 The British Sociological Association is the United Kingdom's Association for Sociologists and our aims are to support sociologists, promote sociology and sustain sociological research, teaching and imagination both inside and outside of academic life. So one of the ways in which we do that is by holding events such as this as well as conferences. I'd like to express my thanks to the British Library for once again partnering us on this series and of course to you all for coming tonight. I'm especially pleased to be able to introduce tonight's speaker, Professor Mary Evans, who as you've heard is the seventh person to present a talk in our series. I personally am indebted to Mary for co-authoring a small book called Work on Women with David Morgan in 1979 as an annotated bibliography of research publications on aspects of women's lives. This was extremely useful to me and a colleague Ruth Waterhouse as we prepared to teach a new course on women and society in 1980. At the time, Mary was at the University of Kent. She still retains Meritus Professorship in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research there. And now most recently is a Meritus Leverhulme Professor at the London School of Economics. She was formerly co-editor of the European Journal of Women's Studies and has published widely in Sociology and Women's Studies on topics as diverse as love, detective fiction, austerity, autobiography, social class, higher education and who could forget, Jane Austen. Mary's work has examined how gender informs and structures the social world. She's been central to the development of women's and gender studies in the UK. Her work has taken place in the context of teaching sociology, but the poorest boundaries of that subject allowed her to consider aspects of the world often ignored by sociologists, particularly works of fiction. In Mary's latest book, The Persistence of Gender Inequality, published earlier this year, she demonstrates why many people consider her to be one of the foremost sociologists of her generation. The book is a very good read and demonstrates why sociological understanding and insight is vitally important when considering the big issues of the day and none could be more urgent than that of inequality. The book title alone made her an ideal speaker for the series of lectures. Please welcome Professor Mary Evans. Thank you very much for those introductions and thank you to everybody for coming along this evening and my welcome to you all in addition to those welcomes which have already been expressed. This lecture, as the title suggests and as the previous two speakers have also suggested, is going to be about gender inequality. I start from the idea that this has not disappeared, but that the form in which it nowadays confronts us is very different from that of 100 or even 50 years ago. So what I want to do in this present lecture is to look at our circumstances today in 2017 and to suggest tentatively some ways in which new forms of inequality are being formed. We already know about various forms of gender inequality. I am not the first person speaking about this, I'm sure, at the British Library or elsewhere. And we don't just know about gender inequality in 2017. We've known about it for decades and even centuries. But the four aspects of gender inequality which I would cite as central to the assertion of this kind, this form of inequality between women and men. In both the past and in the present are these and there are four, inequalities of income, public power, responsibilities for care and forms and means of representation. All four are of course experienced in different ways according to differences of class and race. So I start from a position, a position which can be demonstrated, has been demonstrated through evidence collected by such institutions and groups as a women's budget group, the Fawcett society and of course argued with real coherence and force by writers for more popular audiences such as Laura Bates. There is no shortage of evidence on this subject. But what I want to do here this evening is also to attempt to think about the ways in which gender inequality is being reproduced and about these new forms that I suggest that it is taking. So this is going to involve a discussion of the ways in which perceptions of class have changed over my lifetime and how that and new forms of technology have also impacted upon and changed forms of inequality. So what I want to try and do together then and or bring together is think about those social practices which are constitutive of gender inequality. So talking about social inequality like gender inequality is nothing new. And if we go back only 20 years we can find some very considerable literature on the subject that now exists. But in that rich literature with names such as Thomas Piketty and Danny Dawling to mention just two, there's very little mention if you look either in the text or in the index of those books of the particular inequalities of gender or race or in the ways in which these particular and other inequalities enforce and support other forms of inequality and unequal relationships between human beings. So we've got two extensive, very distinguished, very meticulous forms of evidence that are too often I think not connected. And I think that this really matters today because of the forms of inequality between the genders that I've mentioned and also because of the ways in which we're thinking about social inequality in Britain today demands that we consider these kinds of connections. And I also want to say since social inequality is so much at the fore of people's minds these days that I want to emphasise as Selina Todd has done that poverty inequality is nothing new. And let me quote from Selina Todd's book which is called The People, The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, where she writes, Despite the post-war reforms, class inequality was never eradicated and came back with a vengeance in 1979. Now in 2017 we have only to look at present evidence about austerity, the ways in which people are producing evidence about the ways in which universal credit might work to know that those situations of poverty inequality still very much exist and what's more are being, as some people would very powerfully suggest, actually enlarged. So how, when we know about contemporary social inequality, can we understand and think about gender inequality and see the ways in which the two forms of unequal relationships are intertwined. What I want to do to try and look at this is to identify three central forms of change which I think have occurred in the past 30, 40 years and see how these particular forms of change have both enlarged and changed forms of inequality and the changes are these. The dissolution of some forms of class boundaries, the creation of a new social contract and with it a new ideal of the citizen and the rigor of expectations about women's appearance and conduct. Both these latter changes constitute what I want to describe as forms of aspirational coercion and it is this idea of aspirational coercion that I want to add to those four forms of gender inequality which I mentioned previously. And finally, and tentatively, I want to suggest that the ways in which these contemporary forms of inequality are not just a crucial part of the making of gender inequality itself but that this form of inequality is itself productive of maintaining social inequality. I don't for a moment think that in 45 minutes of this lecture I'm going to be able to achieve the merging of those two huge silos of information but I'm going to try and propose some connections. So the next