According to a report in today’s Times, almost twenty percent of women who gave birth to a child in Britain in 2004 were themselves born somewhere else than the UK.
Of the babies born in 2004 to such mothers, almost two thirds of their fathers had been born elsewhere than the UK.
In the case of some British cities, the number of births that occurred in them in 2004 to mothers not themselves born in Britain almost exceeds births in them that year to mothers who had been.
The percentage of births in British cities in 2004 to mothers who had not themselves been born in Britain is as follows: London – 49%; Slough – 48%, Luton – 44%, Leicester – 38%, Cambridge - 36%, Birmingham – 34%.
Of the women not born in Britain who in 2004 bore a child in Britain, 27 % came from the Indian sub-continent and 13% from Africa, parts of the world not noted for being in the vanguard of sexual equality, especially in occupations to which the attach the greatest prestige, income and political power. The traditional societies in these regions tend to be distinctly patriarchal in character.
These facts suggest that, quite apart from any other reasons, the suggestion made by the Equal Opportunities Commission in its just-released annual sex and power survey that it might take as many as 200 years before women enjoy as much power as men do in Britain could well be overly optimistic. Indeed, given cultural inertia, and the changing demography of Britain, the balance of power between the two sexes could well in future start to tilt further in the opposite direction with more and more patriarchy.
It looks as if the sorority who run the Equal Opportunities Commission have a lot of consciousness-raising to do before their ‘sisters’ will want to take up the reserved quota of positions in boardroom and parliament for their gender that the Commission wants guaranteed them in the name of equity.
But what makes whoever works in the Equal Opportunities Commission so sure that women whose families have come in recent times from countries with such very different forms of life to Britain’s will either want, or benefit from coming to want and then being granted opportunity, to participate at the top as the Commission wants them to have?
Granted many or even most of them will have come here because they believe their opportunities and prospects here are better than in their countries of origin. However, they will as a rule, surely, have calculated those prospects and opportunities in terms of their conception of their traditional roles, as wives, mothers, and home-makers, not as company directors and cabinet ministers.
I can only think that what drives the Equal Opportunities Commission to call for equal representation of women in all top positions is aspirations of their own to occupy such positions themselves, and a belief they will be unable to succeed other than by persuading men they should be granted them on grounds of gender-equity rather than on the basis of any other consideration.
Yet, since women with similar aspirations to theirs are liable to constitute a steadily diminishing proportion of the overall number of British women in future, assuming current demographic trends continue, so will the demand and need for thier gender having such large representation in top positions also correspondingly diminish.
Indeed, one can imagine the day when British women might come to look on such aspirations for members of their gender as those currently harboured for them by the Equal Opportunities Commission as positively oppressive to members of their gender.
Much needs radical re-thinking in light of Britain’s changed demography, not least the future place and role of women in this country.