You can’t blame any young woman who would rather bake vegan muffins or live in a tree. But where does that leave the rest of us?
The #girlboss has lost her lustre. A recent survey of nine- to 18-year-old girls reported that they rank “being a leader” the lowest priority in a list of 17 attributes for future work. Girls, the report concludes, were “nearly three times as likely to prioritise being healthy and safe” – you would hope – and “twice as likely to prioritise being respected than being a leader”. I like that: weren’t the two traditionally considered complementary? I suppose the farce-tragedy of the Borisiad has estranged concepts of leadership and respect so comprehensively that the two can’t be in the same country as each other, let alone the same gold-wallpapered room.
Apart from being governed by a man who needed to be penned in with a puppy gate, what has turned young women off leadership? There’s the perennial “you can’t be what you can’t see” issue: women remain dramatically underrepresented as CEOs and on boards, and Covid bulletproofed the glass ceiling. A survey quoted by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in his cathartically titled book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? found that 92% of Americans couldn’t name a female leader in tech, and a quarter of the remaining 8% offered “Alexa” or “Siri”. The Rekyjavik index, measuring attitudes towards women in leadership in G7 countries, hasn’t improved since 2019, with the most recent report concluding “deeply rooted views on female leadership are hard to shift”. Plus, the UN says we are still 257 years away from gender pay parity (by which time, on current reckoning, the few survivors of any sex living in a burnt-out Greggs will have more pressing matters to worry about than what Paul from Accounts is making: he’ll be making rat stew like everyone else).
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