question in all this is exactly where to start. Well I'm going to start with an autobiographical context and I'm going to start back at my girls' grammar school of the late 1950s and early 60s, a school in a leafy suburban part of suburban south east England with an intake that was more or less entirely white and middle class. But one of the remarks, in fact possibly the remark which I remember from the seven years at this school, is a remark which teachers often produced if we had failed to do our homework properly. And the remark was this, you'll end up working in Woolworths and that was the spectre which was put before us, grammar school girls in that suburban world. Now of course Woolworths has disappeared but sports director is still there and there are other forms of very unequal and not to be very much wanted forms of work. So what this suggests to me is what Barbara Erin Reich was to define in 1989 as the fear of falling. The extent to which middle class and the professional middle class is fearful of not being able to maintain its class to position. In my days at school there was a huge amount of energy put into forms of cultural separation, wearing our hats in the right way, having our skirts at the same length, not sitting on tops of buses. All these kinds of things were part of making sure that we separated from popular culture and indeed the undesirable elements of this suburban population. So those differences of class marking have I think disappeared in some ways and that of course would support the argument that class lines are less marked than they once were and we should congratulate ourselves nowadays perhaps on a greater democratisation. Except of course the class lines haven't quite moved in the ways that was once hoped and the fear of falling of which Erin Reich wrote has become precisely that for many sections of the middle class and especially its younger members. We hear of people who have been described as just about managing but I think we need to add to that sentence the phrase the words to stay in the same place. So what I also want to remark about this use of talking about class here and in the light of these change circumstances is the confidence that some people still use the term middle class. And I think this is one of the remarkable paradoxes of the current usage of that term. And I want to take two examples because I think these two examples show a great deal about the way in which people talk about class and some of the implications which are important. The first one is this in 2011 David Willits who was then Minister of State for Higher Education spoke of middle class women taking away good jobs quote from bright working class men. Now this comment to anybody who likes to analyse sentences in detail is probably one of the richest ones in our contemporary history. Priceless social information here. The assumption of course that there are a few tall poppies amongst working class men, those bright working class men who might be deserving of entry into the middle class. The idea too that working class women don't matter, working class women and people, non-white people were not considered in this sentence at all. And most appalling to me the taken for granted assumption that it's perfectly reasonable for an economy to have good jobs and bad jobs. So in that one sentence there's a lot going on about class. But three years later in her autobiography Hilary Clinton wrote on page 516 that probably not all of you have reached that point but anyway persevere. Again what she wrote was this and I quote the global middle class is the natural ally of the United States. Now I found this sentence extraordinarily interesting and fascinating because of course the sentence is assumption rich. That there's a definable group of people who constitute a social group of particular value and who will endorse the right kinds of values. A degree of social liberalism with a commitment to the market economy and that those values will have been produced through certain forms of credentialised education. In the case of the second quotation of course there's an implicit assumption that the global middle class of which Clinton speaks will also share the values of the United States. So Willis and Clinton spoke in ways which of course invoke and accept radical social separation and leave many of us wondering what place in global politics might be occupied by that considerable part of the population which lies outside their definition of middle class. And in any population in any country of the world that part of the population is very considerable. And of course the political repercussions and events that have taken place I think have been very much related to those kinds of reception to reception of those ideas about the separation of the middle class and the rest. But two questions I think we should ask here about the ways in which we speak of this binary difference between the middle and the working class. What does it mean? The first is that we might wonder why the term middle class is being used with such confidence given that for many people the term is becoming in both objective and subjective terms redundant. Graduates working with few benefits and those in white collar jobs who have seen their conditions of employment gradually worse than can't find very much security in the term middle class. Traditional markers of middle class life have been increasingly uncertain. But as that social uncertainty has increased and I would emphasise it as a form of insecurity which is challenging both the literal and the symbolic meaning of middle class. So of course we have seen in that those groups in the population frantic efforts to maintain that position. The second point I would make is that the term middle class when used by politicians and others is often what might be described more accurately as the upper middle class. The world of the professions elite higher education and a commitment vague as it might be to aspects of high culture. Higher rates of university of education have not in themselves enlarged this class yet it remains a version of definitions of middle class with enormous and considerable aspirational authority. Yet in those elite professions the law, the senior posts in medicine, the civil service, the academy, the military, the church, the media it is still the case that white men dominate appointments. You do not have to read massive tomes of sociology and I'm sorry to say that in this context. However you need only read the footnotes to the two volumes of Charles Moore's autobiography of Margaret Thatcher to come across an endless series of white public school educated men who occupy key positions in the British state and in the central institutions of our country. As countless people have pointed out the 7% of the population educated at public schools do still get a considerable number of those good jobs of which will it spoke. It's a very clear case of the persistence of the transfer of social and cultural capital from one generation to the next. But a form of education which alarmingly seems to have increased its authority in recent years as state schools are derided and public schools suggested as models of excellence. So in these confused and anxious times about various forms of insecurity one of the progress narratives to which we cling is that of the emancipation of women and the argument that gender equality has been achieved. Although of course it's clearly impossible to argue the same thing for race. But this narrative about women obscures the ways in which new forms and expectations are paid work together with established forms of educational inequality