Catherine Hakim
It seems self-evidently unfair that a woman should lose her job for being pregnant, yet such things used to be common. Before equal opportunities legislation was introduced in the 1970s, it was even legal to fire women for getting married. Now Harriet Harman is determined that Britain must do more to protect women. Her equalities bill follows Sweden’s lead, where maternity leave has been extended to three years and fathers are forced to take paternity leave. Yet laws protecting women’s employment are less successful than we think, and Harman’s moves to break the glass ceiling may actually strengthen it.
The law requires women to notify their employer if they wish to return to their job a few weeks before they go on maternity leave, and inform them of their return date a few weeks before they go back. Statutory maternity leave includes a paid period, plus an additional unpaid period, so mothers may return to work anywhere between one and 12 months after birth. An employer is penalised for failing to honour this bargain, but women can decide not to return without penalty, simply by giving notice and resigning at any time. Pregnant women thus have a strong incentive to say they will go back to a job even if they think they will not. And indeed the number of notifications rose from the mid-1970s onwards; in recent years 60 per cent of women signalled the intention to return.
Yet only about half of mothers do return to their previous jobs, a figure largely unchanged since maternity protection was introduced. Government surveys deftly skate around this issue by focusing on mothers who return to any job, however briefly, including those who go part-time, or find work with a different employer.
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Jonathan Power
An examination of the Swedish soul must begin, I’m afraid, with sex. Not Volvo, not IKEA, not Alfa Laval nor H&M. Not Strindberg nor Dagerman nor even Astrid Lindgren and Pippi Longstocking. Not the welfare state, not income equality nor criminal justice. Not the Lutheran Church nor collective bargaining. Not the Vikings nor 200 years without war. It’s that three letter word—and the half-myth about Swedish promiscuity—that is our starting point.
The town I live in, Lund, across the bridge from Copenhagen, hosts not only Scandinavia’s oldest university and cathedral, it is full of high-tech companies including some of the ones mentioned above and many computer technology, biotech and pharmaceutical start-ups. It is where I have lived for the last eight years. It hosts thousand of students and the weekends are notoriously wild. But the students are bright and after I’ve given a lecture I like to take those who want to out for a drink.
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Elizabeth Pisani
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Having lived in India, Indonesia, Kenya and other recent adopters of democracy, I’m no stranger to the untidy realities of parliamentary government. And while the mother of parliaments has not been setting a good example in recent months, one of the legislative backdrops to the expenses scandal tells us more about parliament’s true strengths and weaknesses. To find out more I have been talking to Catherine Stephens, a sex worker who, like many in her trade, has spent time hanging around Westminster. Lately Catherine has been there on parliamentary business, trying to knock some sense into the nation’s laws on prostitution. And she scored a significant victory on 19th May at the third reading of the current policing and crime bill.
The legislation covers gang law, airport security and what the government can do with your DNA—as well as whether men should be jailed for paying for sex with prostitutes. If it passed you by it might well be because the Speaker interrupted its third reading to make a statement about MPs’ expenses, and promptly fell on his sword.
Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford and champion of safer sex work, was speaking at the time. He soldiered on as gaggles of MPs took possession of the chamber. Harris politely gave way for the Speaker’s eight minute interruption, and then quietly resumed as most of his colleagues drained away.
The debate gave a fascinating glimpse into British democracy. Discussion of a law that may mean life or death in the sex trade, and that threatens men with arrest for an offence that is not clearly defined, was sandwiched into a couple of hours. The government bangs its drum on “evidence-based” policy but failed to present any evidence that locking up prostitutes’ clients will reduce trafficking of women. Labour’s John McDonnell summed it up well: “We not only do not give ourselves the time to discuss legislation, but we legislate in absolute ignorance of the facts of what is happening on the ground… This is no way to run a country, is it?”
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Alice O'Keeffe
21st April, 2009. An extraordinary sound is filling the sold-out auditorium of the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. It is cracked and plaintive, the voice of an old crone on her deathbed. On stage is a frail figure, dressed in black, hunched over the microphone. She is utterly absorbed in the song, which is accompanied by the seasick lurching of a fairground organ. At times, her cry fades almost to a whisper: “I don’t know what silence means/ It could mean/ Anything.”
