CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

How do you see women? And how do they see themselves? In her role as Head Strategist at the world famous advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, author Rachel Pashley decided to find out. In a global survey orchestrated over five years, over 8,000 women responded, aged seventeen to seventy across 19 countries. The results make fascinating reading.

Working with the results, Pashley defines four key ‘female tribes: Alphas (focusing on achievement and career); Hedonists (focused on pleasure and self-development); Traditionalists (women whose chief focus is home and children); Altruists (women who focus on community and environment).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

With over 20 years spent in global marketing and advertising, Rachel Pashley specialises in female insight across cultures. For the past 11 years she has been employed at J Walter Thompson London as a Group Planning Head/Strategist. As a feminist writer, Rachel contributes to the Independent as well as a host of consumer titles and influential blogs. In 2016 Rachel executive produced Her Story: The Female Revolution with Films of Record and BBC World News, while combining her producer role for JWT Entertainment with public speaking for a wide range of events. Rachel lives in London.

Twitter: @RachelP21

FOREWORD

Madeline Di Nonno CEO, Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media

What Rachel Pashley has captured with this book is a significant narrative that corrects the story of women’s contributions to society and our world history, as well as introducing the important concept of Female Capital – the value women bring to bear every day across every field.

Given the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media’s long-standing mission to achieve gender equity onscreen in media, we are experiencing a pivotal time as we all strive for gender equity in business and in our lives. Our work addressing female portrayals onscreen along with movements such as #TimesUp and #MeToo contribute to our collective efforts to strive for systemic change. This change is manifesting itself around the world and across many industries.

That said, women’s achievements are still vastly overshadowed and regularly airbrushed from our history and culture, depriving women and girls of powerful female role models. The reality is that women are leaders, we are multifaceted and we are intelligent!

The book makes a compelling argument as to how the commercial world can be a force for good: how we can dramatically influence the perceptions of women’s value through our storytellers and marketing. We know from Rachel’s research that women want to see themselves reflected in media as they are in real life. It challenges the unconscious gender bias so ingrained in all of us as adults. Our motto at the Institute is ‘If she can see it, she can be it.’ I believe we all can play a critical role in shaping the future – the future we want to see.

PROLOGUE

New Female Tribes: How this Book Began

This book is based on a survey we at J. Walter Thompson came to call ‘Female Tribes’. To my knowledge, it is the largest female insight study of its kind conducted within the advertising industry. It was fuelled by over five years of desk research and it grew from the commissioning of our own global research study, the J. Walter Thompson Women’s Index. The study reveals the dreams, ambitions and goals of over 8,000 women aged 17 to 70 years, across 19 different countries, and from different ethnicities and income levels, with the objective of understanding female progress.

We initially commissioned the study with what I now call the ‘original global nine markets’, a deliberately diverse global spread of countries to investigate women’s progress beyond the realms of rich, white Western women. Those countries were the UK, USA, China, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, India, Australia and Saudi Arabia. As the project gained momentum, additional offices in the agency network participated in the study, so we expanded our research across the Middle East (Lebanon, Egypt) and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam), and in Europe Italy came on board. By the end of commissioning for the Women’s Index research, we had a truly global study and, frankly, a lot of analysis to do.

The results present a fascinating and diverse study of contemporary femininity from a wide spread of ages, ethnicities and geographies, and the degree to which women’s role in society is advancing. Equally the results point to the fact that women’s status in the real world is significantly out of step with the way in which women are portrayed on screen in popular culture, through advertising or in entertainment, i.e. the ‘reel’ world, and that is something I wanted to address in this book.

FEMALE CAPITAL: WOMEN AS VALUE CREATORS (NOT JUST CONSUMERS)

The aim was to explore the idea of ‘Female Capital’, the value that women bring to the world as women, to demonstrate that our equity in the world extends beyond bearing children or just as a lucrative consumer sales target in our role as ‘main household shopper’. I wanted to reflect that the lives women are leading today do not follow the traditional pattern or ‘life script’ of dating, brief career, marriage, children, retirement; that, in fact, women are pursuing incredibly diverse ‘life scripts’, which may or may not include motherhood. By highlighting the findings of the Women’s Index, my intention is to reveal the diversity of women’s lives and ‘Female Capital’.

