Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: How Gender Equality Can Save The World!. Catherine Mayer
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‘I am so excited about this party – I’ve waited my whole adult life for it.’
‘YES PLEASE, this is just what we have needed for such a long time. I’m on board, we have much work to do, please delegate.’
To delegate, you need a structure. We created an organisation from scratch and then scrambled to update it as needs and priorities changed, sprouting subcommittees to formulate policy and deal with press, social media, outreach, fundraising, finance and the demands that bureaucracy ladles onto the political process.
Britain is generous with its portions of red tape, far more so than many other nations. In July 2015, I met up with Sunniva Schultze-Florey, who had also co-founded a new political party four months earlier. Inspired by Sweden’s Feminist Initiative, she and a small group of friends started a Norwegian offshoot, Feminist Initiative Bergen-Hordaland, and they were already preparing for their first elections, for local government, in September. They didn’t need to do much more to make the party official than to announce its existence; they didn’t have to raise money for deposits to run, just collect a certain number of signatures. Norway’s proportional voting system meant the entry level for new parties didn’t seem too daunting – only a few thousand votes to win a council seat.
As our Norwegian counterpart plunged into campaigning, we jumped through hoops just to secure the right to campaign, an exercise as questionable as a dolphin show at a water park – and as anachronistic. Politics in the UK doesn’t just look and sound like a club. It is a club, with rules designed to exclude the wrong type of person as defined by the type of person who already belongs to the club. A new party cannot open for membership or put up candidates for election until registered with the Electoral Commission. That involves writing a constitution and rules of association and appointing officers. You must also establish a company and then find a bank willing to accept your business, because a party is also an enterprise. Quite a few bankers sucked pens and stared skywards when confronted by a start-up enterprise without a business plan or guarantee of income.
You can see why they might worry. The club rules ensure it’s hugely expensive to do politics. There are deposits to be paid for each candidate – £10,000 to stand for Mayor of London! A further £10,000 to appear in the official brochure that goes out to voters! Turn again, Whittington: the road to London’s City Hall is truly paved with gold.
Campaign costs are eye-watering, especially in first-past-the-post elections such as Westminster’s, where the overall number of votes across the UK matters less than the concentration of votes in individual constituencies. In the May 2015 general election, UKIP picked up one in eight votes, almost 3.9 million in total, but won only a single seat. The Scottish National Party gained 1.5 million votes and 56 seats. To successfully challenge old parties, newcomers must finance not only profile-raising marketing and PR campaigns but also street-by-street, door-by-door drives, reliant on volunteers and paid expertise, and underpinned by pricey technologies.
There’s another way in which money talks. One reason politics is dominated by affluent men in suits is that candidacy is expensive and risky. It’s far easier for people with private incomes or salaried jobs that grant leave of absence to run, and that’s assuming they aren’t caring for children or elderly relatives. The Women’s Equality Party wanted to support women to become candidates, not only by paying their deposit money but also by providing bursaries to help with childcare and other costs.
So we were eager to open for membership as soon as possible to establish the revenue stream necessary to do this – any of this. We needed funding just to collect funds. The Electoral Commission allows political parties to accept donations over £500 only from permissible donors: UK-based companies and individuals registered on a UK electoral roll. The regulations are intended to stop foreigners and tax exiles from buying influence in British politics – no representation without taxation, as it were – but do nothing of the kind. Any global corporation with a UK subsidiary is entitled to donate, no matter how breathtaking its tax-minimising schemes. Any person rich enough to stash wealth offshore is probably also rich enough to find channels to donate.
Yet WE risked penalties if, say, a British national living in the UK but not registered to vote gave a series of small donations that in total breached the £500 threshold. The only way to guard against such accidents is to check would-be donors against the electoral register, which inevitably isn’t a conveniently centralised electronic list, but a series of lists held by local authorities. Sian McGee, a new law graduate and youngest member of the original steering committee, became WE’s first paid employee, hired to perform these checks. She immediately spotted a potentially dodgy transaction. The party had launched a time-limited founding membership scheme, ranging from £2 a month to £1,000 and upwards for lifetime membership. Sandi enrolled online for the latter option but Sian could find no Toksvigs on the electoral roll. She could not know that Sandi’s information is withheld since a stalker broke into her house. Sian diligently rang Sandi to query her eligibility to help found the party she had founded.
The final hurdle to gaining official party status involved seeking the Electoral Commission’s approval for our logo and slogan for use on ballot papers. Two wonderfully talented designers, Sara Burns and Jeanette Clement, volunteered to produce a logo for us. They had never met before joining the steering committee, but instantly devised a way of working together, and celebrated that collaborative spirit, and the party’s aims, with a design that turned the E of WE into an equal sign. They chose a palette not in use by any other party – green, white and violet, the colours of the Suffragette movement. The committee then voted on a range of slogans and landed back on the one I had written for the public meeting back in March: ‘Because equality is better for everyone.’
This book aims to test that proposition. It might appear that the only point of debate relates to men and whether by ceding their dominance they would really gain more than they lose. The rest seems self-evident.
Inequality is yawning and its impact is disfiguring. The gap between rich and poor countries, and between rich and poor, is widening. One per cent of the global population owns more wealth than everyone else on the planet combined. Not even the one per cent look happy about this state of affairs as they transfer from one hermetically sealed bubble to the next, ringed with security lest real life accost them. In rich countries, the poor struggle daily to survive. As many as a fifth of Britons live below the poverty line, as do more than 15 per cent of Americans. Social mobility is stalling. Social unrest is deepening. Conflicts spill across borders and reach out violently into distant city centres. Many of the people displaced by those conflicts, some 65.3 million on current estimates, seek shelter in countries already lacking resources; 86 per cent of the world’s refugees are lodged in the developing world. Migrants reaching Europe should expect a mixed reception. Any dreams of universal live-and-let-live tolerance are dissipating as populist hate-mongers and extremist movements find, in their supposed polarities, common cause against liberalism.
Surely if we successfully dismantle the patriarchy, the biggest structural injustice of all, other structural injustices must also begin to crumble. Surely a more gender-equal world will be a more equal world in other ways too.
Yet from the start of WE, easy assumptions frayed. Our first steering committee meeting took place at my central London flat, in my kitchen. We sat around an extendable table owned by my family since 1933, when my widowed great-grandmother started dealing antiques from her front room in a Chicago suburb during the city’s Century of Progress International Exposition (a World’s Fair with the motto ‘Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Adapts’). The table tells a story not just of female entrepreneurship, but of comfort. My middle-class family, émigrés to the US, not refugees, lived in homes large enough for such a table.
There were ten of us at the first steering committee meeting. Not every woman (and neither of the men who joined us) had been born to the same level of advantage, and none of us had problem-free lives. Between us we wrestled with disability, physical and mental health issues, had experienced racism, homophobia, ageism and abuse. Still, we all enjoyed the luxury of political activism. Entry to the steering committee rested on two qualifications: an enthusiasm for the idea of the party and a commitment to getting it started. Many