesitate only because of its awful, heart-wrenching subject content. For – as you will know if you have ever explored even just beyond the title – you will know that this is a tale of a boy who grows up to be one of a line of the now all-too-familiar ‘High School killers’ who make the headlines in the US on a depressingly – and shockingly – regular basis. It is a story of how his mother fears and suspects that his relationship with her, from even before he was born, may be at the root of his sociopathy, despite the evidence which we see to the contrary. We want to know why he did it, and as the tapestry of events unfolds before us, we desperately want to know that this could not happen to us, or to our children. Jenni Murray had it spot-on – commenting on the story, she wrote that it is “a book that acknowledges what many women worry about but never express: the fear of becoming a mother and the terror of what kind of child one might bring into the world”.

Becoming a mother means exposing yourself, rawly, in a way that you never needed to before having children. You are responsible for your child – jointly, of course, but what mother in moments of silent uncertainty or fear does not feel herself primarily responsible for how her child turns out? Fathers experience the same fears, but again, we do not dare talk of them. We work to deny bleak thoughts, to reassure ourselves that our children will turn out all right, and we fight not to drop into the blackness of ‘what if …?’ These are the horrors of motherhood – that something will happen to our child, or that we – through negligence or weakness – will cause something to go wrong, and that that ‘something’ will blight their life and ours forever. We Need to Talk About Kevin is unremitting in its exposition of a mother’s thoughts and feelings, and part of me feels that all parents should experience it, if only, through the insights it forces upon its readers, to grow in reaction the courage and determination that evil (for what other word can we give it?) shall not triumph, and that we shall together – all of us – rise to this task of making sure that our children live and contribute in the world in the way in which we know they can – with positivity, joy and compassion.

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs in the entire world. Our children can bring us heartache because of the love that they unleash in us – a love that makes us vulnerable, but a love that can make us indescribably strong too. We live in a world which buffets our parents as well as our children; we owe it to one another to reach out to share the support and care for our children. We have a collective responsibility to bring up our children, and to work to create a better world. Humbly, unassumingly, unjudging of others, but strong in our sense that there is a right and a good path ahead, we can do this. We are all in this together.

Actually, We Need to Talk About Our Children and Our World. And we need to do it now.

Aug 22

Good news about Physics … well, sort of.

Figures for this year’s A Levels, released last week, show that there has been another increase this year (on average, 3%) in the number of students taking A Level Science and Maths subjects. Physics has seen an especially positive rise: the total number of taking Physics A Level this year increased by 5%, up from 32,860 in 2011 to 34,509 in 2012. According to the BBC News website, there are a number of reasons for this, including the newsworthiness of Physics at present, with projects like the Hadron Collider about to write a more complete version than ever before of the rules that govern our existence. Physics teaches us who we are and how we exist, and is – quite simply – fascinating. Schemes to support teachers in schools to communicate this fascination are, demonstrably, working.

But not everyone has heard and acted on this sense of wonder, and while it is pleasing to note that the numbers of pupils taking the subject have increased, the final paragraph of the article is somewhat more depressing: “But one continued cause for concern is that although there has been an increase in girls studying A-level physics, the proportion compared with boys is still very low. Of the 34,509 entered for physics A-level, only 7,361 were female.” A ratio of 1:5 is not a particularly healthy one, and not much, either, to shout about.

Girls’ schools, of course, contribute significantly to the numbers of girls studying Physics. At St Mary’s Calne, a third of last year’s Year 13 leavers studied a Physical Science or Maths at A Level, way over the national average, and they all scored extremely high grades – mostly As and A*s. I sometimes fear I must sound like a stuck record when I say that girls’ schools enable girls to do anything, free of stereotypes and prejudices … but in the case of Physics, again, it is absolutely true. There is no reason whatsoever why as many girls as boys should not study Physics at A Level, and go on to further study in the subject. With all these exciting discoveries around the corner, we are going to need as many Physicists as we can get.

So … work still to be done. But at least we know we can do it.

 

Aug 20

“Women were celebrated for doing more with their bodies than model the latest clothes”

Janice Turner has written a fantastic piece in Saturday’s Times magazine, and if you have access to the Times online, then do read it. Over six pages of glorious photos of women Olympic athletes, she took us through the triumphs of these Games, which really did place women on the front pages for their achievements, not for their appearance. “In Britain, where for all the purported equality our female stock images are TOWIE airheads or actresses peacocking at premieres or wifely political help-meets, it did us good to have a whole new cast in our national soap.”