NEW TRIBES: NEW LANGUAGE

Through our analysis of the Women’s Index data, and scrutiny of values, motivations and aspirations, we have identified a rich variety of cohorts or, as I prefer to call them, ‘tribes’, many of them challenging female stereotypes and countering the received wisdom of what ambitions or life goals look like for women. While we saw that there were home- or family-focused ‘Traditionalists’ – arguably pursuing familiar roles for women – we also observed the high prevalence of achievement-focused ‘alpha’ characteristics present across geographies and, perhaps surprisingly, independent of age or marital and maternal status: busting the myth that motherhood dulls ambition. At the same time, though, we also identified what we term the ‘anti-alphas’, those women who are struggling to find their way in the world, perhaps still living at home with parents and grappling with emotional or financial insecurity. The prevalence of ‘anti-alphas’ tended to correlate to age – millennials being a key demographic – but also to those countries with troubled economies (Italy) or a ‘hostile’ work culture as regards women (Japan is a case in point). The prevalence was perhaps reflective of the fact that in economically turbulent times women are often the first to suffer, given that they are likely to be in lower paid or part-time work, or simply viewed as an expendable resource.

On a more optimistic note, we also identified what I refer to as the ‘Altruists’, women committed to philanthropy or activism and driven by a sense of social responsibility, and lastly the ‘Hedonists’, women for whom self-satisfaction, exploration and taking risks were driving forces; some would say these are more traditionally ‘male’ values, or at least values frequently associated with men.

The intention of the ‘tribes’ concept was not to find a new set of stereotypes in which to force-fit women (one can embody many different ‘tribes’), but to stop using such simplistic or binary terms as ‘Busy working mum’ to define all women. The new tribes concept would help us to refer to women beyond their parental and caring responsibilities, and create a language that credits women with ambition, aspiration and attitude.

My hope is that we can begin describing women in a much more meaningful, inspiring and profound way that will serve to influence not just advertising but product design and service creation; this will start to change the way the world works for women. Advertising is a central part of our culture and, in my view, we have a responsibility to change the one-dimensional way women are portrayed throughout the world.

CHAPTER 1

Women and the New Rules of Engagement

There has never been a better time to be a woman, or so say 83 per cent of women around the world in our J. Walter Thompson Women’s Index study.¹ Admittedly you might have a different opinion depending on where you live in the world, but this is reflective of a bigger trend, a sense that something is happening for women: and it is a movement to be excited about. What startled us in the results of our study was the universality of optimism. We fielded research in deliberately diverse corners of the world, from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, Brazil and the US, India, Russia and South Africa, and the sentiment was shared. It’s clearly too simplistic to suggest the push for equality has in any way been won and that we can now sit back and soak up the rewards of our new-found freedom. Women’s lives are evolving, however, things are changing: let me put forward the evidence.

THE ERA OF THE FEMALE HERO

If like me you grew up in the 1980s, you may have wondered why Ferris Bueller got to have the day off driving the Porsche while Molly Ringwald’s sole preoccupation was to be pretty in pink. Aside from Princess Leia, Purdey in The New Avengers or The Bionic Woman, there were precious few kick-ass female role models when I was growing up. As part of the cultural surround sound of social conditioning for young girls, films and television served to reinforce our normative role in society: to be the mother, supportive wife or girlfriend hovering in the background and to leave the fighting, leading and achieving to the menfolk.

Fast forward to the new, empowered Disney heroines, or the Star Wars reboot, The Force Awakens and Rogue One, each with a female lead and smashing the box office. In 2016, Rogue One was the number-one box office hit in the US² by a long way, earning half-a-billion dollars and cementing the significance of the female lead.

A 2018 study by the BBC revealed that female-led movies were significantly more profitable,³and in the past decade the top 25 movies about women earned $45 million more than the equivalent for men.⁴ Recently Wonder Woman became the largest grossing live-action film directed by a woman (Patty Jenkins), but even that feels like faint praise because, in fact, the film is set to earn a spot in the top ten highest grossing superhero films of our time: not bad for a woman. Atomic Blonde, featuring Charlize Theron, further demonstrates our appetite for female action heroes, or rather anti-heroes, and surpassed John Wick in earnings, with an ultimate revenue of $90 million worldwide.

In fact, in a dismal box office in summer 2017 in the US, the only movies to earn significant revenues were female-led movies: alongside Wonder Woman, the all-female road movie Girls Trip has earned more than $100 million, with an all African-American cast and screenwriting duo demonstrating that there is a place in Hollywood for diverse talent.

