Things have improved for women in many ways but – understandably – people want them to get better even faster
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Betty Boothroyd, who fought six elections before getting a seat, could be scathing about the sensibilities of the 'Blair babes' generation. Photograph: Richard Young/Rex Features
Today's papers are again full of allegations about sexual harassment in the workplace. There's the Lib Dems and Chris Rennard (though the Tory media's real target is increasingly Nick Clegg) and there's that even older, revered institution, the papacy (though the Tory media care less about ex-Cardinal Keith O'Brien and are more interested in the pope). Where will the spotlight fall tomorrow? Sexism in the City? In the BBC (again) or the trades unions? In sport, as it was during the Olympics?
What's going on here? Is it a pandemic of sexism in British society, which campaigners routinely claim on doubtful evidence is so much worse than neighbours like France? Or is it something deeper going on? The latter, I think.
One feature of most current exposés of institutional failures is pressure for greater transparency and accountability. It comes from many quarters, including good governance campaigns and social media, and is highly desirable. But it takes a corrosive toll in terms of public trust.
Is it better that we know all these dreadful things about the way some people – that's some people – with power and opportunity behave when they think no one's looking? Now that we know the true cost of the nuclear power industry since the 1950s or the greedy, irresponsible and corrupt ways some bankers have behaved since the 1990s, are we better off? Ditto the highly leveraged management of Premier League football and its pampered stars?
On balance, the answer must be yes. But the danger is obvious. Our widespread rejection of the nuclear option may leave us vulnerable to power blackouts in the foreseeable future as other energy sources falter.
Hack-handed attempts to tame the excesses of the bankers may cripple our capacity for economic growth, the jobs and prosperity that go with it. Premier League footballers may decamp elsewhere, though probably not to the Cayman islands or Switzerland like the bankers.
Populist responses are easy (I plead guilty on several counts), but they don't keep the lights on or the ATM machines working. Politicians too deserve much of the collective stick they get, not least over the MPs' expenses scandal, but not all of it.
Much of the stick is cynically orchestrated by media moguls whose interests are not aligned with Britain or its electorate, not least because they neither live nor pay income tax here. You can see it in the papers any day of the week – if you can overcome the personal prejudice and distraction to which the headline is appealing.
The other force at work which constantly catches my attention is the working through of what I was taught decades ago to call the revolution of rising expectations. People get restless and angry when things are getting better overall, not when they are reduced to a struggle for survival as things get worse. It may be what drove the Arab spring and similar cataclysmic upheavals over the centuries.
Closer to home it is driving demands by women for equal shares in society's good things – power and money along with freedom from groping. It comes almost a century after they first got the vote (1918), almost 150 years after the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 allowed them to keep the money they earned or inherited, even longer since the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 allowed hundreds of women to seek divorce from bad husbands. Kate Summerscale's Mrs Robinson's Disgrace offers a fascinating insight into that world, based on a wife's private diary.
Other "minorities" (yes, I realise women are the majority) are also pressing their claims after centuries of neglect or oppression based on race, sexual orientation, disability and the like. But let's stick to women for the moment.
I got into trouble at a seminar the other week when I told an audience of impatient educated women that they should bear in mind that they're winning this battle, a battle moreover in which there are also losers: most conspicuously ill-educated boys at the bottom of the social pile for whom jobs and prospects are often quite bleak.
But race and gender have displaced class on the inequality agenda. Just look at Sunday's Observer profile of Facebook's Superwoman of a boss.
When a well known public figure told the same seminar that things are as bad for women as they were 50 years ago, I got quite cross. Oh no, they're not. Didn't women once have to resign as teachers when they got married, let alone pregnant?
Things are much better in countless ways, but it's in the nature of the revolution of rising expectations that people want them to get better even faster. It's easy to see why, very understandable, but it undermines a sense of perspective.
So today's Guardian carries an article by Vera Baird, former Labour MP and solicitor general, currently Northumbria's elected police commissioner, explaining how sexist parliament still is. Baird is a seriously smart and tough woman, Mo Mowlam's successor as MP for Redcar (2001-10), whose testimony should be taken seriously.
Yet from a longer perspective – mine – the Lords and Commons are far more feminised in so many ways than they were in my youth there. Better or worse? Both. Let's just say it's different, though I do miss chips on the cafeteria menu.
Politics attracts some big egos; bullying, favouritism and harassment happens – as it does in many walks of life – but it's not all confined to women. Nor are hurt feelings or personal insecurity. Robin Cook, to cite one complicated example of a family friendly male MP, felt horribly defensive about his looks, felt they held him back (No Robin, it was you).
I know such sentiments, however mildly expressed, will annoy some readers. Yet older women politicians, some of them feminists who fought their way to the top (or had to settle for the unelected Lords) in the male-dominated jungle of yesteryear, would share them. As Commons Speaker, Betty Boothroyd, who fought six elections before getting a seat, could be scathing about the sensibilities of the "Blair babes" generation.
Not kind, I agree, but you can see her point of view too. So when I read Yvonne Roberts's Observer account of the number of women holding top jobs in industry, politics, the judiciary, banking, the arts (etc) – they are culled from Sex and Power 2013: Who Runs Britain? produced by the Counting Women coalition – I don't think: "Oh my God, we're slipping back"; I look on the stats as steady, relentless progress over my lifetime.
It may slip back here and there, but it won't be reversed. Excellent! More women on the board may provide a better cure for macho bankers than tighter rules from Brussels. It's worth a try.
Meanwhile, mere numbers are a useful guide, but too crude a benchmark to be the sole test of change. If François Hollande's government has gender parity and David Cameron's doesn't we shouldn't feel as badly as we're invited to feel. We didn't nearly elect Dominique Strauss-Kahn as president either, though we did once elect Lloyd George (he was a Liberal too).