continue to support what I think and what I would maintain are gendered forms of inequality. So at this point I'm going to introduce a new form of social subject an individual and a collective human being. A person who is the master of the universe a high point of our models of the contemporary citizen as well of course as the title of Daniel Stedman Jones's study of neoliberalism. The person is both very real in that they're very often a high earning corporate subject or a person occupying a specifically important post in some kind of central institution. But a white male person a master likely to have acquired that fundamental characteristic of successful masculinity in the UK a public school education. A marker of what Mike Savage has described as class origin. It remains a building block of white male privilege and has continued so for decades if not centuries. It should concern us for all the reasons that has concerned us in the past because it should also I think concern us today rather more because we have increasingly allowed that this form of privilege is somehow not relevant. It has nothing to do with patterns of exclusion and yet stands as a marker for all that is admirable in secondary education. So my further point here is that whilst we can condemn the literal absence of those others who are not white male and privileged from various elites. It's the impact of the fantasy of the position of the position of the master of the universe which is at least as important. Being a commander of men has always dominated the aspirations of the ruling class. But what interests me here and this is where we get to the point where it intersects with gender is the way in which this idea of the powerful autonomous individual replete with choice and agency has now become generalized as a human ideal. Assumptions about the access to choice and agency including that of the organization of our psychic and sexual lives has gone some way to removing the expected strength of the connections between our class of origin and achieved adult status. This generalization which I suggest now sometimes takes the form of making individual choice the determinant of individual situation continues to have different consequences for men and women. For women what is achieved here I think in 2017 is the fusion of two problematic narratives one of emancipation the assumption of the achievement of the emancipated subject and the other of the unfettered autonomous social subject a human ideal which derives from certain positions of the masculine and masculinity. Now I recognize I fully recognize that very few men and even fewer women ever come to be masters of the universe. But what concerns me is the way in which we construct and organize our fantasies and subjectivities about who and what we should be. So here we turn to a second change where I think that gendered forms of inequality have both continued but also arguably increased. The change is that those narratives of women's emancipation which I have mentioned have often cited the greatest greater increase in the numbers of women in paid work and from this have rapidly assumed that women compete on a level playing field with men in terms of employment and other public contexts. There is so much to note here in these assumptions. The refusal of historical evidence about the numbers of women who always worked. The extent to which women's employment is consistently more likely to be part time and interrupted than that of men. The famous double shift of women and other two other very important factors. One is that we're still very far away from thinking about what Miriam Glucksmann has really importantly described as the total social organization of labour in which we think or we should think about all kinds of tasks for others and ourselves which are performed outside as well as inside paid work. The second is the growing push to work of the British state and this I suggest is fundamentally transformative in terms of the making of social expectations about women and in it the form of this transformation is that women's respectability the way in which the female subject is deemed to be respectable has begun to shift away from that of sexual behavior towards that of the paid employed woman. Not just the paid employed woman but the paid employed citizen. I am not here suggesting for one moment that sexual double standards abusive forms of the control of women have disappeared. In the what has appeared in the press in the last three weeks it would clearly be impossible to maintain this. Nor am I saying that paid work cannot be emancipatory or engaging although the quality of paid work is too seldom considered for all those who are employed. But I am saying that paid work has become the gold standard of the behavior of the adult citizen. It's a discourse which I would further suggest does not bring with it clear advantages for women or anybody who cares nor is it generally as it should be presented as part of the interests of those who are determined to decrease the extent and the generosity of state benefits. So let me consider this in two further ways. One is the implication for ideas about care and the second is that of ideas about shaming and to think about care and shame in the context of women in particular. We all recognize and many of us increasingly confront this question, we all recognize our need for care and we are constantly told of the crisis in social care, the increase in the elderly population and so on. But what we too seldom also consider here is the way in which our concentration on the virtue of paid work decreases the social value which we attach to unpaid work. Feminists of the 1970s put an enormous amount of energy into arguing about the value of the unpaid care work of women. But that argument has increasingly had to compete with that other narrative which I've just suggested. That paid work is the essential form of work and the other forms of care should be secondary to it. Battles are fought and sometimes won over questions of the state provision of childcare. But other battles in which the care involves the conditions of forms of mental and physical health which might persist for decades is seldom acknowledged. The master of the universe, the person produced out of discourses of exceptionalism and choice, the specialist, the highly skilled, is essentially to use Kathleen Lynch's memorable words, care less. So with success goes distance from care, a social association which establishes a connection between high achievement and being care less and being a low achiever and doing care. Women we know have always been the major carers for our society. But the political aim of getting people into work, notice the people in that particular phase, both erodes the value of unpaid work and makes little or no allowance for the continuities and the pressures of care that women face. The second issue which I referred to above is that of the ways in which in economic insecurities can shame. Clara Fisher has written of the shame once imposed upon the unmarried mothers of various countries, a form of sexual shaming and a marker of that previous version of the unrespectable woman. But more recently Emma Casey has written about more contemporary form of shame, the mothers who cannot provide for their children access to forms of consumption or even participation in various forms of activities which are part of their education. Again, the poverty that underpins this situation is not new. But what is new, I am suggesting, is the way in which the demands of the consumer culture are taken for granted as real needs and integrated into institutional and social contexts. One