Hollywood writers’ guilds are now actively seeking female-centred screenplays as studios wake up to the earnings potential of female-led content, and within the TV world female show runners such as Shonda Rhimes are behind some of the biggest successes on the small screen. The more enlightened broadcasters like Netflix even enable subscribers to search for shows featuring ‘a strong female lead’. So, it could be that female box-office capital will initiate a wake-up call among studio bosses: women are ready for their close-up after all. The advent of Hollywood’s burgeoning promotion of the ‘Alpha Female’ with The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen, female Marvel superheroes, Wonder Woman, Star Wars’s Rey et al. is a sort of cultural barometer that points to women’s changing roles in society: the sense that we’re at a cultural tipping point moving from ‘best supporting actress’ to ‘leading lady’.

THE END OF THE ‘LIFE SCRIPT’ AND THE RETIREMENT BABY

It used to be that you could look at a woman’s age and predict with some accuracy her ‘life stage’. It would go something like this: twenties – single and working; thirties – married working mum; forties – stay-at-home mum; fifties – retired grandmother. For many women today, things have changed: it’s now no longer the case that we can confidently predict we’ll know everything about a woman based on her age. In fact, certainly in the developed world, I might go as far as saying that we can predict very little these days about a woman based on age alone. Never has there been more truth in the assertion that age is ‘just a number’. We have witnessed recently UK Marks & Spencer senior executive Laura Wade-Gery, a high-achieving Alpha Female at the top of her game, taking time out from her career to have her first child in her fifties. Predictably the press baulked at her age, yet the fact that her husband will be a first-time father at age 67 passed almost without comment. Nevertheless, Wade-Gery is not alone in postponing motherhood. In January 2017 Dame Julia Peyton-Jones, former boss of the Serpentine Gallery in London, announced at the age of 64 the birth of her first child, leading to the suggestion that the ‘retirement baby’ is now a thing.

A woman’s average age for the birth of her first child in the UK is now 30, compared to 22 back in 1950, and for the first time more women in Britain are having children over the age of 35 than under 25.⁵ Increasingly we’re also witnessing women postpone motherhood indefinitely in order to focus on their own lives, with a subtle shift in attitudes redefining ‘childless’ to ‘childfree’, and embracing life without children not as eternal ‘spinsterhood’ with the implied pejorative associations, but as a positive and powerful choice. In fact, the percentage of childless American women in their forties has doubled in the last 40 years and, according to the latest census data, some 43 per cent of American women aged 15–50 are childfree, with many women in this cohort actively seeking to redefine and challenge what it is to be a woman and willingly childless.⁶ The Not Mom Summit is an event and organisation working towards ‘redefining female legacy’ and breaking the cultural trope of ‘Mom with kids’ as the only woman of significance or value.⁷

At the same time, women in their fifties are also more likely to get a divorce, and this is not confined to the UK and US; in Singapore, for example, women in their fifties and sixties are six times more likely to get a divorce compared to the same cohort 20 years previously.⁸ What’s driving this trend is partly that life expectancy, both in terms of age and anticipation of quality of life, is increasing. In Singapore, for example, women’s increasing empowerment means they are less likely to stay in an unhappy marriage or suffer their husband’s infidelities out of a sense of duty; and if you can expect to live another 30 years or more, why would you? From our own Women’s Index study, we saw that Singapore was home to some of the lowest incidences of what I call the ‘Spouse Focused’ tribe, the traditional marriage model where the husband comes first, with only 9 per cent of women falling into this group.⁹ Across Asia, we witnessed a pragmatic attitude towards marriage, with significantly more women ‘not expecting to be in a relationship forever’, and accepting of the idea that ‘love isn’t the be all and end all’.

In the US, the divorce rate among the over fifties has doubled since 1990, and research indicates that divorce among this cohort is most frequently initiated by women; in fact, some two-thirds of divorces are initiated by wives.¹⁰ This dynamic has meant that women we typically assumed were settled at home doting on grandchildren are now single and dating – another profound shift in life stage. Again, we saw this reflected in our Women’s Index data, with the US, UK and Australia home to some of the biggest populations of what pop culture would call ‘The Cougar’ tribe, namely older unmarried women, actively dating and seeking to date younger men. Perhaps the most iconic example is Brigitte Trogneux, or Madame Macron as she is better known, the French President’s wife who is 24 years his senior. An additional frisson of intrigue was added to her public reception on the revelation that she was once Emmanuel Macron’s drama teacher.

