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[shreena]

Q.  Do equality laws hold women back?

A.  I don't know, get back to me when we have them.

Increasing maternity leave to about 25 times the length of paternity leave doesn't look much like equality to me.

Discuss

Comments

[lordrosemount]

I think the government is often over-concerned with abstract ideas over how to achieve this ephemeral concept of 'equality' than addressing what's actually going on in people's lives.

For example, increasing numbers of women who in the past gave up their successful careers to raise children at a relatively young age, are finding that once their kids have grown up a bit there's really nothing stopping them from going back to work. They're highly skilled and talented, but in the mean time the economy has changed around a bit, so it's not so easy just to walk into a job even though they could easily become highly qualified for it. So what does the government do to help them out? Not a fat lot, unfortunately, because for all this talk of lifelong learning and adult education, the government training initiatives we have at the moment are good at little more than training Macdonalds staff for IT jobs.

So why not make job centres into something a bit more advanced than labour exchanges for the barely-employable, and provide real career advice and coaching for women in this situation? As a policy this might not hit the right politically correct buttons of helping the worst off (read: spending millions of pounds on shifting people's incomes from 1% below the poverty line to 1% above it, and then claiming you've cut poverty) or making society more equal, but it might, just might, manage to help the economy whilst making real people's lives better. Doesn't sound like a bad idea to me.