As we know, these Games were amazing for women, from the first medals for Team GB (which were earned by women), to the inclusion for the very first time of female athletes from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. For these women, just being there was a triumph: women’s sport is in effect banned in their home countries, and for them to have trained and gained permission to compete was an astonishing step forward. Leah McElrath in the Huffington Post, after interviewing Saudi women about what it meant to them to see their countrywomen compete, concluded that: “The images of two strong, courageous young Saudi women athletes will forever exist as part of Saudi history. … a bell of hope and expectation has been rung – a bell that cannot be unrung within the hearts and minds of the women and girls of Saudi Arabia.” She is right, of course, also to remind us that the battle for women’s equality has not yet been won: only “Time will tell if the leaders of the Kingdom heard it as well.”

But from a Western perspective, it was the focus on women’s achievements and not on their appearance that was so refreshing, so empowering, so liberating. These were women as real people, not clothes horses or simpering shadows of who they could be. We saw, experienced and shared their stories – real stories, with all the twists and turns that we know our own real lives bring us, but which we have been ‘Hollywoodised’ into imagining are not part of the lives of those in the public eye. Surrounded as we are by pictures of unrealistically shaped, airbrushed women, plucked and buffed to what we have been cudgelled into believing is ‘perfection’, it is not surprising that female aspirations for success have become so enmeshed with these notions of superficial beauty.

These Games have had a huge impact on how women are viewed, and we have to keep up the momentum. The vultures are circling, though – in this week’s ‘women’s lifestyle’ magazines there is a rash of stories and pictures of Team GB athletes dressed up to the nines and looking, in the words of many an edition, “hot”. There is nothing wrong with this in moderation, but there is something devastatingly wrong if we airbrush away the images and stories we have just recently been witnessing, of these real, amazing women, with their real, amazing stories of hard work, sacrifice and triumph. We need our daughters to have role models of whom we can genuinely say that we would want our daughters to be like them when they grow up. Let’s not lose this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we have to make this happen.

My fervent hope for London 2012: that they were the Games when women chose to be who they really are.

 

Aug 18

Fantastic A Levels … but where are our future communicators?

This week has brought another excellent crop of A Level results, and I send a special congratulations to the leavers of St Mary’s Calne, who are now headed for leading universities across the UK and the world, including seven (of the year group of fifty) to Oxbridge, and three to North America. They are raring to go, and will most definitely make their mark at university and beyond – well done to them!! There are plenty of scientists and linguists amongst them, and this consoled me to some degree as I read Thursday’s Guardian article about the decline in the take-up of languages at A Level across the country, which is alarming.

According to the article, only around 12,500 students took A Level French this year, and fewer than 5,000 took German. The number of entries for Spanish dropped slightly too, to approximately 7,300. A few languages saw a slight increase: from 844 last year to 923 for A Level Polish, and from 3,237 to 3,425 for Mandarin, for instance. These figures hide the age of the candidates, but it is a fair guess that not all of them are 18 year old school students, ready to extend their knowledge of the subject at university and beyond; also unclear is the proportion of native speaker candidates, but again it is a fair guess that some of the increases come from heritage or native speakers of the language in question. All told, this paints a pretty bleak picture of the level of preparedness of our new generations to be able to communicate effectively in a global world.

Of course, English is widely spoken, widely used and widely recognised as one of the major languages of the world. But my time in China earlier this summer, for example, reinforced to me the power of Mandarin as almost a necessity in tomorrow’s – if not, in fact, today’s – world. With a population of almost 1.4 billion in China alone, and native Chinese speakers spread throughout the world, Mandarin is the most widely spoken language in the world. Being able to speak to someone on their own terms in a sign of respect for them and for their culture, and is equalising – sharing a common language brings with it a level playing field of communication.

But above all we need to learn language – any language, in fact – because, as the gateway to another culture, it teaches us that, of ourselves, we are not the centre of a private universe. We are part of a gloriously diverse world, where unique individuals are knitted together through shared customs and cultures, and when we travel, meet people and communicate in different tongues, we discover that although we are all different, we all share an essential humanity in which we are all equal to one another. Languages open doors to a richer understanding and appreciation of the human race. They should be taught by experts in all primary schools. A language course – not necessarily an exam course, but a meaningful course of study – should be taught all the way through senior school. Our politicians should extol the virtues of learning languages, and lead by example.