THE FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS

At the other end of the spectrum we now have young women who should be at university racking up tuition-fee debt, but who are instead dropping out, starting their own businesses and achieving millionaire status before their twentieth birthday, making those of us who went to university feel a bit like gullible losers. Juliette Brindak started MissOandFriends.com at only 16 years of age; it’s a community created by a teenager for teenage girls, selling products but also supporting self-esteem at a critical age. The company was valued at over $15 million three years after its launch. Meanwhile, Diane Keng invented MyWEBoo, enabling users to manage their online reputations (yet another pressure millennials have to wrestle with), at the age of 18; it was her third business and earned her projected millions in the process. These examples illustrate the new entrepreneurial spirit among teens to millennials – according to Deloitte, up to 70 per cent of millennials around the world want to start their own business.¹¹

The idea of a teenage millionaire entrepreneur is not something you would have often encountered 20 years ago. What supports female entrepreneurship in this generation is access to a level of education previously denied or discouraged among their forebears, but also the empowerment that technology provides. Technology, in facilitating access to information, networking and design resources, in one sense democratises entrepreneurship – it’s no respecter of age, gender or background. Arguably, internet access is all you need. According to the Women’s Index,¹² 80 per cent of women globally felt that technology had empowered them. This sentiment was strongly felt across China, India, South Africa and Saudi Arabia, but most profoundly in India with 90 per cent saying technology had given them a voice. What proved perhaps most striking was the fact that, in India, women were saying technology trumped religion in serving to bring friends and family closer together.

It would be disingenuous, however, not to point out that it remains much more difficult for female entrepreneurs to gain access to venture capital: 85 per cent of all venture-capital funded businesses have no women in the management team, and while in the US the number of venture-capital funded female-led start-ups has increased threefold in the last 15 years, it still only stands at a relatively modest 15 per cent.¹³ It’s hypothesised that part of the problem is the unconscious bias within the venture capital community as to what represents a ‘sound investment’, and from analysing the figures superficially, the data would suggest that women are not seen as a sound investment. A 2017 study, analysing six years’ worth of Q&A panels between investors and start-ups, added more evidence to the unconscious bias theory.¹⁴ The results revealed that panels ask male entrepreneurs about potential gains, and female entrepreneurs about potential losses: so we expect women to fail, perceiving them as high risk, which by implication restricts funding.

What’s most interesting is that when we remove the mostly male venture capital panels from the funding equation and look at, for example, crowdfunding. Although women use crowdfunding less than men, when they do crowdsource they are much more likely to achieve their investment targets than male entrepreneurs.¹⁵ Women were 32 per cent more likely to achieve their funding target and this applied across all geographies studied, but perhaps more significantly across all business sectors.

THE RISE AND RISE OF ACTIVISM

In considering female activity and the exertion of power, and perhaps influenced by the connectivity and power of social networking, we cannot overlook the increased political and social activism among women of all ages and backgrounds. The women’s marches around the 2017 US presidential inauguration were the largest global demonstration of their kind, with an estimated 100,000 people marching in London. Meanwhile, over in Hollywood, the Harvey Weinstein scandal has proved a watershed moment in highlighting the predatory sexual harassment and discrimination prevalent not just in the film industry but across many industries. The #MeToo movement has served not just to throw a spotlight on but to challenge toxic masculinity, with the resulting Time’s Up organisation launched to support victims of sexual harassment: women are no longer going to suffer in silence.

As depressing as Hillary Clinton’s loss was in terms of a desire to see the first female US President, there is no doubt that the increased alt-right conservatism sweeping the USA is in turn reawakening feminism the world over. There is, perhaps, a new wave of feminism intent on resisting a rolling back of female empowerment, and putting women’s rights and their significance firmly back in the public consciousness. A poll conducted by the Washington Post revealed that 40 per cent of US female Democrats intended to become more politically active versus 27 per cent of their male peers,¹⁶ and record numbers of women are applying to run for office. In 2017, over 19,000 women contacted Emily’s List, a US advocacy group, about running for office compared to 920 in the previous year.

If we had been in danger of slipping back into sleepy complacency in the West, something has been awoken. You could say that social media is both a friend and a foe to the cause: it propagates fake news and ‘alternative facts’ that no doubt warped our sense of reality and subsequent election results, but at the same time the public scrutiny it supports means we have access to information as never before.

