The Reader: True equality is all about celebrating our differences

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12 March 2018
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As we marked International Women’s Day last week, 100 years on from the first women in the country winning the right to vote, I was struck by how the vocabulary around gender imbalance is shifting.

At a lively discussion in Victoria, the talk was not so much about equality as about celebrating the differences between men and women.

Equality can mean lots of different things. Obviously, the main areas such as the gender pay gap and women being unfairly overlooked for promotion must be addressed, but true equality is also about ensuring we improve behaviour in the workplace, so that women can thrive alongside men without feeling they need to act like them.

In my role, I am surrounded by inspirational women in the boardroom when meeting local businesses and collaborating with partners. I think much of what we do today would have been pipedreams for the suffragettes even 50 years ago.

But let’s be clear about what we are working to achieve. We want a level playing field with men, respect across all parts of society and to be paid the same as our colleagues for doing the same job.

We are proud to be different to men and different from each other. In celebrating these differences, we will reap benefits in the workplace, at home and the wider community, too.
Jacqueline Chambers, Deputy CEO, Victoria Business Improvement District

EDITOR'S REPLY

Dear Jacqueline

Thanks for your letter. You’re right. The battle for female equality has often, rightly, focused on delivering the same rights for women as for men — like the right to equal pay. As a result, we sometimes overlook the differences between men and women that we should celebrate, and the strength this diversity can bring.

You often have to change a working environment to bring that out — otherwise you find that things like the way points of view are made, the structure of meetings, the hours people work, are male-orientated. That leads to an unconscious discrimination against women. That’s why, although it is light years ahead of the political world that I left, we must go on changing the environment here at this newspaper — which we are.

PS: From now on, every day, either myself or one of our section editors will respond like this to a letter — so we don’t just transmit to our readers; we listen and we engage with you.

George Osborne, Evening Standard Editor


City must keep its independence

Bronwen Maddox is surely correct in her view that Philip Hammond’s recent speech at Canary Wharf was one of his best [“As the two sides talk past each other, Phil is being left in limbo” Comment, March 8].

My concern is that the framework referred to by the Chancellor to supervise “separate evolution of rules to deliver the same results” and to resolve disputes on this would place too much pressure on UK regulators to continue to align the UK’s rule book with that of the EU27.

This would make it more difficult to agree any kind of mutual recognition of standards with other financial regulatory regimes around the world. For example, the City Corporation and Tokyo Metropolitan Government have recently entered into a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate more closely on financial services, and this could be developed in future to include some kind of mutual regulatory recognition of standards.

Of course, the City will survive if there isn’t a deal covering financial services. The EU regulators have given us Solvency II, AIFMD and MiFID II, to name but three directives that have cost the City dear in terms of higher costs, fewer jobs and less revenue than would otherwise have been the case.

We shouldn’t agree to align more closely with EU rules than with the United States’s rules, Japan’s or the rules of any other major financial centre in the world. Our regulators’ influence in shaping best practice rules at the global level will be enhanced, not diminished.

While the inclusion of financial services in our FTA would be, on balance, better than its exclusion, our negotiators need to be very aware of the significant upside for the City in recovering our regulatory independence.
Viscount Trenchard, House of Lords (Con)


Compulsory ID will put off voters

Nimco Ali’s arguments in favour of requiring people to bring photo ID before they can vote are all based on anecdotal evidence [Comment, March 8].

I have never heard of anyone voting on behalf of anyone else, and if it is common knowledge that “community leaders” co-opt other people’s votes, I wonder why said communities do not rally round to prevent this behaviour.

Voter turnout is worryingly low, especially in local elections, and requiring ID is bound to create an additional barrier to voting for some voters, especially young people who may not be able to afford a photo ID. Only a minuscule number of cases of voter fraud are reported each year, suggesting this is not a problem which requires such heavy-handed tactics.

Limiting access to voting can never be a good thing.
J Kenny


We need another EU referedum

As someone who voted Leave in the referendum, I support the case for a second plebiscite on the issue.

The young first-time voters and those who were too young to vote deserve the chance to decide their future relationship with Europe. I am in my late fifties and I can recall William Hague’s speech to the 1977 Conservative Party conference when he said “half of you won’t be here in 30 or 40 years’ time”.

The electorate should be given a second bite at the cherry because leaving the EU is too important an issue and result to cast in stone.

Not that it would change my voting stance — I would still want to leave — but I feel uneasy at the continuous Brexit negotiations while so many Remainers, especially the young, have such grave misgivings for a fearful future.
Dominic Shelmerdine

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