I’m looking forward to a discussion tomorrow with Laura Bates on the Jeremy Vine show, on BBC Radio 2. On International Women’s Day, on 8 March, there was a discussion about feminism in the modern era on the BBC television programme Daily Politics, hosted by regular anchor Andrew Neil. Laura was one of the two key women in the discussion. She was the founder of The Everyday Whining Project – she herself calls it The Everyday Sexism Project http://www.everydaysexism.com and she still runs the site. Nobody would ever confuse Ms Bates for a ray of sunshine, it has to be said.
The other key woman in the discussion was the sociologist Catherine Hakim, originator of Preference Theory (2000). She made some insightful points, and I wish she’d been given longer to speak. It’s a pity she didn’t seize this golden opportunity to point out the damage caused to Norwegian businesses by gender quotas, or to point out that four in seven British men are work-centred, while only one in seven British women is – which largely explains the gender balances we see in parliament, at the top of major corporations, and elsewhere.
The video footage of the discussion (with a little preliminary material) is below, from approximately 15:12 to 25:40. Enjoy:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01r7npp/Daily_Politics_08_03_2013/
