How to ensure we don’t wait 70 years for equality

Two weeks ago I wrote about the recent report published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, ‘Sex and Power‘, which had calculated the rather gloomy statistic that in some areas of public life, we will most probably need to wait 70 years until there is equality of gender representation at the highest levels. Can we really afford to wait these 70 years? Almost three generations? Even if we could, should we?

In order to effect any change at all, we will need to work from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Legislation is all very well, but it is the changing of hearts, minds and expectations that will make the difference in the end. So, where do we start?

Well, we can start with our current generation of girls. A girl who embarks upon her secondary schooling at the age of 11 in September 2011 will graduate from school in July 2018, and from university in 2021 at the earliest. We have 10 years in which to change her world for the better; what, then, can we do?

First, we can teach her to value herself, to understand her strengths, and not to underestimate her potential and her abilities. We can teach her to take risks, to be resilient, to be courageous and to listen to her inner moral compass. We can teach her to reject pressures to conform to trivialised, sexualised imagery which holds back common perceptions of women.

Secondly, we can give her the tools to negotiate the hurdles and embedded stereotypes she may encounter. The more aware she is of the world around her, of the history of women in the workplace, and of the conflicts that have arisen over the ages, the more sensitive she will be to the task that is still ahead of women in the workplace, and the more she will be able to take the bumpy path in her stride.

A simple prescription, but an effective one. When young women are grounded in a strong sense of who they are, able to put into context the pressures they encounter around them, they are best placed to be able to forge their own path in life. If they are free to be genuinely true to themselves, their world will quite simply be better, for them and for all those around them.

Barack Obama famously said: ‘Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.’

Girls’ schools are already doing this. If we all did it, think what we could achieve. Can we really wait 70 years?

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