very simple example here because it is this time of year. The purchase and the wearing of Christmas jumpers in primary schools, something which from what I hear is becoming almost essential and compulsory. Now we might think that this is ridiculous. What does a Christmas jumper look like? Why would I want one? Why would my child have one? Less so it is much less ridiculous of course if your child is the only one in the class who hasn't got one. So the instance of the Christmas jumper takes me to the third and final context where I think gendered forms of inequality have enlarged, that of the body and the body of women. A place where we all, which we all inhabit but one where material worlds have paid and unpaid work intersect with fantasies about ourselves. One element of that fantasy is how we think about our physical selves, of how we do our bodies. And here I suggest is one of the contexts in which gendered inequality is potentially formed. In this the body, body size, bodily appearance is central. And as many writers on women and their bodies have pointed out, a growing context of increasing psychic concern and anxiety. It's no longer an understandable fear about dying in childbirth. It's about looking, not just young and thin, but also confronting those new areas of the body that have suddenly acquired problematic status. And obviously I'm not describing those here. Just as science and medicine have increased longevity for some people, so that longevity is accompanied by new forms of worry about bits of ourselves. So fat, as Susie Orbach memorally said, is certainly a feminist issue. But I also think it's a wider social issue because meeting the concerns and the desires of women about their appearance plays such a large part in our economy. Consumption has associated with fashion is age old, that's not new. But the present energy and vitality of this area of both our productive and consuming lives has gained an importance in terms of both national and individual economies. The possibilities of the gratification of our fantasies about our appearance and the imagined transformation of our lives is everywhere. So the needs and the standards about appearance are presented in ways which connect with and inform that picture of the autonomous knowing subject of the modern global world. A culturally hegemonic female subject. And exactly how culturally hegemonic that female subject is could be brought home by information just like that of a story in today's Guardian newspaper which referred to the $10 billion worth of creams that are sold in parts of Africa to whiten the skin of African women. This is about a global subject. So being for women of doing femininity is both a global industry and a global concern. In this it seems to me aspirations have been enlarged but so too have the possibilities for the ruthless exploitation of women. Karl Marx wrote in 1887 about a young woman seamstress who had died from exhaustion while sewing a dress for people he described as noble ladies. Now the noble ladies don't dominate fashion today very much but death from exhaustion is just as likely to come for meeting the needs of a much larger group of people. So I'm hoping to make the case here for the consideration of the part that imagined forms of the feminine play in our economic in our economies and their growing inequalities. Women have always been imagined and portrayed as the carers and the mothers of the world. A very real correspondence with reality. But as both the costs and the aspirations of living increase so too do the demands which we make on ourselves. Those demands occur in different gendered ways and I would argue that the bodies of women and the very person of womanhood has become a very important place for the making of profit. Not least because generally women are so much more connected with the making of fashion and fashion as change than men. This is hugely important because of the expectations and aspirations of the modern which are very closely associated with all forms of aesthetic innovation in which shifts in dress and general appearance are central. The energy of the modern as the world in which we live and in more precise economic terms that energy which is sometimes described as growth has to take a material as well as a symbolic form if it's going to become functional and to impact upon the economy. The modern needs sensation. It needs change. It needs to be able to construct different kinds of needs and of course those different needs come from different people. We all recognise that capitalist economies need new markets and new goods. We need to keep making, selling and buying stuff. Today one purchase online means that we'll be pursued to make further purchases. One dress leads immediately to suggestions for six more. But in the creation of these global sites of consumption we're also assuming the participation of women as consumers of an ability to buy the form of the fantasy of the modern. 21st century women. The fantasy includes of course that assumption that women now have it all, that in the words of the 1980s cigarette advertisement women have come a long way. Now in this assumption there are of course references to real changes in levels of health and education, legal and civil rights. But the assumption of the free floating female subject of the modern world remains a creature of fantasy, even as that fantasy informs quite toxic narratives about the costs to men of women's emancipation. And this of course leads me to that common sense of today which suggests that women can do anything. They only have, as Cheryl Sandberg has suggested, to ask. But of course the we who are being encouraged to do the asking, as Dawn Foster has pointed out, is highly problematic and may have little relevance to the millions of women who might not be in those positions of possessing vast and highly respected skills. But where, if women have come a long way, have we got to? We all know that more women, whether mothers or not, are in some kind of paid employment. But we also know that those forms of employment are often those of cooking, cleaning and caring. And caring and coping at home and in homes continues to be more often done by women than by men and by networks of solidaristic assistants usually involving female relatives and friends. These are foundational aspects of the United Kingdom in the 21st century where we see much that is traditional in the gender division of labour. Yet ideas about the achievement of level playing fields for women has considerable social acceptance and endorsement, arguably more so than is the case for that of non-white citizens. At the same time, the very limited recognition of the continuing inequalities between genders and races is accompanied by the expectation that the greater root of social equality for all lies in our immersion, our collective immersion in the values of competition, autonomy and individualism. It is thought essential to endorse social mobility without asking, and again to refer to Selina Todd, quite why we would want to maintain a society replete and determined to ensure social hierarchy. Most importantly here of course my hope is that at least some people in the political world would note that we might also ask why there should be such things as good jobs and bad jobs. So to conclude and to bring together some of these ideas. First, to recognise that the lived experiences of women as well as fantasies about the feminine and femininity have changed in the past 50 years. But this has not achieved gender equality. If I asked this if there is more or less gender inequality than 50 years ago, I would give the highly equivocal answer