Do many women want to be train drivers?

Hold your wine glass steady: the BBC has news for you. This week it splashed the news that train drivers in the UK are ‘overwhelmingly middle-aged white men’. The story was accompanied by a picture of a black woman driving a train – under the supervision of a white man, it might be noted – as though to signal that this glass ceiling too can be smashed.

Personally I would expect train drivers to be overwhelmingly middle-aged, white and indeed male. Most of the UK is white and half of the UK is male. And the male half of the species tends to be more train-oriented. You don’t see many single women standing at the end of Reading station noting down train numbers in a little book. There may be hardwired reasons for this. So I would put the BBC’s train-driver story into the same ‘breaking news’ list as ‘most kindergarten teachers are women’ and ‘most people who run successful corner shops are immigrants’. In other words: not a story.

But of course it’s not really about news. It is another example that tells us something deeper about the age.

Until recently, the only professions in which people obsessed about ‘representation’ were the more high-status ones. One of the madnesses that came out of the #MeToo movement was the idea that if an actress in Hollywood is paid eight million bucks and her male co-star is paid ten million for the same movie then we should all take to the streets to protest this appalling inequality and indeed oppression. Pity the stunning multi-millionaire actress, everyone; we are all Angelina Jolie now, etc.

Company boards were another focus – as though most of the public were regularly bothered by the question of which company boards to sit on.