The last chord hangs in the air for a few seconds. Now the singer turns and looks directly at the audience, eyes wide. The old crone is gone and in her place stands a strutting dominatrix: “He had chicken liver balls/ he had chicken liver spleen/ he had chicken liver heart/ made of chicken liver parts… I want his fucking ass/ I WANT YOUR FUCKING ASS.” After two minutes of venomous squealing she bows sweetly to the audience and smiles. “Thank you very much indeed,” she says, in a soft west country burr. “Thank you for listening.”
The inimitable Polly Jean Harvey—she uses her initials for her stage name, PJ Harvey—is an uncannily adept shapeshifter. During the course of a live performance she adopts and discards characters as frequently as Beyoncé might change her hotpants. At times her thin frame looks so fragile you could blow her over; at others she is terrifying and as tightly coiled as a spring. During the course of a career spanning almost 20 years she has been likened, with varying degrees of inaccuracy, to many things: Patti Smith (a comparison she dismisses as “lazy journalism”); Medusa; a gender-bender; a vamp; the first lady of British indie rock. She has flirted with each successive incarnation, only to dismiss it with some scorn and move on.
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Judith Mackrell
In 1921, when John Maynard Keynes admitted to his friends that he had fallen in love with the Russian ballerina, Lydia Lopokova, it was assumed he was indulging in an eccentric, even a perverse peccadillo. Not only was the near exclusively homosexual Keynes declaring passion for a woman, but the woman herself was in every sense a foreigner to his world.
The painter Duncan Grant, who had formerly been the love of Keynes’s life, expressed the view of most of his circle when he commented,”until I see them together it beggars my fancy.” Yet not only would the affair lead to a happy, stable marriage, it would also play an unforeseeably productive role in Keynes’s professional life. And, given Lopokova’s importance in sustaining her husband’s failing health as he negotiated American war aid and attended the Bretton Woods conference, Lopokova arguably played a rather central part in securing Britain’s position in the postwar world.
Keynes met Lopokova when she was dancing in London with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. She seemed a creature from a fascinatingly different world. The daughter of a Russian peasant, she trained at the Imperial ballet school in St Petersburg and spent most of her adult life dancing across Europe and America. By 1921 she was one of the world’s greatest ballerinas, so popular that fans chanted her name during performances. She was well connected too, counting Stravinsky among her lovers, and Picasso and JM Barrie among her friends. Her witty, poetic style of Anglo-Russian chatter was considered among the more diverting entertainments in London.
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Tim Leunig
Recessions are always painful for those who lose their jobs. For most, life goes on sooner or later: the economy recovers and they get a job similar to the one that they had held before. But for others life does not go back to normal. Their job turns
out to be gone for good. Skills and experience that were once valuable are no longer, and if they get another job it is not as good. Think of the former steel workers stripping in The Full Monty. Economists call this “hysteresis”: it means that a recession can be more than a cyclical phenomenon, and have long-lasting effects.
This happened in the early 1980s, when the recession increased the number of industrial workers losing their jobs so much that the economy could not generate enough new jobs for all of them.
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Ellie Levenson
Few things grate more with me than advertising executives telling women that they know what women want. David Cameron, however, seems to think differently. Keen to make himself more attractive to female voters, he has hired Pretty Little Head, a “strategic consultancy,” to help.
The firm claims to base its analysis on “the scientific study of gender difference.” But this seems to amount to the usual sweeping statements about men liking systems and women preferring empathy. No mention is made of politics. Instead, drawing heavily on the ideas of John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Pretty Little Head explains how “men are driven by the Achievement Impulse.” Women, by contrast, want “an environment in which they and their offspring? feel safe.” The future of progressive conservatism this is not.
To be fair, seeking political gender advice is not new. Al Gore famously paid feminist Naomi Wolf thousands of dollars a month to advise him in a much derided (and largely failed) attempt to gain alpha male status. Her advice? Speak aggressively and change the colour of your clothes. American women, apparently, liked loud mouths in earth tones. To his credit, at least Cameron seems sufficiently confident to avoid machismo, and to hire an organisation that at least appears to take social science seriously.
