Sarah Vine

Scared of sexists? Try upsetting the feminists

How the author came up against censorious feminists

As a study published the other day showed, the equality gap is far from sewn up. Despite the fact that women managers climb the career ladder faster than men and reach positions of responsibility five years earlier than their male counterparts, they are still paid less …an average of 12 per cent less, rising to 23 per cent at senior level.

Are you still there? Because if I were you I would have wandered off by now, perhaps to tidy my sock drawer, or empty the bins — or perform any number of more fascinating tasks; anything apart from listening to yet another whingeing career woman bleating on about the unfairness of it all. It is not that I don’t care, of course I do: I am a woman and I have a job; but it’s like another recent headlining report, the one about e-numbers making children hyperactive — tell me something I don’t already know.

Many aspects of the female condition are not ‘fair’. Always having to put the loo seat down before you go for a pee, for example, or dealing with a frankly psychotic set of hormones, or not being able to get your partner to gestate a baby for you while you fly off on a series of vitally pressing business trips. Overall, however, I am more than happy with my chromosomal lot in life — especially since I am fortunate enough to live in a wealthy, secular country such as Britain where psychopathic religious zealots do not (as yet) prevent me from driving a car or threaten to kill me if I wear the wrong clothes.

Sure, we need to bridge the pay gap; and yes, we urgently need to do something about anomalies such as women’s pensions (women are in effect paid less than men, since to qualify for the full state pension you need to have spent a minimum of ten years in employment — apparently raising the next generation of taxpayers does not qualify as ‘work’).

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