of saying that the freedoms are greater but so are the constraints. I would also argue here that the possibilities for the abuse of women through new forms of the media and new expectations about our appearance are greater and in the latter case endlessly more profitable. The contexts of exploitation I'm suggesting have been enlarged. The second point I would make is to return to that issue of class. To argue that the assumption of the erosion of some of the cultural divisions and markers of class has not served women and particularly a majority of women born outside the class origin of the upper middle class particularly well. Since it too easily assumes that the aspirational model of individualism and autonomy that continues to serve privileged male people is generally socially positive. This model of the autonomous social subject is one that depends upon access not just to employment but to its privileged and powerful locations. Thus for women the aspirational coercion towards the autonomous subject with all its associated connections in terms of the body and appearance that that subject is expected to take is a particularly complex and demanding goal. Work is increasingly about paid work. A validation which both obscures the work of care and continues both the low pay and the value of the paid work of care. So finally two comments. The first is that if we think about gender and social inequality together rather than separately. We are able perhaps to make some important connections in our thinking about what is being formed in about what is being called the new form of capitalism. In this new form there are clearly continuators with the past profit and the ownership of capital are still central as of the needs for new goods and markets. But how do we get those new goods and those new markets and those new desires which will create those new goods. Contemporary fantasies about the feminine of autonomy and the possibilities of endless beauty and endless youth doom millions to endless disappointment. Snake oil can be sold in its trillions but it will still be snake oil at the end of the day. But the collapse and the curtailment of those fantasies, the recognition that snake oil does not work is itself met by an industry of consolation. Indeed in many ways our failure to achieve to meet those high expectations of the feminine provides for itself the further opportunities for our consolation. Our very failure creates our new needs and new forms of manufactured means of healing. Real needs are no more generally and fully met than in the past but the always important fairy tales which we are told and which we tell ourselves of course have a greater material meaning. It is this issue of aspirational change and what I would see and what I would define as aspirational coercion which seems to me the fifth point that I would add to that list of four which I named at the beginning. A new form of certainty is being produced about what it is possible for human beings to achieve and in those expectations and aspirations it is of course very often women who are the least able to meet or to even experience any hope of meeting those expectations. Those expectations harm us all but my argument would be that they harm us in particularly gendered ways. But my second and final remark also this evening is this, to thank the BSA and the British Library for making this such a public space and for allowing me the space in which to speculate and to think aloud. My own view is that the public space within universities is decreasing. Academics especially younger scholars are all too often subject to pressures not so directly experienced in previous generations. The very idea that women both as studying subjects and objects of study should have a much greater presence in the academy was a product of a recent moment of history but a moment in which the spontaneity of discussion and the production of ideas was I think very much more possible. It led to very important changes which writers, academics such as Hilary Lang contributed to in putting forward the idea that care work should be paid and recognised. So hopefully forms of creativity and argument will persist and my very sincere thanks to all of you who have come this evening and to all those of you of course who made this evening's event possible and did the work of organising the event. So thank you. Hi, thank you very much. Wonderful lecture, it's really very resonant in all sorts of ways. My name is Rosie Harper. I'm interested in something that was quite early on in the lecture which was about the sort of re-emergence of the dominance of people, men particularly from public school backgrounds in our governing structures. I work quite a bit with people who I would call survivors of a public school and quite often when you speak to them for quite a while you find that they're trapped in their 7 year old emotional persona and yet the government is run by these people. I'm thinking of having seen Boris just before I came out genuinely looking like a 7 year old schoolboy and I just wonder how we've got to the stage where we as women have allowed that to happen. And whether there's anything we can do about it. Help. Thank you very much for your question because I think it's a really important recognition of the way in which these structures, both literally in terms of these institutions such as public school but also in terms of the values which they enforce upon those children in those institutions. You have to win, you have to do well, you have to compete. It's quite an extraordinary value in situations in which there's also a tremendous sense of the club, the old school, the network. And I think one of the things that is probably so problematic about those institutions to which you're referring and the products that it produces is that there's never an opportunity for people to work out. The ways in which you have to balance those two rather contradictory ideas on the one hand compete and yet on the other hand be totally part and loyal to this particular institution. And you can see that working through, I think, precisely the kinds of individuals that you've mentioned, you know, because there is still in them, as was very, very clear and is particularly clear, I think, in the case of the individual that you've referred to. A real desire to differentiate himself, to make himself, to compete literally, to say the thing that nobody else is going to say. But also has a strong sense of knowing that he is also best served by staying in a particular group. And I think it's those kinds of connections which are so interesting, but also, as you're suggesting, so powerfully destructive of many individuals. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for your talk. It's really interesting. I want to just go back to one of the points you made at the beginning about the representation of women and tie it up to the point you made about David Willits, which truly was one of the richest sentences in our time. But one point that you, I think, maybe didn't pick up in that sentence. And that is the representation of women as connected to bodies rather than minds. And that seems to me to have intensified enormously in the last 10, 15 years as women have become more educated. And one of the things about David Willits' sentence was that, in effect, he told middle class women that they were expected to maintain their social position through marrying middle class men or through their fathers. In other words, their education did not matter. They were not expected to nurture their minds, and they were expected not to and also that working class men could. And so, in that one sentence, he managed to dismiss the nurturing of the minds of all women. And that seemed to me to be a quite extraordinarily significant aspect of what he said. And he didn't even realise he was doing that at all, I think. Thank you. I think that's absolutely right. I quoted it as one sentence, but obviously it was a much longer speech in which I was obviously not quoting from and which I don't have access to at the moment, but there were all sorts of other things in it. And as you quite rightly say, he was suggesting that there's something very wrong going on in something which everybody was taking for granted, which is that you open up higher education to women, which in effect has happened since the 1960s. And I think the rest of what he had to say was sort of did suggest that social unease about changing the picture of the social world. What was going to happen? Would this make a difference to people like him? And I think that there's also that sort of fear going on. What is going to be transformed in my world about this new group of people being in it? And that perhaps is to read into those paragraphs or that paragraph perhaps too much. And I'm sure literary critics don't like people reading into things quite as much as I'm suggesting. But I am suggesting that that would be certainly something which I think he was hinting at. OK. Yes, there's somebody there. Yes. Hi. My name's Zana. And I've just started the Teach First programme, so I'm a student teacher. And I'm really interested in what you said about the kind of aspirational fantasy that's offered. And I think in teaching that's really important, like Teach First school is to end educational inequality and give those from more disadvantaged backgrounds a brighter future, I guess. But I'm wondering how one could make that brighter future more kind of gender inclusive and not just this, I can't remember your wording, it would be better than mine, but like a picture of something with lots of masculine characteristics? That is such an important and interesting question to think about. I don't think you have to, I don't think you can do it. And I think probably other people, well certainly other people have said this as well, you can't just do it by changing one side, you have to change both sides. You have to say, why don't we change the excluding side? Why does that side have those characteristics? Why is it so often assumed that with higher position goes distance from the private world, the domestic world, the world of care, the world of responsibilities to others, et cetera, et cetera. I mean why do we take that for granted? Because otherwise what I think you're going to put in place is all kinds of things which are going to perhaps succeed in that yes we'll support women, we'll provide better institutional care, childcare at work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what you're doing then is increasing the lowly paid employment for women who are going to take up those positions of care for others. But you're also not doing anything about the model which is producing that issue in the first place. And I think it's that model which is really the problem which has to be addressed. That association, that association, that the Nordic countries have gone some way not to solving but they have recognised that every person in those societies, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, every person in those societies has responsibilities outside paid work. That's the flat line, that's the levelling out, that's I think what has to change. And it's possible in those societies because they're smaller societies, it's possible because in the couple of cases they have more public money which they are prepared to see as public money. But I think that that's the way that you have to move forward. Thank you. Is there somebody back there? No? Okay, sorry, here then. Thank you. My name's Kim Hamer. I've just taken up about four months ago a role of being a governor at an all girls academy in north London. So following on from the last question, it's a little bit more about what should I be bringing to these girls for our next generation who are going to have to live in this world, be resilient and resourceful and lead fulfilled and happy lives. Right. Okay, thank you, yes. Well, I do congratulate you on the definitive question. I think we should say to all children, all teenagers, what do you really want to do? What do you care about doing? This doesn't necessarily fit in with an aspirational model of how much you're going to get paid or who you know, which kind of hierarchy you're going to rise up in and be president of, chair of, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the thing to talk to young people about is what do you actually passionately care about? And because if you, I mean, I go back to human thinking about nothing matters about what you do rationally unless you care about it. Passion never let rationality be subject, dictate your passions. And I think that that's really important sentence wherever it comes, wherever it is another sentence, which is a hugely important one. And they will probably think, well, actually that's really liberating to think that because, you know, my parents are always telling me that I ought to be an accountant, but I'm not sure I really want to be an accountant and I apologise to any accountant. But, you know, what I really want to do, what I'm really interested in is X or Y. OK. That's what I would say. Now there is somebody at the back there that I was looking at before. There's a couple here as well, but somebody there. Yes. Hi there. My name is Megan Sullivan. I'm from the Humanity Foundation, so Women's Empowerment Charity. I have a quick question. You were talking about particularly the British experience and the white male and the white female. I guess my question is that women's empowerment and some of the aspirational issues you mentioned are a global issue today. And just how potent do you think the version of empowerment or aspiration that we're espousing now is? Are there forms of maybe less unequal gender feminism being espoused in other places? Or is this pretty much all-consuming as everyone jumped on the bandwagon? And are there things we can do to change it? OK. I think the narrative of empowerment is one which we should take extremely seriously and very critically. Because I think it's very easily, it very easily falls into that place which I feel critical of. It's any kind of empowerment if you get paid for at its empowerment. And I think that that is a very dangerous place because then what you are opening up is all kinds of possibilities for the employment of women, which are very much greater profit to the people employing those women than women themselves. So I am very, very wary about empowerment narratives actually. Also because of course women already possess empowerment. Again, it's an issue of thinking behind those ideas and thinking about the structures which actually inhibit the agency and the choice of women. It's not just saying that you have to empower women, give them some magic dust which is going to make them empowered. How about some magic dust or some rather more explosive dust which does some damage to the structures which are preventing the emergence of that empowerment? That seems to me to be another way of thinking about it and really quite an important one as well. Now there was somebody here and then somebody at the back first. Thank you very much for the lecture. Just on two subjects or two quick questions. First being women's body issues. I'm in fashion, I'm a professional clothier and I teach men how to dress for women, for