In our research, 84 per cent of women globally felt that technology or social media had made them much more aware as a global citizen, and this was particularly prevalent among millennials in our survey.¹⁷ The relatively youthful face of political and social activism is perhaps best illustrated by Malala Yousafzai: a Nobel Prizewinner, activist and impressive orator, yet until very recently still a teenager. Global research highlights the significant phenomenon of activism among teenage girls, often stimulated by education, and posing an articulate and energised voice in what we must accept is increasingly a hostile world.¹⁸ Jessica Taft’s research discovered that girl activists often perceived themselves as better activists due to their more empathic nature and emotional intelligence, and the nature of their activism was not isolated to ‘women’s issues’ but to broader societal and environmental issues around them, shattering the preconception that teenage girls’ preoccupations centred only on Barbie and boys. To quote Michelle Obama: ‘Adolescent girls are the future of their countries and their voices can move mountains if we let them speak.’

What we are witnessing is that the rules governing women’s predictable life script and the resultant cultural stereotypes appear increasingly redundant as a means of characterising contemporary womanhood. Women we thought had settled down are kicking up their heels, dating again, becoming first-time mothers in their forties and even fifties; university students are dropping out of the rat race to pursue a life of self-employment and entrepreneurship; and political and social activism is being taken up by girls not yet out of school. This is nothing short of a cultural revolution and illustrates the diversity of Female Capital. For all the difficulties and inequalities in the world, it is an exciting time to be a woman.

THE J. WALTER THOMPSON WOMEN’S INDEX: THE MAGIC NUMBERS

While our desk research at J. Walter Thompson undoubtedly pointed out a ‘quiet revolution’ for women, in order to try and put a sense of scale to this phenomenon we commissioned our own proprietary research and were able to secure funding through the agency. We wanted to provide real, tangible insight into prevailing attitudes and ambitions: to explore contemporary femininity. We deliberately set out to speak to women across very diverse countries, cultures and ethnicities because we didn’t want to imply that progress was purely the province of rich white Western women – from my time travelling around the world and witnessing boardrooms from Shanghai to São Paulo filled almost exclusively with women, I knew this wasn’t the case. In Russia, for example, I observed what seemed to be something of a curious role reversal. On arriving at my client’s offices, it was an exclusively male reception desk and men who delivered the coffee, but the boardroom was female. The most powerful person in the room was a very formidable woman who had the respect (if not hero worship) of everyone in the organisation, male or female. My experiences told me there were real shifts in the workplace, and we had to attempt to record and report it.

We launched the study at the end of 2015 initially with 4,300 women across 9 countries, and then started to roll the study out across the world, facilitated through our agency network, getting us to a final total of 19 countries and more than 8,000 women. The more we publicised the research through the agency, the more offices jumped on board to commission the study. We had more research than we knew what to do with, and making sense of what the numbers were telling us was one of the most challenging but ultimately rewarding experiences of this endeavour. It probably helped that I love numbers.

As any agency planner or researcher will tell you, numbers tell a story. Initially, certain figures leapt out from the page: the overriding sentiment that ‘femininity was a strength not a weakness’, not a burden to be overcome, no matter which country we looked at, gave us a clue to the global scale of female empowerment. Other data, seemingly innocuous numbers on a page, reminded us just how far we had to go. The fact that more than 40 per cent of women anywhere in the world felt that their gender was holding them back in their career was a consistent if depressing theme. To see that in black and white in this century still enrages me, and the gentle hum of that anger is what gets me out of bed most days, that and the will to do something about it.

The first nine countries in the study – the UK, USA, Brazil, China, Russia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, India and Australia – are the core countries that constitute our ‘global’ all-market averages quoted across the book. As mentioned, we tried to achieve a representative balance of income, race and demography, and equally we spoke to women from 17 to 70 years old in order to understand how attitudes evolved with age.

The study comprised an online survey, consisting mostly of ‘closed’ or tick-box questions to facilitate ease of administration and analysis. We did include a number of open-ended responses, however, allowing for individual feedback. All countries participated in the same questionnaire, although we edited some of the questions on, for example, sexuality for some countries to respect cultural sensitivities. We decided that in order to really get a personal feel for what was going on for women around the world, we would ask the same sort of questions we would ask at a job interview or perhaps, given the more personal probing, a first date! We asked questions around earnings, ambition, education and aspiration, but also love and sexuality. For example, ‘Do you expect a relationship to last forever?’ and ‘Are you comfortable dating a younger man?’ We also probed their ideas of feminism and femininity: ‘What does being a woman mean to you?’ and ‘What should women represent in the world?’