In this world, we all need to be communicators. Let’s make sure our young people this.

 

Aug 15

BBC Breakfast TV, a London cabbie … and positive role models for women

On Monday this week I was a guest on BBC Breakfast TV, hosted by Bill Turnbull and Susannah Reid at Lund Point, a block of residential flats overlooking the Olympic Park. What a view! The studio itself was actually on the roof, and I and Liz Nicholl of UK Sport, who was also speaking in the same slot, walked up a set of rather rickety steps into the open air before we were ushered into the compact but highly efficient studio with, as I said, that fabulous view over a now very empty Park. It was the morning after the night of the Closing Ceremony, and we were there to talk about the legacy of the Olympic Games, particularly for girls and women. I made the point that the Games had been incredibly inspirational for girls and women, and we now had to keep up the momentum and keep enabling us all to watch lots of women’s sport. As is always the case with the media, there is never enough time to say all that could or should be said, but it was a very good experience, and an opportunity to make the case for more sustained support of sport for girls and women.

When I left Lund Point, because the weather was threatening and the territory was unknown, I decided to catch a taxi back to Paddington. This turned out to be a little bit of a mistake, as the Olympic lanes were still in operation, and it was rush hour … It took a long time to reach my destination, but it was a fascinating journey. Steve the Cabbie and I had a great conversation. I told him all the things I had not had time to say on air – the fact that only 12% of 14 year old girls do enough exercise, that only 0.5% of corporate sponsorship in sport is given to women’s sport, and that only 5% of media coverage of sport is of women’s sport. I spoke about the backdrop to girls’ lives, and how they needed positive female role models who were valued for what they did, not how they appeared. He told me about his daughter, a recovering anorexic, and we agreed that while anorexia is a psychological illness, it didn’t help one jot to have all of these pictures of ‘perfect’ women around. Nor, he said, does it help boys: the number of boys in the eating disorders unit which his daughter had attended as an in-patient for 5 months had more than doubled in the past few years. Boys as well as girls are susceptible to the influences and images they see around them, and the backdrop of their lives is increasingly sexualised and airbrushed too.

So – for the sake of Steve the Cabbie, his daughter, and all our young girls and boys who need positive role models around them if they are to feel inspired and fulfil their great potential, let us keep the spirit of the Olympics alive. Let us not allow our female – or male – athletes to become sucked up into the celebrity machine and to become shadows of their physical, real selves. Let us re-run, again and again, those marvellous interviews just after the athletes got off the track, or out of the water: real people with real stories, real exhilaration, sometimes real pain, but above all … real.

These people are our heroes – ordinary, non-surgically altered people who have worked hard and given their all for their own self-respect and to try to win for their country. Beside them, the significance and power of airbrushed models will fade, and we will start the process of creating a more balanced, realistic, grounded backdrop to our society: a backdrop of positive, empowering images to influence the lives of our young people.

Let these Olympics truly and genuinely inspire the whole of the next generation.

 

Aug 12

London 2012: Inspiring a Generation … of Girls

The motto of London 2012 has been “Inspire a Generation”, and now that the Olympics are over, the work to make this happen must begin in earnest. And although we want all boys and girls to be inspired, there is a particular case to be made for working to inspire the next generation of girls. A report earlier this year by the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation showed that just 12% of 14 year old girls – half the number of 14 year old boys – are physically active to the levels recommended for healthy living. Over half of the 1,500 children surveyed, both boys and girls, said that there were more opportunities for boys to succeed in sport than girls. 48% of the girls surveyed said that getting sweaty was perceived as “not feminine”. Similarly, and worryingly, nearly a third of boys said that “sporty girls” were not very feminine. 43% of girls – almost half, in fact – said that there weren’t many sporting role models for girls.

Well, this has to change, and it can. The health and wellbeing – mental and emotional as well as physical – of our young people is too important, not just for them but for the future of society and for our world. When we are fit in body, mind and spirit, we are able to contribute and make the difference that the world needs; sport provides us all with a positive focus, an opportunity to work hard, individually and as part of team, to develop ourselves in every way … for so many reasons, sport should be a central part of our lives, and this is why we need to ensure that our young people have the opportunities that will enable them to play and grow into sport. We must look forward, and we must commit to this goal.

