Only Half a Revolution

Dr Carol Black's prognosis for the medical profession - that it risked a possibly terminal loss of status because the majority of medical students are now female - began quite promisingly. It would be hard to argue with her that female-dominated professions - with the possible exception of opera divas - suffer from low public esteem and poor pay. Her prescription, though, was a disappointment. The hope for a cure, she said, lay in an equal balance of men and women. More men must urgently be drafted, a rapid reaction force deployed to guard the profession's status from the otherwise inevitable attrition.

I am sure Dr Black, only the second woman in 500 years to be president of the Royal College of Physicians, could do better. She complains that women do not reach the higher ranks of the profession or enter the more demanding sectors of it in sufficient numbers. There is, she points out, no female dean of a medical school, head of a department of surgery or of medicine. Yet, while she complains that women don't get to the top, she also laments that if they did, the profession as whole would suffer.

It is not surprising that a profession which operated explicit quotas to limit the number of women it recruited should suffer adjustment problems when the effects of lifting those quotas work through. The panic in the British Medical Association about the effects of feminisation is, in part, a measure of progress in what was one of the country's more chauvinistic lines of work. But the anxiety is also a sign of how the attitudes that underlay the quotas have been disguised rather than changed in the past quarter of a century. Dr Black's solution - more male doctors - implies fewer female doctors. What is that, if not a return to quotas?

There is nothing wrong with the competence or commitment of the female medical graduates. But they apparently fail to thrive in the profession in a way that doctors seem unable to diagnose, despite the fact that the same phenomenon is present in almost every workplace in the country: they do not make it on to committees, they find the demands of advancement incompatible with family life, they opt in larger numbers for part-time and flexible working.

The bottom line of what is being said here is still why can't women be more like men? However, the problem is not that the workplace has been over-feminised but that it has not been feminised enough. If we wish families to continue to exist, to bring up children, to treat their elderly and sick with a modicum of humanity, we have to accept that the burden and costs of work that is now largely the unpaid labour of women have to be shared. We have had half a revolution - the one that lowers the formal barriers to paid employment. The other half - the one that shares the burden, is still a long way off.

At present, it is still women who pay. They pay in an impressive variety of ways. Today 67% of women are employed, but they are still underpaid and under promoted. Women in full-time work take home an average of 18% less per hour than men. Women in part-time work (and more women than men are in part-time work) take home an average of 40% less an hour. Women have been entering the law, journalism, business, architecture and the civil service in ever-larger numbers for three decades now, yet the senior ranks of all these professions remain overwhelmingly male.

And what about the women who do make it? They pay an even higher price. In the boardroom, for instance, according to a recent survey by NatWest and Director magazine of 470 company directors, only one woman makes it to boardroom for every 10 men - and those who do are far more likely than the men to be single (33% single women against 8% single men). Twelve per cent of the women were likely to be divorced compared with 5% of the men. What the survey suggests is that 30 years on from the legislation that was supposed to fix this problem, women continue to work harder for less and pay a disproportionate emotional and social cost for their efforts.

Women have entered the workplace, but the price of advancement continues to be an absolute divide between work and family life, a pattern laid down in the industrial revolution for the convenience of factory owners, and remarkably little changed since. The solution offered by the Vatican and Ukip is to send women back to the home to indulge their better natures and clean behind the fridge. It's a solution that is unlikely to prosper in the 21st century - women would not put up with it and the British economy, like the Italian, could not survive if they did. Italy and the UK have ageing populations and falling birth rates. Of the estimated 2m new jobs that a growing economy is expected to create over the next decade, some 80% are likely to be filled by women. Turning the clock back is not an option.

The way forward, though, requires more energy and imagination in the workplace than we have seen so far. If we want family life to survive, then men and women must insist on ways of working that allow them the space and time family life demands.

We no longer live in Victorian Britain but we live in something that is, in some ways, worse - in an over-sexualised, atomised and frivolous culture in which the dominant images that surround us derive from the need to keep us consuming. Empowerment, the message is, means having the power to shop; liberation is confined to sexual liberty; self knowledge to the mushy repetition of pseudo-psycho cliches.

The workplace insists on the primacy of the shareholders' interest and on its power to define itself as an institution devoid of reciprocal social responsibility. The rights of women have become confused with the right of young women to indulge the most self destructive aspects of male behaviour - to drink to excess or behave as sexual predators. To establish the right of men and women to live in balance between family and work demands a redistribution of the social and economic burden - one reason why it continues to be so heavily resisted.