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Jo-Ann Mort
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Less Israelis voted for Tzipi Livni to lead the Kadima party than will attend the Paul McCartney concert in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park this week. After pollsters had given her a double-digit lead, she only beat her nearest rival, transport minister Shaul Mofaz, by 1 per cent. Yet as leader of the majority party in Israel’s ruling coalition, Livni is now tasked with the nearly impossible job of forming the stable government that Israel so desperately needs. And she has 42 days in which to do so.
Livni faces three immediate obstacles, and their names are: Bibi Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Eli Yishai. As head of the right-wing Likud opposition, Netanyahu’s lead in national opinion polls—(perhaps explained by the fact that he is seen as strong on defence)—is encouraging him to try to undermine the coalition and instigate early elections. In Barak’s case, it’s completely unclear what he’s up to. Under his leadership, the Labour party has plummeted to third place in the polls and could even slip further. The party’s talented younger tier of politicians are captive to his ego, and his policies seem to have nothing to do with any traditional Labour party principles. He is presently in negotiations with Livni; at the same time he is rumoured to be negotiating with Netanyahu to manoeuvre for early elections. Meanwhile Eli Yishai, the leader of the ultra-orthodox Shas party, is looking for who can award the biggest largesse to his constituency before he joins a new government coalition.
It’s not clear that Livni is up to the task before her, but if she is able to wrestle any of these political leaders into a coalition that supports her agenda for peace, she will have succeeded where no man before her has done.
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Rebecca Davies
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Ask most people to describe a stereotypical film critic, and they’re likely to come up with a white, middle-aged, middle-class geek, perhaps scruffily chic, invariably wearing glasses. But one assumption nearly everyone will share is that their critic will be male. This is hardly surprising, given that the majority of today’s film critics are in fact men.
It wasn’t always so. Many of the first writers to treat film as something worth reviewing were women. Take, for instance, Lotte Eisner, Germany’s first eminent film critic, who began writing reviews for the magazine Film-Kurier in 1927 and was later chief curator of the Cinématheque Française. In Britain there was CA Lejeune, the Observer’s main film reviewer from 1925 to 1960, whose career overlapped with the other “Sunday lady,” Dilys Powell, chief film critic at the Sunday Times from 1939 to 1976. Penelope Houston edited the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight & Sound from 1956 all the way to 1990. In France, bohemian expats Bryher (aka Annie Winifred Ellerman) and her lover Hilda Doolittle, better known as HD, founded and wrote for the intellectual quarterly Close Up, published between 1927 and 1933. The early years of cinema were a time when women’s opinions about film mattered.
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William Gill
Argentina’s recently elected president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was due to visit London this week for the Progressive Governance conference. She was forced to cancel her trip owing to a national strike by Argentinian farmers, who are outraged by a series of new taxes. This has led to food shortages, road blockages and anti-government demonstrations—not the kind of image Kirchner wanted to project abroad.
Argentina has been a constitutional democracy ever since the fall of the last military junta in 1983. The experience has not been successful. Ever since becoming a republic in 1853, the country has had a fraught relationship with the notion of a constitution, guaranteed rights, separation of powers, press freedom and the role of the opposition. Democracy in Argentina, unlike its neighbours Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, grows weaker with every president because, as with the western diet adopted by suddenly wealthy Asian nations, the body politic is not suited to it. Other than the populist Peronist movement, no political party has an effective national presence. The country has for all intents and purposes become a one-party state, with the inevitable financial corruption and authoritarianism.
When Cristina’s husband Néstor was inaugurated as Argentina’s president in 2003, nobody imagined that his wife would succeed him. But then many people thought there would be no successor. The economic collapse of 2001 had brought the country close to disintegration. Néstor Kirchner became president only because none of the bigger figures in the Peronist party wanted the job, which was seen as a political tombstone. As governor of Santa Cruz (a Patagonian province larger than Britain but with only 200,000 inhabitants) between 1991 and 2003, Kirchner was an effective administrator and an authoritarian leader. As president of Argentina, he applied the same tactics to a country of 40m. Arguing that the fallout from the financial crisis demanded strong leadership, Kirchner asked congress to extend the extraordinary powers that were granted to his predecessor, Eduardo Duhalde, after Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt. Two years ago, he asked for those powers to be made permanent, and this was granted. They removed most of the levers the legislature had over the executive, including approval of the national budget and control of provincial funds.
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