As we look forward, though, we can draw inspiration again and again from the memories of these amazing Games. Here are my top, female-focused, memories to inspire the next generation of girls …

– the participation: these were the first Games – of many, we hope – in which every nation represented brought both female and male competitors. Remember the cheer in the Olympic Stadium when Jacques Rogge announced this at the Opening Ceremony …;

– the GB medal tally: the first medal on the table was a Silver earned by female cyclist Lizzie Armitstead, the first Gold medals on the GB tally were earned by female rowers Hannah Glover and Heather Stanning, and the women’s medals continued to flow in, helping to make this the best Games of modern times for Team GB;

– the role-models: all our female athletes deserve role-model status, but who can help but admire especially athletes like Jessica Ennis (just think of all those personal bests, and her storming approach to no fewer than 8 disciplines). These are celebrities worthy of our adulation and interest;

– the determination: Katherine Grainger’s performance was an example of sheer doggedness, leading her to win Gold after winning Silver (no mean feat either) in no fewer than three previous Olympics;

– the hard, hard work: no words were more truly spoken than those by Rebecca Adlington as she took back her apology to the crowd for earning Bronze rather than Gold in the 800m Freestyle Final: “that was so painful … I gave it my absolute all … I hope people see that and don’t think I let them down.” Being an Olympian means being among the fastest and best in the world for that sport – it is tremendously worthwhile, and it is this because it is hard work.

– the real females: women of different shapes, sizes, heights and appearance, interviews without make-up, with sportswomen expressing real emotions … this was hugely refreshing to see, and a reminder that we have to fight against the airbrushed, sexualised images of women that surround us most of the time. When Joanna Rowsell, who has lost most of her hair to alopecia, stood on the podium, holding a Gold medal for the cycling team pursuit, we were proud of who she was in her entirety;

– the former pupil: Laura Bechtolsheimer, a Calne pupil in years gone by, won Gold in the Team Dressage and Bronze in the Individual Dressage. It is always fantastic to have connections with medal winners, and the girls at school will be even more inspired by this connection;

– the great female commentators: Clare Balding, Hazel Irvine, Sue Barker, Gabby Logan – the Olympics have showcased their intelligence and humour;

– the women’s team sports: from football to hockey to basketball to handball – we have seen how thrilling they are, and we want to see more. Saturdays should no longer just be about men’s sport.

So – it is up to all of us not to let these memories fade. Let us keep them alive in the media, in our conversations, in our school lessons. Long live London 2012, and may the Olympics indeed inspire a generation of children and, especially, girls.

 

Aug 10

Inspirational Women

I came across a fantastic website recently, and I thoroughly recommend that you visit it. In fact, it is a subsection of the magazine Marie Claire’s website, and it is entitled ‘Inspirational Women‘. The introduction on the site says it all: “There’s no doubt about it – the women of the world are truly inspirational. Read their stories, and other reports here, in our Inspirational Women section. And who knows? Maybe one day you’ll be profiled here, too. Because we know better than anyone that you’re more than just a pretty face.” Stories of women who have achieved, a focus on action and substance than appearance, and an exhortation to girls and women to be inspired … what is there not to like in this!

The site is the American online home of Marie Claire, and so it will not be surprising that many of the women profiled are based in the States, although there is an international element too. Including the archives, well over 50 women are profiled, and what I found remarkable when browsing these profiles was how upbeat, refreshing and – yes – inspiring the stories are. From the well-known (the actress Calista Flockhart, for instance, who focuses now on leading a campaign to end violence against women) to ordinary women with extraordinary tales to tell (for example, Katie Miller, a 27 year old autistic artist from Maryland), the stories are rich in detail, and draw the reader into their lives. Fascinating stuff!

I believe – and say this frequently to the students at school – that we can learn so much from the lives of other people. We have to look beyond the celebrity glitz and glamour which surround us in the media, none of which is more than merely a brief and insubstantial snapshot of a moment in time, and look out for insights into people’s lives which reveal the depth of their passion and purpose. When we read inspiring stories – and the London 2012 Olympics have given us many more of them – we remember that we are not alone in this world, and that we are connected with a shared and common sense that we can, together, make a positive difference, in our own unique ways.

Be inspired today.