The results were fascinating. It took us months to extrapolate the findings, but immediately responses jumped out, making us take stock of what we were witnessing. We all had a moment of reflection when we zeroed in on the fact that one in four women in Brazil told us they had been inspired to leave an abusive relationship purely through seeing a strong on-screen female role model. When you consider that one in three women in Brazil is affected by domestic violence, then you start to understand the huge influence popular culture can play in people’s lives – the fact that the moving image can be persuasive not just in selling products through advertising, it can truly change fortunes.¹⁹ It seemed so absurdly simple, yet so powerful: the idea that having on-screen female role models could unleash what could be an incredible cultural ripple effect was and still is hugely compelling. It’s a message that I will never tire of telling: role models could change the way the world works for women.

Within this book, I will attempt to unpack the rich insight of the Women’s Index in order to highlight the value that women have in the world now, and the future of Female Capital. In constructing and analysing the results of the Women’s Index, I have Mark Truss and Diana Orrico from our New York team to thank for their tireless work, not to say brilliance and patience in designing what initially was a ‘quick survey’ and very rapidly turned into a major initiative.

A NEW FEMININITY?

I remember once describing a woman to her face as ‘feminine’ and watching her nose wrinkle. Firstly, I realised that I ought to be more careful with what came out of my mouth (no filter), and, secondly, I wondered whether ‘feminine’ is such a great compliment anyway.

If you read through the various dictionary definitions of femininity, while some of the finer points may change a little, there are key themes that emerge, namely passivity, gentleness and being pretty or attractive. As a culture, we associate the word ‘feminine’ with sugar and spice: the soft, girly values of being a woman – great, for example, for hanging curtains or adding decorative appeal to a room. The word itself is derived from the Latin word, femina, simply meaning ‘woman’, so literally feminine means ‘of a woman’, but over the years it’s acquired a more nuanced meaning, encompassing those qualities culturally associated with women, particularly ‘delicacy’ and ‘prettiness’. One of the most interesting findings from our Women’s Index research was the universal belief that femininity is not soft or passive: 86 per cent of women globally felt that ‘femininity’ was a strength not a weakness, so delicacy was not resonating. In China, when we asked women what values they aspired to have as a woman, 50 per cent chose ‘aggressive’ as a key attribute, another 50 per cent chose ‘maternal’, so we can see how the phrase ‘Tiger Mother’ was born.²⁰

If you start digging into just what feminine strength entails, a very surprising picture is revealed, which starts to dissipate the ‘sugar and spice’ image of femininity and replace it with more steel. As we started to assess the data, what emerged was a much more empowered vision of femininity because what women aspire to embody today, as recorded in our Women’s Index Study, is confidence and independence; 60 per cent pinpointed confidence and 57 per cent chose independence as key values, while ‘caring’ features at 49 per cent, and strong and determined are the next most important values.

Confidence, independence, strong and determined are not words associated with passive delicacy but with courage, heroism and leadership. A study we had conducted in 2014 revealed that 80 per cent of women would rather be described as ‘strong’ versus ‘sweet’, which tells you a lot about modern femininity.²¹ Equally there are signs that societal attitudes towards gender and femininity may be starting to change or embraced more fluidity. For example, John Lewis recently announced that it will no longer separate children’s clothes by gender, embracing a unisex approach, something that adult retailers (such as H&M, Rick Owens and J.W. Anderson) have embraced for some time. Whilst in Canada and Nepal citizens will be able to select a third gender, as distinct from a binary male or female definition, and although this marks progress, there is still a long way to go before we can assume true equality.

IS FEMININITY COMPATIBLE WITH LEADERSHIP?

So often it is assumed that women do not make good leaders, and are rather better as supporters because of our ‘femininity’. When children were asked whether women would make good presidents, being ‘girly’ was given one of the chief impediments (notice here that in this context, femininity is used implicitly as a pejorative).²² The truth, though, tells a different story. In the Zenger Folkman global study of over 16,000 male and female leaders, it was women who were the more effective leaders, and not just in relation to the traditional ‘feminine’ qualities of nurturing and team building.²³ They excelled in the typically ‘masculine’ qualities of drive for results, taking the initiative and championing change.

