SUNDAY SUBTEXT – IT’S BUSINESS TIME

Posted by Charlotte on October 18, 2009

I very rarely buy the newspaper but being nestled in the comfort of my mother’s home I have been treated to the rarity of the Sunday paper in the form of the Sunday Times. As many of you know, the only real point of getting the Sunday paper is for the magazines – at least for me. Generally there will be a few, all trying to capture the joy of specific parts of the targeted readership. With the Sunday Times you’ll find the Culture, the Style and the Sunday Times magazine – all offering slightly different articles, tone and tailored information. Being the sort of woman who goes looking for a fight, I picked up the Sunday Times magazine where the top cover line is “Deals and Heels: Why Women in the City Need to Toughen Up”

There’s so much wrong with that as an intro I don’t know where to start but lets go with the idea that any problems in the city are because women are too soft, too much like a gendered stereotype than a person. Also, worth adding, all men know what they’re doing in business. Except the ones like women I would assume.

Camilla Long captures wonderfully the fear women in the city have about being seen to speak out of turn, or to complain, unfortunately she decides that these things are happening because women are such little mice, she doesn’t have anything to say about a world which is a fine example of the way industry excludes women. The only woman who is living the fine life of mother and city leader, has 9 kids and a stay at home husband and nanny – I can’t think this is something many women will be able to identify with, still, Helena Morrissey is a strong voice for the fight for equality. In general it’s a  depressing piece painting women who do succeed as flukes, or as whores, who work their way up the ladder through the lively dating scene for money hungry women.

Interestingly – or maybe not considering I don’t often read the Sunday mags and know the format – The Style magazine also runs a piece covering women in big business and that women’s only option is one of my pet hates becoming a “momtrepreneur”. This piece, looks more broadly at women’s lack of confidence undermining their position on the boards of the FTSE offices. At least the Times’ line sticks to women being the lone cause of all their troubles. Offering a new way of doing business should be a good outcome from a look at the way most industries work now, but something about the momtrepreneur title feels amatuerish and points to the fact that women should never expect to be welcomed into the mainstream world of business.

I’m not surprised that women and business is the basis of much feature writing – especially after the Treasury select committee attempted to get to grips with pay inequality and other gendered questions this week. But I’m still surprised that the outcome of people reporting on it could be so watered down – as if the women journalists who attempted to look at the subject were scared of agreeing with women that business was rife with inequality. Sdly, so much time was spent denigrating women for whatever limited they’d chosen to live with and the clothes they were wearing that the two journalists never even scraped the barrel of the issues.

Charlotte

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