Move over men, it’s time women ran the world

This is the summer of the Lionesses. I doubt that the pick-and-mix assortment of the Commonwealth Games will outdo the mass audiences which relished England’s first major international football victory since Bobby Moore’s team won the world cup back in 1966. For sure, there was some specular batting by Bairstow in the test matches, but pink, white or red  — there are so many different colours of cricket ball these days — it is impossible to tell what really counts. 

It mattered of course, and may even have been decisive, that the England women won the Euros on home soil, outdoing the penalty shoot-out defeat of their male counterparts at Wembley last year. The BBC also marshalled its unmatched national resources to push the women’s championship. But the team won over the nation with modesty and team spirit, which also seemed to hark back to the lost era of the 1960s. Many friends told me that the best thing about the women’s competition was the lack of histrionics, even hysterics. The women did not repeatedly pretend they needed to be medi-vacced to A&E in the hope of getting a penalty or indulge in orgiastic celebrations every time they scored a goal: They know that such behaviour is just silly and showing-off.

The temporary release from the over-rewarded narcissism of men’s top-level professional sport was welcome. Perhaps it could spread to other parts of public life and do us all a favour by degrading the male dominance of our culture which stretches from perennial violence to malign strong men such as Putin, Xi, Orban, Maduro and Modi.

Maybe a transition is already underway. Thatcher, Merkel and Cresson were outriders. Women are now assuming positions of power to an unprecedented extent, automatically and without question, at least in many democracies. This may explain why there has been such a brutal backlash against democracy and women’s rights by reactionaries ranging from the US Supreme Court to trans-rights extremists and the Taliban.

Inside the EU, the Commission is headed by Ursula von der Leyen. The governments of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, and Sweden are all headed by women. That leaves a mere 23 member states with men in charge. But Elisabeth Borne is Prime Minister of France, though subordinate to Macron. Annalena Baerbock of the Green Party is Germany’s Foreign Minister and deputy Chancellor. Giorgia Meloni is the leader of the far-right “Brothers of Italy” party currently expected to be key in the next government. Liz Truss seems poised to be the Conservative Party’s third female leader and, on the Tories’ BOGOF offer to the Tory membership, Britain’s third woman prime minister. 

In the United States, the first female vice president, Kamala Harris is only Joe Biden’s heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Brave Liz Cheney is spearheading the de facto public indictment of Donald Trump at Congress’s January 6 Inquiry. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the most senior American Office holder for a quarter of a century to visit Taiwan and express solidarity for its democracy, in defiance of bluster from the bullying Peoples’ Republic of China. 

These rising women in politics do not belong to an ideological sisterhood, however. In the US. Justice Amy Coney Barratt was a swing vote removing women’s rights and reversing Roe v Wade. In the US Congress, representative Majorie Taylor Greene is one of the most outspoken pro-Trump conspiracy theorists, counterbalanced on the Democrat left by other women including Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. In the UK, Nadine Dorries and Liz Truss have set themselves up as lead defenders of Boris Johnson’s naughty boy premiership.

For millennia men have claimed that their dominance in society was down to superior intelligence. Women’s tiny little minds were not considered capable of coping with serious decisions and carefully curtailed women’s rights meant they were physically barred from participating in ruling political or religious networks. We now know that this was false, women are equal to men in intellectual capability and when allowed the opportunity in modern societies, have proven this beyond dispute.

Male dominance was actually based on brute strength. Biology dictates that men are physically bigger and stronger than women and they have, literally, overpowered them. Women also have a superior, more extended and physically challenging part to play in the procreative cycle, which could conveniently keep them indisposed or out of the way for a lot of the time. Religious and civil rules, drawn up by men, codified women’s subordinate position, treating them as property rather than people in many societies, including our own. 

Modern social, medical, technological and scientific advances have obviated most of these practical inequalities. In many, but not all societies, women’s rights have been enshrined in law. Full equality has rarely been achieved in practice. In the United Kingdom, for example, there is still a gender pay gap, and disproportionate to catastrophically low representation of women in senior positions, such as parliament or boardrooms. 

Before full equality is achieved the status of women is already coming under attack here. Most obviously from conservative politicians and the Christian right trying to remove women’s reproductive rights, from abortion to contraception. More surreptitiously some gender self-identification campaigners challenge what a woman is, want to banish acceptance of the word “woman” and associated female characteristics and violate women’s spaces. Whatever the progressive motives of such mind-over-matter advocacy, it amounts to the reassertion of the patriarchy over women.

Belatedly sport is now recognising that there are differences in the physical capacity, though not the prowess and skill, of women. Governing bodies are tightening codes to exclude people who have been through male puberty from women’s competitions. The feminist Sharon Davies has been allowed back as a BBC commentator for Commonwealth Games swimming and new prominence has been given to women’s football and cricket. 

Court victories by Maya Forstater and Alsion Bailey and the recent closure of the Tavistock Clinic’s gender reassignment programme provide further grist for a much-needed rethink by those who seek to be in authority, including corporate management. Showbiz and publishing with their foul attempted cancelling of JK Rowling have yet to wake up from being woke. 

Gender neutrality, including talk of mixed sports teams, is just another way of doing women down before they get their fair share. Looking at the state of this man’s world, vivre la difference entre les sexes! 

Would women massed in top positions make a difference? Would they be any better, or worse than the men? Yes, it may have been because they did not get the chance and from Boudicca onward, there are bellicose examples to confound the rule. Women still have a poor record for declaring and fighting wars. 

It is impossible to say whether female dominance would result in less violent and more caring societies around the world. But it is a fair bet that it would. Let the Lionesses (sic) roar some more!