Equally the most surprising new research from the University of Cambridge reveals that, despite what we may verbalise about the incompatibility of femininity with leadership, we instinctively perceive women with the more ‘feminine’ facial features as the better leaders and, in an important twist to the findings, it’s the presence of oestrogen – literally the hormone ‘of a woman’ – that is believed to not only physically manifest as ‘feminine’ features in the face but inspire competitive behaviour correlating to leadership characteristics.²⁴ So to return to the definition of femininity, if this is true, then we need to reconsider the meaning of ‘feminine’ because as a measure of those characteristics innate to womanhood, it is not delicacy and fragility but competitiveness and leadership that may ultimately define us.

THE LANGUAGE OF FEMALE ACHIEVEMENT

While we are redefining the idea of ‘femininity’, just examining the word itself throws up an important issue of language because, without wishing to state the obvious, it is language that is used to record, characterise and narrate or frame the story of female achievement. How that language is used will decide whether women’s achievements are celebrated or diminished. Sport is a good place to start. If you were watching the Rio Olympics coverage, you could have been forgiven for thinking that there were two entirely different games going on: a serious men’s athletic competition, and for women … well, the gymnasts in their fancy leotards ‘might as well be standing around at the mall’ (someone at NBC actually said that). The patronising language and reporting narrative means that women are not portrayed as serious athletes and, instead, the focus is on our ‘lady’ pursuits (mall shopping).

The significance of language or the issue of gendered language prompted Cambridge University Press to monitor the reporting narrative of sports coverage during Rio 2016.²⁵ The research, led by Sarah Grieves, revealed that not only were female athletes much more likely to be discussed either in the context of their appearance or relationship status (married, mother, engaged), when it came to the discussion of their performance women were subject to much more neutral language (compete, participate), whereas men’s performance was characterised in much more heroic terms (dominate, battle, mastermind).²⁶

In June 2017, John McEnroe suggested that Serena Williams would rank ‘like 700 in the world’ if she played on the men’s tennis circuit, suggesting that women’s tennis is of a lesser standard. Yet the Williams sisters’ tennis achievements are phenomenal; one cannot help but think that, had they been born male and white, they would be held in far greater esteem, and they would not have had to overcome such intense scrutiny as to their body image and love lives, or racial discrimination and the belittling of their combined achievements. It’s significant that despite winning more grand slams in her career than Roger Federer, and arguably being a more consistent performer, Serena attracts a fraction of the sponsorship deals that Federer has racked up. This tells you everything about how we perceive women’s achievements.

The fact is that besides the obvious physical differences, female sporting performance is ‘catching up’ with men. Women’s tennis serve speeds are in many cases equal or even faster than men’s. For example, German player Sabine Lisicki has recorded a serve speed of 131mph, faster than Roger Federer can usually manage. In belittling women’s tennis McEnroe is perhaps forgetting the 1973 ‘Battle of the Sexes’, the iconic tennis match between Billie Jean King and former Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs, once dubbed ‘the best tennis player in the world’. The 55-year-old Riggs was arrogant enough to assume that he would thrash King, who was in her prime. She flattened him in three straight sets, despite Riggs’s assertion that women ‘lacked the emotional stability’ to win! That particular battle has now been turned into a film featuring Emma Stone and Steve Carrell, and may prove a useful reminder to Mr McEnroe of women’s capabilities.

A classic example of gender-focused tennis commentary came from BBC broadcaster John Inverdale about Wimbledon singles champion Marion Bartoli: ‘Do you think Bartoli’s dad told her when she was little “You’re never going to be a looker. You’ll never be a Sharapova, so you have to be scrappy and fight”?’²⁷ The BBC duly apologised, but once again a woman’s sporting performance was overlooked and undermined.

The point is that by conflating a woman’s achievements with attractiveness or home responsibilities, we serve to undermine her; we imply that her energies and concentration are focused not on the job at hand, but at home. In the case of a sportswoman, it implies she can’t be a serious athlete. A case in point: according to a Chicago Tribune tweet, ‘The wife of a Bears linesman’ won a bronze medal at the Rio Olympics.²⁸ She didn’t even get to have a name – it was Corey Cogdell. Perhaps by some fluke, in-between running errands and dropping off dry cleaning, ‘the wife’ had gone and won herself a medal.

