Helen Grant, university lecturer

Bernard Blackburn, journalist and broadcaster

Listening 11. The Parkhurst Talkabout

Good evening, and welcome again to the Michael Parkhurst Talkabout. It is now some years since the government introduced the Sex Discrimination Act, which was intended to ensure equality of opportunity for men and women. We wondered whether the Act had been successful, and our four guests tonight are discussing the general question of equality of opportunity.

In my opinion we shall never create real equality of opportunity by making laws about newspaper advertisements. You know, you have to advertise for a ‘salesperson’ nowadays rather than a salesman or saleswoman… I’m not saying that these things are unimportant, but basically… by the time children get to four or five they have already been conditioned into their social roles. It starts in the cradle – girls in pink, boys in blue. I heard about an experiment a few years ago where they took a small baby and dressed it in blue. Then they asked several mothers to play with it. They bounced it up and down, and tickled it, and said things like ‘You are a rascal…. A real devil!’, and ‘Ooh, what a big strong boy you are!’. And they laughed when it yelled and shouted. Well, then they dressed the same baby in pink and got another group to play with it. They cuddled it and said, ‘Aren’t you pretty? What a lovely little girl! ‘ As soon as it got noisy they tried to hush it and calm it down. Now, that’s where sexism begins. And that’s long before we give the girls dolls and toy saucepans to play with, and give the boys carts and guns.

I feel there’s a long way to go before we can talk about equality of opportunity. Men still expect their jobs to take priority. Even where both partners work, too many men still expect the woman to cook meals and do housework. I mean, go into a supermarket at lunch time. It’s full of working women giving up their lunch hour to do the family shopping. How many men would expect to do the same? They’re probably spending the lunch hour laughing and joking… about women. The same old, tired jokes go on forever… women drivers, mothers-in-law and sexy secretaries. Secretaries! That’s another absurdity. Imagine an office where a man and a woman are doing similar jobs. She’s called a secretary, he’s called a trainee manager. Of course this is how so many firms avoid obeying the law on equal pay… by altering the job description. The media, as always, I’m afraid, is so much to blame. Magazines, TV, film and advertising portray women as sex objects, not people. Women are blackmailed into buying useless products because they might fear they are unattractive without them. Too many of us accept the stereotype, and waste our time worrying and dieting to fit some imaginary male ideal.

Дата добавления: 2015-01-03