Rise by Gina Miller

Author:Gina Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

13

‘Tough Softness’

On the subject of clothes and appearances, as I mentioned briefly before, when I first started out in business in the early ’90s I found myself surrounded by women wearing huge shoulder pads, pinstripe trouser suits, and dark, sombre colours. It was a uniform that deliberately stripped us of our individuality and femininity. There was an unspoken rule that you weren’t allowed to wear accessories or too much make-up. Acceptable accessories to the uniform were tiny pearl earrings and a discreet pearl necklace.

It felt as though we women were being made to be ‘masculine’ to fit in. In the office, any sign of so-called ‘female’ emotion – crying, tiredness or frustration, for instance – was seen as a weakness. Being androgynous meant you being strong.

I hated this. I never understood why I had to wear pinstriped trousers or why I wasn’t allowed to wear the jewellery that expressed who I was. It might sound superficial, but to me it highlighted something more fundamental and deeply troubling: instead of celebrating women, the workplace culture was diminishing us, with the none-too-subtle message that to get ahead – to be valued – you had to be shoe-horned into being more like a man.

A lot has changed since then. Laws have been passed to make overt sexual discrimination illegal. But sexism still exists: it’s just become more insidious. As women, we still feel the need to compensate for this misogynist notion that we’re somehow ‘the weaker sex’. We need to resist thinking we must act ‘like a man’ – to be more aggressive, more bullish than the next person and not be entirely ourselves.

The good news is things have moved on, but the question is if it’s for the better? Recent scientific research has thrown up some confusion about what is ‘male’ and what is ‘female’. The notion of gender is more fluid than ever before, and there’s no doubt that we are a product of nurture just as much as nature. The glorious Grayson Perry made a three-part documentary on modern-day masculinity, All Man, which questioned how men see their place in society and how they deal with emotions in a world where the sexes are said to be forgetting what makes them unique, invaluable and interlinked.

Having said that, certain biological factors cannot be denied.

One influential 2001 study into the differing characteristics between the sexes involved over 23,000 men and women from twenty-six cultures filling out personality questionnaires. Women consistently rated themselves as being warmer, friendlier, more anxious and more sensitive to their feelings than men. The men, meanwhile, consistently rated themselves as being more assertive and open to new ideas.22

More recently, testosterone has been shown to inhibit crying, while the hormone prolactin (seen in higher levels in women) may promote it. A 2013 study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania23 analysed nearly 1,000 brain scans and found that stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains. Maps of neural circuitry showed that on average women’s brains were highly

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