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The front page of the Observer featured Maria Miller (you know, the women's minister and culture secretary - she replaced Jeremy (ahem) Hunt in the latter job, as it happens, so she's got a lot to live up to), who is, we are told, planning to send information packs to parents of daughters to encourage said daughters to become captains of industry, entrepreneurs and chief executives of FTSE100 companies (possibly not all at the same time).
She says, does Ms Miller:
"Making sure women can be successful at work and in business is essential if we want a strong economy. Encouraging women to fulfil their potential... ".What does that mean? How do you measure someone's potential anyway? And are you really only fulfilling it if you do so in a way that contributes to the economic benefit of the country?
Because that's what this is all about. She says so. A report from the Women's Business Council says that equalising the numbers of women and men in the workplace (which means increasing the women) could increase economic growth by 10% of GDP by 2030.
So to do this, we need more women working, and that means more women at the top, because Ms Miller also believes that the lack of women at the top of whatever industry is a deterrent to other women entering at the bottom.
I don't disagree with that, although I happen to have more faith in women - I think we have sufficient imagination to be able to see something as a possibility (a female chief executive, for instance) whether it exists already or not - but I think Ms Miller, and indeed the report is missing something else.
I don't think women need to change. I don't think they need to become more thrusting, more driven, more ambitious, more like men, if you will.
I suspect, though maybe it's just me and I'm making the ego-centric mistake of assuming I'm not alone, that lots of women (and probably some men too) look at the magnates and bigwigs held up for our aspiration and think: "Eh? They want me to do what? Well actually, no. He (or indeed she) doesn't look that happy, despite the yacht".
I am (or was) ambitious. I have probably excessive pride in myself and my abilities. I have great difficulty doing anything if I don't think I'm doing it well or successfully (one of the reasons I haven't been blogging so much recently). My parents gave me a genuine belief that I could do or be anything I wanted.
Despite all that I don't have, and have never had, any desire whatsoever to work 23 hours a day, never to see my family and friends, never to have any free time or always to have a blackberry surgically attached to my hand, all for the pleasure of a (very) large pay cheque and the prestige of running Europe's largest manufacturer of widgets, chemicals or financial derivatives. I don't look at Sheryl Sandberg asking me to Lean In, with her high-profile job and full-time nannies and think "I want that".
I am a child of the late 20th Century and I want, and have been taught to want, other, more nebulous things. Things which my grandparents wouldn't have dreamed of demanding: happiness, self-confidence and the ability and space to express who I am.
And I think many people of both genders look at the demands made on top-level executives, and the greater demands made on those who aspire to being top-level executives, and turn away. If you can earn a comfortable living half-way up the career ladder, and still have time to do the other things you enjoy, why continue the agonising push for the top? What is there at the top apart from a view?
The world has changed. We want different things, but we are still going about it in the same way. We want freedom to express who we are and time to do the things we enjoy, yet we still expect the people who are most successful in their line of work to do it to the exclusion of everything else.
To get Maria Miller's (and my) dream of equality in the workplace, we don't need to change women, we need to change workplace culture. We need to make it possible to succeed and to contribute economically, for both genders, without being omni-present, without giving up the other parts of your life. We need to change attitudes to part-time working, so that both genders can do it with pride, and still rise through the ranks of whatever job they do. We need to be (and we need our bosses to be) like the entrepreneur Martin Bjergegaard, whose book I haven't read yet, but who seems to understand that we are all most successful, most dedicated, when we are enjoying ourselves, both at work and outside it, and that being at the top of one thing in your life need not necessarily mean that everything else has to fall to the bottom.
I don't think Maria Miller gets that though, however much she contributes to the country. I wonder if she's happy.
