Pilita Clark: A woman in power needs the freedom to be as mediocre as any man

At the UK Conservative Party conference in Birmingham last week, I was struggling to get to a meeting in a room I couldn’t find, when a woman suddenly stopped me and thrust a small round badge in my hand.

On it was printed: “3-0″, with the number 3 in blue and the 0 in red.

I stared at it cluelessly. It was only when I noticed she was standing in front of a Conservative Women’s Organisation stall that it dawned. The Conservatives, whose political colour is blue, have had three female prime ministers – Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and now Liz Truss. Red Labour has had none.

The badge-thruster, a pleasant-looking woman of middling years, had been watching my face to see when it got around to registering comprehension. “It’s great isn’t it,” she beamed. “We’ve had three and they’ve never had one!”

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I didn’t ask how she felt about being led by a woman whose first market-crashing weeks in office had been marked by shocking U-turns, abject party infighting and polls showing Labour would win office in a landslide were an election held today.

For one thing I was in a hurry. Also, I did not want to say that yes, the fact that Truss is female is indeed a cause for celebration, but not for the reasons she might think.

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The truth is, there is a tedious expectation for female leaders to be more admirable, able and inspiring. This is wearying for them, and for rank and file females, and it’s unfair. A woman in power needs the freedom to be as mediocre as any man, but it’s a numbers game. That freedom will be elusive for as long as female leaders stand out because they are so outnumbered.

Truss is helping to rectify matters, as are the Conservatives who made her prime minister just three years after choosing May. While it is hard to calculate, the very existence of another female prime minister should be helping to make her gender cheeringly irrelevant to her leadership.

Personally, one of the last things I find myself thinking about Truss is the fact that she is female. But research suggests I may not be alone, and might feel differently were I male.

Studies have long shown that people have a tendency to “think manager, think male” – except in times of crisis, when top jobs often go to women or people of colour. In general, a man working for a woman is also less likely to accept her than his female colleagues are. He is also likely to respond by trying to boost his own influence within a team, especially when men outnumber women in the group, according to a paper published this year.

It may be as well that women make up almost a third of Truss’s cabinet – slightly more than Boris Johnson’s last team but about the same as that of May’s first cabinet.

Unhappily, the pool of potential female leaders is still relatively small, in the UK and elsewhere.

At the last UK election in 2019, 34 per cent of MPs elected to the House of Commons were women, which was a record. Globally, the share of female members of parliaments has risen from a risible 15 per cent in 2006 to an unimpressive 23 per cent in 2022, the latest World Economic Forum global gender gap report shows.

Once there, few get promoted: the average share of women in ministerial positions has gone up from 10 per cent to just 16 per cent. At this rate of progress, it will take 155 years to close the political gender gap.

Truss touched on the frustration of having one’s potential dismissed last week in her party conference speech. In one of her most quoted lines, she said that as a young girl on a plane, she was once given a “junior air hostess” badge while her brothers got “junior pilot” badges.

“It wasn’t the only time in my life that I have been treated differently for being female or for not fitting in,” she said.

And that is a reminder of something important about Truss. Whatever one thinks of her abilities, decisions and authority, it is still a statistical marvel that she became prime minister at all.