Gender

Thursday

Joanna Williams

Tackling the gender pay gap could leave us all worse off

It’s International Women’s Day. As feminists rush to detail the many disadvantages still facing women (yes, all women, everywhere) we’ll no doubt hear a great deal about the gender pay gap. In that regard, International Women’s Day is a bit like every other day of the year. But let’s go with it. According to the Office for National Statistics, the gap between the median hourly earnings of men and women working full time is 9.1 per cent. The Fawcett Society prefers the mean figure of 14.1 per cent. Actually, they’d like us to focus on the gap between the total average earnings of men compared to women – about 18.4

Judith Green

The real war on women

How hard is it for women to talk freely about sex, gender and the law? Not very, I used to think. I’d heard about a few no-platforming incidents on campuses, where speakers including Germaine Greer were blocked from appearing because of their views. What I hadn’t realised was just how far the problem has spread. In the past few months, I’ve discovered firsthand that political debate is narrowing for everyone — and that fear and intimidation are being used increasingly to curtail free speech. I am one of a small group of women who get together to discuss proposed changes in the law on sex and gender. We’re called Woman’s

Tuesday

James Kirkup

The violent misogyny of the gender debate

Journalists and politicians talk a lot about freedom of speech, and rightly so, because the ability to express thoughts and opinions without fear or restraint is the foundation of democracy. We must be free to question, free to doubt, or we are not free at all. But for journalists and politicians, ‘freedom of speech’ can feel a bit of an abstract concept, a debating point not a matter of personal safety. We talk about curbs on free speech as things that make it harder for us to do what we do – write and talk. We rarely think about them in terms of physical fear. So a couple of weeks

Thursday

James Kirkup

Can we have an honest debate about gender?

This article is about gender and the law. When I asked several friends, politicians and journalists, about writing it, they all said the same: don’t. It will go badly for you. And that is why I’m writing this. In fact, that’s what I’m writing about: fear. The fear that persuades some people they can’t say what they think about something, or even ask questions about it. Fear that prevents proper discussion of public policy and the public interest. Fear that chills debate. I’ve been a journalist for 20 years. I belong to no party and I have no allegiances or affiliations. I don’t have an agenda or an axe to

Peter Hitchens

A very minor prophet

Now that I seem to have become a prophet of doom, I wonder whether I should have been a guru instead. Doom doesn’t sell. Bookshops hide my books in back rooms. My recorded harangues and TV appearances reach a few thousand dedicated YouTube enthusiasts. But Dr Jordan B. Peterson, supposedly as reactionary as I am, speaks to millions. His new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos adorns the front table of every Waterstones. Annoyingly, friends of mine recommend his lectures to me, people on Twitter tell me incessantly that I ‘must’ explore his work. They become positively rude if I express reluctance. How has he done this?

Kate Chisholm

State of independence

When the BBC’s Arabic-language network went out on air for the first time 80 years ago, on 3 January 1938, its mission was to provide ‘reliable news’ to a region that was being fed German and Italian ‘propaganda’ via short-wave transmissions from those countries. News is still its main focus, says Bassam Andari, news-gathering editor for the Arabic service, who has been with the corporation since 1994, arriving in London from Lebanon. He grew up listening to the station during the civil war in that country in the 1970s. ‘My mother would switch the radio on to the BBC every morning to find out what was happening in the world,

James Walton

Girls on film

To mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage — if a little oddly — Channel 4 on Tuesday brought us a special girls-only edition of The Secret Life of Five-Year-Olds. The cast were a mix of new faces and old hands from previous series: among them Jet who, like a primary-school version of a traditional Hollywood actress, has been playing a five-year-old on the show since 2016. Still, you can see why the producers keep calling — because, by now, Jet has got the tomboy role required of her down pat. ‘It’s hard to make friends with just girls,’ she declared early on, hitting the word ‘girls’ with exactly the

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The Tesco equal pay claim sets a dangerous precedent

I have decided that my work is of equal value to that of Claudia Schiffer and that therefore in future I should be paid the same as her. Why not? Okay, we don’t quite do the same thing, but we both get up in the morning, go out and do what we do as best we can. Yet she is paid more than I am, which is indefensible. That is pretty much the basis of the claim by 100 female Tesco shop floor workers who have launched an action against the supermarket claiming that they should be paid the same as men who work in the store’s warehouses. It is

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Dancing queen

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie opened at the Sheffield Crucible in February for a standard three-week run. The show is based on a BBC documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, about a working-class lad who attended his school prom in a scarlet frock. Director Jonathan Butterell saw the potential to create a replica Billy Elliot and he brought in two co-writers to turn the material into a comic musical. Word of mouth was excellent and the show received immediate offers for a West End transfer. The action starts in a Sheffield comp where a class of 16-year-olds are being given career advice by a computer. Blond misfit Jamie is encouraged to

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 16 November 2017

The incident I am about to recount I make no judgment about, other than that I believe it tells us where we are in the cycle of civilisation and that it is helping me orientate myself. A friend of mine was walking her dogs at the same beauty spot I walk my spaniels, when a car screeched into the car park sending children scurrying for their lives. My friend ran up and knocked on the window and the window was wound down to reveal a man in a dress and blond wig. My friend said, ‘What are you doing? You could have killed a child. Slow down!’ And the man