business and women. The second question would be that disparity in dress codes keeps us so segregated and causes enormous amounts of problems but doesn't do anything to raise the issues of gender equality. As far as the way women dress for business also, with the stretch fabrics, etc, etc, does nobody that many favours, apart from body hugging, which sort of defeats the object when it comes to business. I would love your views on those. OK, dress codes, instances. Yes, business has dress codes, a lot of the high street has dress codes of one kind and another. Again, I will turn to this idea about coercion. The woman who was sent home from work because she wasn't wearing high heels, not just small heels but four inch heels, being told that she could only come to work dressed in this way. She tried to bring a case about that in terms of sexual discrimination in the workplace and the case was not taken forward, she didn't win the case. It created discussion and it created debate but what was I think really worrying about that debate is that there were people prepared to endorse the idea that women who were going to be in the public space should look quote attractive. It's a very sexualising norm it seems to me being told that you have to come to work wearing four inch high heels. Who is this for? What exactly is going on here in which we are actually saying this is part and parcel of your job description? This is not about whether you can do the job, it is actually what you are going to present as an image of yourself. I think that kind, we have to think about that, we have to think about dress and how women dress outside the areas of dress codes, uniform etc etc. In terms of very much more general sexualising changes that have taken place in the last 20, 30 years which campaigns about the dressing of young girls have also become involved in. We have become very concerned, we have started to notice that dress is not just a matter of choice, other people are choosing your dress, there is a lot of coercion going on in a way in which women think they ought to dress. This isn't necessarily of course an imposed coercion but it's a coercion which actually becomes part of women's imagination about who they are and what they want to look like. Of course it doesn't affect everybody but I'm saying that it's there and I think it's too powerful not to recognise it and to identify it. So is somebody here and then somebody on this rep? My name is Ege, I'm working as a teaching fellow at LSE. Exist, thank you very much for your research and presentation. Existing research shows that although there are more women in labour market, men's involvement in care work and home work, house work doesn't increase including Britain and other countries. As far as I know Nordic countries targeted this very sharp and persistent gender based division of labour at home in order to change the gender regime and gender inequalities. If I didn't understand you wrong, you are suggesting that care work should be paid and recognised and I feel like this magical dust targets capitalism more than patriarchy. So I got a bit confused about that. I agree with you about the question of gender division of house work. Debates about that go back to the 1970s. We started to measure who did what at home. That's quite a now 50 years of that literature and nothing seems very much to changed. It's changed around the edges a bit but not very much. I mean one thing that has changed is that there's been a certain amount of duplication in terms of certain household tasks like cooking in movement to the service sector. I mean that's one shift that we can identify something that we have seen happen but in terms of the gender division of labour that doesn't seem to have shifted very much. How you change it, I think that is a question. You have to address through socialisation, you have to address through discussions of what you teach children to be able to do, all sorts of questions which I think are incredibly deep seated in our culture. Deep seated taboos which we can think about the taboos which has taken generations to shift. The idea that man could not push a pram 60, 70 years ago that would have been unacceptable in this country. It's a bit like the folk story of any man who carried an umbrella in Glasgow was attacked because it was thought that he was a homosexual. So those kinds of folk stories sort of locate that kind of cultural resistance to shifting gender roles. And I think one of the things that you raised which is disturbing is that more women being in work doesn't seem to shift what you've identified. But as I say, some of that shift has moved to the use of the service sector. Person here in Blue Sheep. Hi, I'm Bita Reyes, social consultant. What's the relation between the class divide and gender inequality? Do you think that that's an obstacle in terms of progressing women and also women to be involved more in decision making process? It can't not be because we all inhabit social class. Everybody here, everybody outside has a social class. We're all classed just as we're gendered citizen, racialized citizen, so we're all classed citizens. It can't not is my answer to your question. How it makes a difference I think is through the different expectations and aspirations which are located in us through class. And that's why I was so eager to discuss this issue of the idea of the specialist autonomous subject, which I think has become the focus for so much concern, ambition, direction within large sections of the middle class. And that's becoming an ambition which people share for their daughters as well as their sons. But the problem is, as I hope I've been saying, that it's much more difficult for women. Yes. Hi, my name is Vivian Zims and I work in the field of mental health and psychoanalysis. Sorry, you're pointing, do you want me to continue? Yes please. What I was going to say was that I do think that there has been quite a lot in changes when we're thinking about masculinity and femininity and how those concepts have loosened up. For example, if you look at research into the brain, a recently published book by I think called Delia Fine, challenges the idea that these changes aren't that significant. You were talking about, somebody was talking about clothes and men. Pressures on men have changed enormously. I was reading an article last week about now 10% of men particularly working in the city are undergoing botox on a regular basis because they are worried about their appearance. So I'm thinking that whilst I agree with everything you're saying, there are also changes too. And looking at some of the voices, the way that women can speak out and can respond. Watching a man last week coming down the road with his baby singing and dancing. That would have never happened when I was growing up. So whilst I agree with everything you're saying, I do think there have been some very important and significant changes. I would not deny those changes and I hoped I was paying to say that I think there are those kinds of changes taking place. The problem with it is exactly in other discourses about the welfare sponge, the extent to which we dramatise those instances and generalise them. That's the question. The Daily Mail has only got to find one family that isn't quite doing rights as far as benefits is concerned to label whole groups of people as spongers. And I think it's the same problem with changing expectations about gender. You've only got to read one newspaper article that says, you know, I'm a stay-at-home dad and we've reorganised our family life in ways that are not traditional. To think, oh well, things are changing. Of course