Friday 30 October 2015

Votes for women (and other postcode lotteries)



I’ve seen “Suffragette” twice in the last week.  I know that the way British cinema operates accounts for a few decisions – the casting of Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan should prevent any bad Hollywood remakes. There are one or two historical cheats, including one that did rankle, where Sonny (Ben Wishaw’s character) and Maud (Carey Mulligan) discuss what it means to have the vote – that Maud would use her vote just the same way Sonny uses his.  The 1912 truth is that Sonny, as a man who owns no property, would be just as vote-less as his wife.

On the whole, it’s a solidly well-made film that pitches things about right for a modern audience, my daughters as well as myself or my wife, and I’m glad that the UK film industry can still produce historical drama with political relevance without just leaving this sort of thing to Ken Loach.

The film ends with a list of when various countries enabled women to vote.  After I visited the Middle East for the first time last year, one of my aunts in Liverpool told me that most of the powers that women have in the West are only two generations old, or three at most.  Another opportunity to work for a few days out in the Persian Gulf has just come in, this time to give a training course, and guess what?

The letter detailing the job requested that male candidates need apply.

I took this to the Athena SWAN representative in my department, and she expressed no surprise at all – The Times and the Daily Telegraph* had run a story on another UK institution actually paying different accommodation allowances to men and women in Qatar a few weeks earlier.  It all reminded me of a confrontation at my former employers twenty years ago when only men were being sent to jobs in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, even if some of my most able colleagues were women.  Ultimately, my current employer cannot climb onto a particularly high horse over this one, as none of the engineering academics are women anyway.  (The Athena SWAN rep herself is a physicist).

If you are a woman and you’re actually reading my blog, can you please consider an engineering career?  We’re all quite friendly, and the whiff of testosterone is nothing like as strong as it is in financial trading.  Once there’s enough of you in this particular workplace then you’ll be rather hard to ignore.

Thank you.

*I’ll link to the Daily Telegraph rather than The Times here, because of the paywall and because, well, Murdoch.

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