It’s not hard to understand how, in the workplace, this undermining emphasis on home responsibilities and relationships could rob a woman of opportunities for advancement – because she ‘might have to leave early to take care of the kids’. This is how unconscious bias works. Another facet of unconscious bias that befalls women in the office is the lack of credit we get for ideas: that moment when you suggest an idea that everyone ignores only for the man next to you to repeat it, and suddenly it’s brilliant. And his idea. Something not too dissimilar happens outside the office, too.

THE GUY WHO GOT HER THERE: GIVING WOMEN RECOGNITION

I call this phenomenon ‘The guy who got her there’, the man behind the scenes who is ultimately responsible for a woman’s stellar performance – because she couldn’t have done it herself. In Rio, this supposition was in evidence in epic proportions: for example, Hungarian swimmer and medallist Katinka Hosszú’s sporting performance was almost incidental to that of her coach husband, ‘the man responsible’ for her victory. She beat a world record, by the way. Or gold-medal winning swimmer Katie Ledecky, who is the ‘latest innovation’ of coach Bruce Gemmell. If you read a New York Times article, you could have easily mistaken Katie for a Stepford-like swimming fembot designed by Gemmell, a former engineer, because ‘he’s never stopped innovating.’²⁹

If you thought this was just confined to the sporting world, you would be wrong, because ‘the guy who got her there’ pops up just about everywhere, and he must be exhausted supporting women everywhere, because it’s portrayed as a full-time job. There’s Hillary Clinton, who has Bill to thank for her political career, and so newspaper editors felt justified in giving over their front pages to the husband, rather than to the first ever female US presidential nominee.

Or spare a thought for poor multi-millionaire Grammy-winning musical failure, Taylor Swift. The real meaning and credibility of her songs only seemed to become apparent when Ryan Adams sang them. I could bore you by listing all the female scientists whose achievement was credited to their husbands or male colleagues, or the female screenwriters whose storytelling genius is attributed to the male directors of their films … Have you ever heard of Melissa Mathison, the writer of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra Terrestrial?

The portrayal of ‘the guy who got her there’ robs many women of the real, hard-won credit they deserve. Plus, it implies that women lack the ambition and courage to strive and compete on their own terms, and that they need a man to be successful. It’s the ‘mansplaining of female success’. This I find curious, given the fact that more women than men are attending university in the US, women are attaining higher grades and we’re increasingly the primary breadwinners. Perhaps most importantly, this phenomenon robs us of female role models and the opportunity to really acknowledge and celebrate female achievement.

WOMEN’S ACHIEVEMENT: THE TREE THAT FALLS IN THE WOODS

When it comes to female achievement, despite most women in our Women’s Index Study telling us it had ‘never been a better time to be a woman’, there was observable and universal frustration with both the lack of female role models when growing up; 74 per cent of women wished they had more female role models as inspiration.³⁰ This sentiment was most strongly felt in China (89 per cent), Saudi Arabia (89 per cent) and India (86 per cent), which given the cultural context is unsurprising. Equally an almost universal 93 per cent of women felt that we need to understand the value that women bring to the world: as women.

The degree to which women’s accomplishments had been airbrushed from the history books was a frustration shared by nearly six in ten women worldwide, with 82 per cent of women wanting to see more inclusion of women’s achievement in relevant narratives. If over 8,000 women across 19 different countries support this idea, we’re not all imagining it, so although this is a great time to be a woman and, yes, we’re ushering in a new era of female empowerment and influence on culture at large, but like the tree that falls in the woods, if nobody hears about it, will it even matter?

Taking the philosophy of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, ‘If she can see it, she can be it’, the reverse is also true: without visible role models it’s difficult to visualise a different life path to those other than the ones we are surrounded by. If a girl sees female astronauts or scientists the precedent is set, she believes she can also aspire – it becomes possible for her to imagine this in her future. Thanks to Katniss Everdeen, record numbers of young girls have taken up archery as the fastest growing American sport, with 70 per cent of girls citing Katniss as their inspiration.³¹ Meanwhile Hidden Figures, the 2016 movie about the African-American ‘human computers’ of NASA, has already inspired hundreds of girls to consider a career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths), according to Techbridge, a Seattle-based organisation that seeks to inspire the next generations of innovators. For this reason, it’s important to continually challenge the lack of representation, inclusion and celebration of women’s achievements but also the language and narrative used to describe them – so that we can reap the rewards of the cultural ripple effects and make it even easier for future generations to follow in their footsteps. Role models can change the way the world works for women, but only if we can see them.