things are changing, but there is some very remarkable literature written by women in both this country and the United States in the 1920s, which suggested that that was exactly what was going on there, that forms of dress and family life were also changing. And I think what we always have to do is to measure, to look at those dramatic, important, individually really, really important moments and compare them with the general picture. You know, they are probably very important instances and certainly I think those instances of the father with the baby is something which is general, that's probably happened across the culture and across classes. But you still have to look at those patterns and that's where the sociologist in me starts saying, yes, but how general is that? You know, does that, where is the evidence to suggest that that generally happens? I mean, I'm all for these individual changes, fantastic, yes please, in many cases and in many instances, but how many people are doing that? And how many people as well do they have the opportunity to do that? I think that's the other part of the question we have to ask. There's somebody in the middle here and then somebody at the front, yes. Hi, my name's James. Thanks very much for your lecture. I was wondering about modern theories of gender and kind of the idea of gender fluidity and kind of the mainstream acceptance of transgender rights as kind of part of that and kind of viewing your lecture through that lens if you had any reflections on what you said, how it might change or what you think? I think it's a form of choice which has to be recognised, endorsed, allowed, celebrated, et cetera. But I also think I do wonder about the social implications for people not making that choice. In what sense are we increasing and enlarging in ways which may be very important and very positive, our sense of how we become what we are as human beings? So I am not suggesting that this moves in either one direction or another direction, it's not negative, it's not positive. But what I am suggesting is that we have to think about the ways in which our perceptions of ourselves are enlarged through that particular shift which has now become possible and it's always been possible but it's become medically possible and it's become possible in certain parts of the world through wider acceptance of that particular shift. But at the same time, why do we seem to cling so much to other much more traditional versions of gender? So I think we have to think about that question in the light of these other issues and situations. Thank you, yes. Hi Andrew, I did my master's at LSE last year and I worked for a charity. My question is stating from Sarah Ahmed's work because she talks about how violence against women is continuous because we kind of remain silent about it and basically we have a legal system that only convicts 6% of rapes and those people who come forward. So can you give any ideas on how we can maybe change legal system or change police culture or help people who are remaining silent still for the violence that they've had because of their gender? Okay, well, I mean, it's a considerable, it's a very topical question. I think you help it by doing actually what we're doing here and what I'm sure many people here are doing in other contexts which is to talk endlessly and constantly about issues of gender and not accepting gender as a given situation in which tradition should be how it is and we should not depart from that tradition and those conventions. So what I think is always important and what is only going to make those things change is the greater intervention in those kinds of situations but we also have to think about the ways in which it is often so difficult to actually not just make changes but also to take forward the condemnation if you like the prosecution of those who have committed the violence. What do you do in those kinds of cases? It's very, very difficult very often for the CPS to bring cases to court. There's always a terror that a case is going to be thrown out. There's always a terror that is something or other is not going to be accepted in court and so on and so forth in cases of rape and sexual assault, in cases of abuse on Twitter or any of the other forms of media. Again, it's really difficult for people to bring successful prosecutions to identify the person who is causing those abusive remarks or whatever else. I think there what you have to do is actually create situations where it is much easier to shame. I talked in my lecture about the ways in which women have been shamed and I think shame should be also very much more about the shame of people who commit those kinds of abuse, whether it's on women or whether it's on sexual minorities or either it's on people of different races and ethnicities. I think shame is actually a really important social weapon. I think it's been misused in horrible and damaging ways in the past and I never think it is a powerful weapon and I think it's one that should be used. What kind of person are you exactly that you think it's acceptable to do this? People don't like being shamed. I'm a great fan of detective fiction and I have to tell you that one of the two of the motives in detective fiction, as you probably all know, are sex and money. The other one is shame. People hate being shamed into being revealed to be shown to be what they are not. I think that detective fiction really hits on this idea of being unmasked, being shamed, being shown to be something other than the person that you want to present to the social world is actually a really important weapon and sometimes much more powerful than the very ponderous workings of the legal system. OK, this person here. Valerie Hay. The University of Sussex Centre for Research into Equity and Higher Education. Thank you very much, Mary. It was a great stimulating lecture. I'm going to move it to the parochial in the sense in boundarying it by the UK. How confident are you that a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party is sensitive to your analysis and some lines of your policy ideas? I was going to say, unfortunately, this has to be the last question. It probably is the last question. Of course, there is an opportunity to meet with Mary outside with the book, but anyway, sorry. Thank you. We've known each other for a very long time and lived through many hopes and disappointments together. So I hope my answer will actually also suggest to you that I am equally prepared to live through more hope and more disappointment. One of the things that I would most hope about Jeremy Corbyn and a future Labour Government is that they can actually think seriously about this difference between good jobs and bad jobs because I think this is such a pernicious form of organisation of the labour market and it's a particularly pernicious form which impacts upon women. So that's one thing. It's a very simple slogan. We want all jobs to be good jobs. You only need a sentence to say it, but I think it's very powerful and it's very important and it's got, as I say, all these very important gendered implications. The second thing that I would say is to go back to what I was talking about in answer to the previous question, which is to say, misogyny, the abuse of women is shameful, full stop, another straightforward sentence. Politicians are looking for signs that sound by it, so there are two, which I hope they'll be able to take forward. But as I say, I'm prepared for disappointment. So thank you. Well, I think on that note, I think we do have to say thank you very much to Mary, not only for a stimulating lecture, but a contact with the question.