Thursday

The Spectator

Identity issues

It was always going to be difficult for Theresa May’s government to secure a legacy beyond Brexit. With the negotiations running into difficulty, it becomes all the harder. Ministers must avoid, however, resorting to well-meant gestures which open the government to ridicule. Take, for instance, the revelation that Britain has insisted on the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights making reference to pregnant transgendered people — although it now denies that it objected to the term ‘pregnant women’. The purpose of the relevant clause is deeply serious — to dissuade malignant regimes from subjecting pregnant women to the death penalty. Britain’s approach, by contrast, has an air of

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

Women-only colleges were the original ‘safe space’

My old college, formerly known as New Hall, is women-only for its undergraduates. But now the term is expanding, as so often these days, to include anyone who, at the time of application, ‘identifies as female’, as well as the non-binary, those who really can’t make up their minds. During my time in college, I shared a room with another girl; quite what it would have been like to share with someone aspiring to being a woman I don’t know…presumably entirely non-threatening but a bit odd. The point about this women-only college is that it was meant to provide a bit of gender balance to the male majority in the

Thursday

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: How not to be a boy

In this week’s Books podcast, my guest is the comedian and writer Robert Webb — whose moving and funny new book How Not To Be A Boy turns the material of a memoir into a heartfelt polemic about what he calls “The Trick”: the gender expectations that he identifies as causing many of the agonies of his adolescence and young manhood. What is it to be a man? Are we doomed to lives of inarticulacy, shagging, fighting and drinking — giving pain and fear their only outlet in anger? Sounds good to me — but Webb thinks there might be a better way… You can listen to our conversation here: And do

Monday

Andrew Willshire

A civil answer to the marriage question

There was a bit of a kerfuffle last week regarding Jacob Rees-Mogg’s view on same-sex marriage. He is opposed but effectively said that it wasn’t up to him to decide: ‘I take the teachings of the Catholic Church seriously. Marriage is a sacrament and the decision of what is a sacrament lies with the Church not with Parliament.’ And yet, marriage is, self-evidently, defined by Parliament. It has a precise definition in law and that definition has been extended to include people in homosexual relationships. It has been extended to permit people who have been previously married and divorced to re-marry, despite religious objections. It is also restricted to people over

Wednesday

Madeleine Teahan

Gender matters to most of us, even if we feel too afraid to say so

The Daily Telegraph dubbed it an ‘admirable move’ when it shared the news on Facebook that John Lewis has decided to scrap labelling children’s clothes according to gender and has opted instead to make them all unisex. I wonder if John Lewis will be extending this wisdom to the adults’ clothes department too, including swimwear? To borrow a question from the vital campaign group Let Clothes Be Clothes; why not #makeitunisex? In a way it is comforting that we live in a society where lobbying over gender specific clothes is a big deal rather than worrying that you’ll be stoned to death for premarital sex or killed for attending Midnight

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Oh brave new gender-fluid world…

Later this year, the Advertising Standards Authority will reveal to the world their list of rules designed to wipe out ‘gender stereotyping’ in TV ads. I’m already looking forward to it because the ASA’s first thoughts on the matter, published in July, were fascinating. An ad for baby milk which showed a girl growing up to be a ballerina was deemed quite unacceptable; KFC got flack for featuring one man teasing another for not being manly enough. Stereotypes on TV contribute to ‘unequal outcomes’ in reality, explained ASA’s chief exec. Of course no one wants boys and girls to feel forced to conform — some boys are feminine, some girls

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 10 August 2017

Unbearable wait Sir: Like Jenny McCartney, I too am fed up with flying (‘Civilised air travel? Pigs might fly’, 5 August). However, it’s not for any rudeness on the part of the staff, which I have as yet not encountered. Nor is it the lack of meals. Who needs them? No, it’s the agony of endless queues at the airport, the misery of taking off shoes and putting them back on, with no chairs supplied, and the confiscation of small items overlooked in packing. This is no fault of the air companies, but the rise in terror attacks has made such scrutiny necessary. I have ceased to travel long journeys

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Justine Greening should keep out of the Church of England’s business

God, she’s on a bit of a run, Justine Greening, isn’t she? A day after it turns out she wants to let people change gender merely on their say so, without regard to their possession of wombs or gonads or XX chromosomes, she’s set her sights on the CofE and its retrograde attitude to gender – actually, come to think of it, she’s probably got the entire Christian communion in her sights. All in her capacity of Education Secretary and Women and Equalities Minister. She observed in an interview on Sky: ‘I think it is important that the church in a way keeps up and is part of a modern

Steerpike Steerpike

Shouldn’t Labour’s ‘gender pay audit’ begin at home?

This weekend, Jeremy Corbyn was full of beans during an appearance on the Andrew Marr show. As well as frank comments on immigration and student debt, the Labour leader found time to turn his ire on the BBC over the gender pay gap. Discussing the disclosure that two thirds of the corporation’s highest earners are men, Corbyn said the Beeb needs to ‘look very hard at itself’ – adding that a Labour government would insist on a pay audit of every organisation. Strong words indeed. But is Corbyn just repeating empty platitudes? This time last year, Corbyn made a similar pledge. In the Labour leadership contest, he announced that if in power, companies with more

Sunday

Melanie Phillips

It’s dangerous and wrong to tell all children they’re ‘gender fluid’ | 23 July 2017

Once upon a time, ‘binary’ was a mathematical term. Now it is an insult on a par with ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobic’, to be deployed as a weapon in our culture wars. The enemy on this particular battleground is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental. This ‘binary’ distinction is accepted as a given by the vast majority of the human race. No matter. It is now being categorised as a form of bigotry. Utterly bizarre? Scoff at your peril. It’s fast becoming an enforceable orthodoxy, with children and young people particularly in the frame for attitude reassignment.