One hundred years on from some women being allowed to vote in Parliamentary elections, 48 years on from the Equal Pay Act of 1970, and 24 years on from the first woman being ordained a priest in the Church of England, the Chairman of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee is moved to take to the nation’s airwaves to plead for equal consideration for women when it comes to making senior national appointments. In this instance it was about the embarrassing lack of women on key Bank of England committees. It is, if you stop to think about it, an extraordinary state of affairs.
When I was young my mother, Susan Fox, co-ordinated the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MoW) in the Church of England’s Chichester Diocese. I would attend their meetings and events and, as a very young person, listen and watch. It was hard and difficult work for the women involved. The Diocese was a bastion of the anti-women priest faction in the Church. The Bishops, which included Eric Kemp, the diocesan and senior Bishop, and Peter Ball, then Bishop of Lewes, are now disgraced. The treatment that the women involved in the campaign received at their hands was one of appalling disrespect and rudeness. Their persistence and dignity won out in the end, but it seared in me a burning sense of the injustice of the situation. It is still possible today to encounter the rudeness towards women priests that I witnessed then in the Church of England, although it is much less than it was.
Through those meetings I met Victoria Lidiard, at that time the last living suffragette. With close attention I listened to her recollections of the campaign for women’s votes, her rejection of violent protest, and her memories of the great figures of that movement. She always carried a photograph of Margaret Thatcher, not so much because she was a political supporter, but because she always marvelled at having lived from a time when she was not allowed to vote to one where a woman occupied 10 Downing Street.
In 1970 the Equal Pay Act was introduced as a direct result of the Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968. Equal pay for equal work, but nearly half a century on this is still a significant issue. In politics, business, public and national institutions the fight for equal treatment continues.
At the time of the appointment of the current Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs – the FCO’s top mandarin, in 2015, it was generally thought that the short-list from which Sir Simon McDonald, the current incumbent, emerged was all male. This was a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. As and when the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, decides to step down all eyes will be on the composition of the list to replace him. It will be a bad day for the principle of appointment on merit if Sir Mark Sedwell, known to be close to the Prime Minister, is simply eased into the Civil Service’s top job.
Nicky Morgan was right to make the point about the composition of the Bank of England’s committees, but the Bank is not alone in struggling with this issue. Even though women now head the Supreme Court, the Metropolitan Police Force and occupy other prominent public positions you do not have to look very far down the chain to see where there remain glaring imbalances. Politicians, and senior civil servants, are swift to challenge business on this issue, and rightly so, but our public national institutions have a long way to go in this area. The pressure to keep up a determined effort for equal pay and equal treatment for women remains as necessary today as it has ever been.