 

Aug 07

Shakespeare, bloody Shakespeare

A couple of months ago, I had a preview of elements of the St Mary’s Calne Venus Flytrap production of ‘Macbeth Unsexed’, which opened today at the Edinburgh Fringe and is showing at C Eca, Venue 50, at 3pm for the next week. The immensely talented actors, most aged 17, took their A Level Theatre Studies this summer, a year early, and as part of their portfolio they devised a clever and chillingly captivating ensemble piece, focused on death and murder, which was terrifying to the core. For Edinburgh, they have woven these elements, into a portrayal of Lady Macbeth, ‘unsexing’ her as she herself asked to be, and binding her to the madnesses of ‘unsexed’ women throughout Western literature.

And yet, although I had had a preview, and although I was steeling myself for the onslaught, as characters rose out of anonymity, formed in front of my eyes, challenged me and attacked me, bruising my sensibilities in a way that only powerful drama can, I was not sufficiently prepared, for how can one be when one is faced with such shocking insights into the mind of a twisted humankind – womankind – that it is all too easy to deny exists? As the cast themselves drove home – “Do not look away … The future holocausts and genocides and murders for which man is to blame … Are we all damned?”

Are we all damned? Is it all – everything we do – pointless, meaningless? Well, of course not. My father, who came with me to the performance, remarked wryly afterwards that – on the evidence of the tales of destruction, suicide and murder we had just witnessed – all my efforts to impart social and moral education at school had obviously not had any effect whatsoever; when I told the girls, they laughed out loud. In that laughter was all the evidence one needed of the power of a liberal education to challenge us to think differently, to stretch to the furthest extreme our understandings even of the darkest parts of the human psyche, and yet still to enable us to return to our strong core of knowing what is right and what is wrong, born of centuries of our moral traditions.

“A deed of dreadful note”, to quote Macbeth himself, is something that he recognised and that we recognise. But remember – it is education that teaches us so, and without it, we might just risk being damned.

Thank you, girls, for reminding us of this. And keep wowing Edinburgh.

 

Aug 04

The Women’s Games?

Before the Olympic Games even started, the omens were good, with the news that for the first time, every country represented had both male and female athletes. Then, the first GB medals came from women, and the tally at this point still looks fairly female heavy. Commentators have been delighting in the performance of the British women in every sport, and it has been hugely uplifting to watch women in action, from the nifty footwork of the women’s football team to the power of the rowing pairs. I considered myself extremely lucky to see women’s hockey, basketball and handball live at the Olympic Park, and the level of performance was, quite simply, astonishing. Even the GB handball team, which was only formed in 2006, especially for the London 2012 Olympics, and which has suffered from severe lack of funding, scored the opening goals against an ultimately stronger Russian team, and made some spectacular saves during the course of a fast-paced, exciting match. What an impressive set of women!

Women are gaining a greater prominence in these Olympic Games than, it would appear, has ever happened before. The Deputy Editor of the Guardian tweeted yesterday that although she had been editing the paper since 2003, never before had they run so many stories about women athletes: “Thank you, Olympians and Team GB”, she wrote. The question is on many, many lips – are these the ‘women’s games’?

Well, they should be. Not because the goal is for women to perform better than men, and not because we would wish to deny male achievement. No – these should be the women’s games because they should mark a turning point in how we recognise our female athletes. Our sportswomen deserve equal recognition alongside their male counterparts. We should celebrate women as we celebrate men; they should be recognised equally, and we should glory in their amazing abilities.

There is a long way to go, of course. Earlier this week the Huffington Post reported research that showed how female athletes suffer from an over-sexualised representation in advertising, and a lack of visibility; we know how little female sport is available to watch on TV. Funding is a major issue – commentators earlier in the week compared the seven figure salaries of the top male cyclists to the small lottery grants afforded to top female cyclists. Lizzie Armitstead herself raised the issue of “overwhelming sexism”in sport as she displayed her silver medal.

So … we may not solve this glaring inequality immediately, but the Olympics have given us a great boost and a great reason to make a significant difference. Women shouldn’t have to fight harder to get funding than men, and they shouldn’t have to fly economy while their male peers fly business, as happened to the Japanese football team and the Australian basketball.

Let these Women’s Games mark the tipping point for a more equal, fairer, more balanced future in sport. What an inspiring legacy that would be!