It's a generation gap, not a gender gap

Yesterday morning I went along to listen to Cherie Blair, who was hosted by Catherine Gonzi, speak about balancing family and career. I thought I would be spending a couple of hours in a large room with 200 women, a prospect that filled me with dread. As I entered the ballroom at the Hotel Phoenicia, I could see that there were just as many men there and was delighted – not for any illicit reason, you understand, but because it means that the organisers of these things are finally beginning to understand that balancing family and career is not the sole concern of women. Some years ago, I used to turn up at similar events to find myself at what appeared to be Women Anonymous, a support group for those with 1950s husbands and a great need to vent.

Of course, there was a catch: most of the men were there in their position as employers of those who have to balance family and career, but then so were many of the women. That in itself is a change for the better. I enjoyed the talk. There was nothing new there, but the atmosphere in the room was switched on and positive and Mrs Blair has marked public-speaking talents.

One point she made has stuck in my mind: that Malta has the lowest figure for women’s participation in the workforce in the whole of the European Union – 33 per cent compared to an EU average of 55 per cent. She appears to believe that the cause of this is lack of childcare facilities and family-friendly policies in the workplace, the very things that held women back from employment and careers two or three decades ago in the more developed parts of Europe.

Mrs Blair doesn’t live here and doesn’t know or understand the culture, so she can be forgiven for making that assumption. But there are others who have lived a lifetime in Malta and who continue to delude themselves that women are held back by others or by circumstances, when the reality is that women over the age of 40 just don’t want to be involved. Yes, there was a time not so long ago when women were much discriminated against in the workplace, talked down to and patronised even by men with a fraction of their intelligence and abilities. But those days are gone. The only men who still think like that are dinosaurs from another age and of a certain age.

Yes, it’s easy to blame lack of childcare and inconvenient school hours and school holidays, but once the children have sat for their O-levels, there can be no more excuses. My generation married young and gave birth in our 20s, many of us in our early 20s, some of us even in our late teens. It seems extraordinary now. It’s been years since I’ve heard of a wedding at which the bride was 20, but up to 20 years ago it was the norm. I was married at 20. My best friends were married at 18 and 19. It seems like another world.

In that situation, by the age of 40, there is no more juggling to bother with and still 20 years or more of viable working life ahead. And yet how many of us are productive? Those who are productive are by far the exception. The rest prefer to enjoy what they see as a well deserved rest, even if that rest lasts for half their time on earth or more. Nothing and nobody is going to change their outlook, certainly no amount of childcare that they don’t need now in any case.

It doesn’t help that most of these women aren’t trained to do anything particular in the economic market. Women of my generation and older were sent to school because it was the law and in any case, it was thought best that we receive at least a basic education. There was no thought of careers or of doing something with our lives. That just did not enter the equation. Women married. They had children. They looked after homes. The most a girl needed was a certificate from a secretarial school, so that she could get a job in an office, typing letters, answering the phone and making the boss’s tea, until she had her first child. That’s the way it was, and I’m not talking about the 1950s, but about the 1980s.

Some women did go to university, but they read for something soft and husband-friendly like a bachelor’s degree in English or similar. Perhaps they might do a little teaching, perhaps not. Many of them snared fiancés while at university and got married immediately on graduation, having their first child soon afterwards, and that was pretty much the end of that, though we were carefully coached from infancy into seeing it as the beginning, rather than as the end.

Women raised as we were cannot be expected to enter the job market raw and wholly unprepared after 20 years at home when they are in their 40s. It is impossible. Most of them are unemployable. Many of them are computer illiterate. But above all, the mentality and mind-set are just not suited to it. If you have spent two decades managing your own time and doing things at your own pace, an increasingly leisurely pace as the children grow up and you have more time on your hands, to the extent that a single errand can be made to fill a morning, you are both unwilling and unable to cope with the pressures and demands of the commercial sector, and this is quite apart from the dearth of skills, which is another problem.

The women of 40+ who stand out in our society do so precisely because they are the swallows that didn’t make the summer. Though we are all so very, very different in every respect, I think I can say with confidence that we have a single thing in common: we are all bloody-minded. We were always going to do what we wanted to do, despite all the odds of a society conspiring to shove us into silence, into the kitchen, into the nursery and into the laundry-room. Most of us are still denizens of the laundry-room, because the men we married, who are either our contemporaries or older, regard any bit of housework done as a favour to the wife, for which she should be suitably grateful. But the difference between us and our non-participant sisters is that we don’t make a day or even a job out of it.

There are many women with a high level of achievement of a slightly younger or even much younger age than we are, but they don’t stand out. This is because there are just so very many more of them. For them, achievement is normal. It is not something that has to be struggled for against the odds, in a society clubbing together to drag you down.

The mindset of Maltese women began to change in the 1990s, and pinpointing why is fairly straightforward. It happened because the doors of our university were thrown wide open. Thousands upon thousands of young women have streamed through them in the last 20-odd years. Every year, the numbers have continued to increase. Now women account for more than half the student population. Though not extraordinary in itself, in that this follows the trend of what is happening elsewhere in Europe and in North America, it seems quite extraordinary to me. The perfectly serious enquiries I received, when I first started writing a newspaper column, as to whether I received help in writing and in formulating my arguments from my husband or my father (and if I had had a brother and if my sole uncle were still alive at the time they would have included them too), don’t seem that long ago. But of course they were long ago. Nineteen years have gone by, and that’s a long time in terms of social evolution.

The thousands of young women – some of them are nearing middle age now – who have graduated since the early 1990s, when university admissions really got going properly, are not going to content themselves with prams and pushchairs and driving their children to private lessons. They know, as I realised early on, that all of that is part of life but it is far from being the whole of life. No man would ever make a life out of nothing but childcare, housework and being permanently on holiday when the children grow up, so why was this considered sufficient for the amusement of women? More to the point, why do women themselves consider it to be enough? It’s because that’s the way we were raised. A great deal of brainwashing was involved. Today, the Catholic Church is the main agent of that brainwashing, but its power is waning. Today’s young women are different, and may God bless them. They are doubly fortunate because men in their age group have a different outlook, too. They don’t expect a round of applause when they perform a household chore. When they look after their own children, they don’t call it babysitting, as my generation of men do.

The head of the Malta Employers’ Association was there listening to Cherie Blair and he pointed this out: that change is inevitable, because the present generation of young women are wholly unlike their mothers. And not just their mothers, I might add. They are wholly unlike my contemporaries, an age group caught between those young women and their mothers.

I look at them and I smile, because they are Malta’s future. My generation and older women were brainwashed into believing that the lucky ones were those who got to stay at home and live off somebody else, like big children but with more freedom. But these are the truly lucky ones, and what’s more, they’re smart enough to know it.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.