There has been much debate about Kirstie Allsopp’s recent comments on university and motherhood.
Allsopp explained that if she had a daughter she would tell her, ‘Darling, do you know what? Don’t go to university. Start work straight after school, stay at home, save up your deposit – I’ll help you, let’s get you into a flat. And then we can find you a nice boyfriend and you can have a baby by the time you’re 27.’
The point Allsopp was trying to make was that the window for motherhood was relatively slim compared to the limitless timeframe to have get an education and have a career. She is right: women’s fertility does decline really quite sharply after 35, while women can opt to work until their dying day, should they choose.
Allsopp forgets that over 50 per cent of marriages end in divorce. When she promotes marriage and children prior to a university education and a career, she denies the majority of women financial independence. She looks at it through the lens of someone who has never had to struggle for money. She speaks of a ‘huge inequality, which is that women have this time pressure that men don’t have’, referring to the ticking time bomb that is a woman’s womb but she misses an even wider inequality, far beyond fertility: it is an inequality between people like herself from privileged backgrounds who can expect to be supported financially by their parents, and, everyone else, the ‘working poor’.
The implication of her ideal is that when a marriage ends in divorce and the woman becomes the primary carer and breadwinner, as the case often is, it is going to be difficult to win much bread when the job market is saturated with skilled graduates, much younger than yourself. The archetype she advises would leave many women forced into low-skilled work, meaning poor pay and thus difficulty in making ends meet.
Allsopp fails to understand the implications of her argument and views it through a narrow prism in which everyone has inherited wealth to fall back on. This may work for women from wealthy backgrounds but it is a dangerous view to promote to the majority of young women; not everyone’s dad is a baron.
Another implication of Allsopp’s argument is that by encouraging women to enter the workplace later it would put them at an even further disadvantage to their male counterparts, beyond that which already exists. They would be viewed as already lagging behind, since the men their age would have more experience and be in more senior positions, thus exacerbating the pay gap.
When Allsopp said ‘women are being let down by the system’ it was a missed opportunity: she chose to encourage women to pick one option at a time, rather than look at ways to make both simultaneously feasible. A truly progressive argument would have looked at the current situation and addressed the issues rather than viewing it as a zero-sum game with a career put up against a family.
I was desperate for her to say that women were being let down by the status quo and that therefore we should be campaigning and fighting for ‘x, y and z, and pushing for this, that and the other’. Instead she chose to limit the options of women rather than inspire change.
The possibility that women do have the freedom to do both simultaneously was not explored. She did not challenge workplaces for failing to accommodate women and to help improve a work-life balance; the statistics on women returning from maternity pay only to leave again are shocking and highlight the need for a long-term assessment of ways to overcome this. If Allsopp was truly providing a feminist and progressive perspective she would have been asking what changes need to be made to make having a career and family life easier to achieve. That is the challenge for the next Labour government.
———————————
Beth Miller is women’s officer of Young Labour. She tweets @BethMillr
———————————