As a UN inspector claims this is the world's most sexist country... Sexist? Nonsense, Britain is the best place on Earth to be a woman

Kathy Gyngell believes women in the UK are high-achieving and capable of standing up for ourselves

She believes men are blamed for being 'sexist' when they are not

A couple of decades ago my late husband Bruce, then chief executive of a TV company, and I, were dining with a group of television executives.



When Bruce momentarily left the table the man on my right — successful, educated, middle-aged — leered at me, groped my knee and announced: ‘If ever you get bored with the old man you know where to come.’



I swatted him off like an irritating fly, told him sharply to get lost and pointedly ignored him for the rest of the evening. The man who goosed me was irksome, clearly drunk and daft enough not to recognise the implications of making an improper suggestion to his boss’s wife.



'Women in Britain today are both privileged, high-achieving and in my view, quite capable of standing up for ourselves', says Kathy

However, I would argue that his fumble and ill-judged remark – although marking him out as boorish and stupid – didn’t make him sexist. To have made a fuss would have been to exaggerate my sense of grievance and, more pertinently, to demean women who had proper cause for complaint.



That is why this week I found myself bridling at the comments of United Nations special rapporteur Rashida Manjoo, a South African expert on human rights looking at violence against women in the UK, who had the temerity to accuse Britain of being more sexist than any other country in the world, due to our ‘boys’ club sexist culture’.



I have to take issue with her on many levels; not least because women in Britain today are both privileged, high-achieving and in my view, quite capable of standing up for ourselves.



Indeed, not only are we shattering glass ceilings, we are also usurping men in top jobs and dominating many professions.

British women are in the ascendancy. They do not need patronising initiatives on sexism. For the fact is, women in the UK today have never had it so good.



Statistics from the Higher Education Authority revealed last year around 20 universities in the country had twice as many female undergraduates as male. Women students out-numbered men on many courses, most notably in veterinary science, medicine and education.



Last autumn, the total of male students enrolling for university fell, while women were a third more likely to take degree than their male counterparts.



The proportion of women directors among the FTSE 100 companies rose to almost a quarter this year and this figure is set to grow.



'Today, I would suggest, women do not just have parity with men, actually we now have the advantage over them '

So the facts disprove Ms Manjoo’s contention: women are, in fact, the dominant sex in contemporary Britain.



Despite this, the cry of feminists deriding our ‘sexist’ culture has never been louder. Thanks to the po-faced ministrations of the sisterhood, we inhabit a dull, androgynous and increasingly humourless society in which men feel constrained from telling mother-in-law jokes for fear of being labelled a misogynist, and balk at complimenting women on their appearance in case they are cast as sex pests.



In Ms Majoo’s sterile, politically-correct world, men who wolf-whistle at women are part of an ‘ingrained sexist culture’. I’m sure I will rankle the feminists when I say that, as a mother of two grown-up sons, I’m heartily grateful for the odd whistle of approbation. Neither do I feel demeaned by men who are civil enough to open doors for me, proffer their seats on trains or even comment favourably on my appearance.



As I mentioned before, my husband Bruce, who died in 2000, was Australian. The Aussies have a long and ignoble tradition of making jokes at the expense of women. I’ll cite an example to give you a flavour: How many men does it take to open a beer? None. It should be opened by the time she brings it.



Yes, of course it is crass, but should the enlightened West be bothering to expend its energy and resources fighting such harmless sexism, when there are bigger battles to be won on behalf of genuinely oppressed women?



In the UK, the Equality Act has enshrined in the law the notion of equal rights for women in the work place.



Today, I would suggest, women do not just have parity with men, actually we now have the advantage over them. And yet we have reached the point where the sexes are no longer permitted to celebrate their different skills and inherent aptitudes.



Kathy argues that when she was drunkenly groped by a male friend at a dinner party: 'his fumble and ill-judged remark - although marking him out as boorish and stupid - didn't make him sexist'

In some quarters, men and women are being melded into an amorphous mass.

It is now heresy to suggest that women have greater emotional intelligence, kindness or empathy than men; that they are more adept at home-making and more skilled at raising children. The title ‘housewife’ has become pejorative.



Twenty-seven years ago I abandoned a well-paid and prestigious career in television — I was features editor on TV AM — to be a full-time mum. I had not intended to relinquish work and, had employed a nanny to look after my first-born so I could race back to the studio, untrammelled, so I imagined, by guilt or regret, to pursue my career.



But I had not reckoned with the sheer distress I felt at leaving my year-old baby in the care of someone else.



I managed to work for 11 months, but I was so racked with sorrow and yearning, in the end I gave up to look after my son then remained a full-time mum when my second was born.



When I met Baroness Thatcher at a reception and admitted sheepishly I was ‘just a mum’. She responded crisply that there was no ‘just’ about motherhood: raising the next generation was, she insisted, the most worthy and laudable of occupations.



And it is this simple but self-evident truth that strident feminists overlook when they inveigh against sexism and campaign so blindly for equal opportunities.



We women have infiltrated every area of professional life, and of course must celebrate our freedom to take jobs in which we can fulfil our potential

We women have infiltrated every area of professional life, and of course must celebrate our freedom to take jobs in which we can fulfil our potential.



But in the clamour for equality — to have equal numbers of female sports presenters and comediennes on TV and radio panel shows for example –— we have also overlooked the truism that men are actually better suited for some jobs than women. The opposite is also true.



Ms Manjoo shared her preliminary findings and asked: ‘Have I seen this level of sexist culture in other countries? It hasn’t been so in-your-face in other countries. I haven’t seen that so pervasively in other countries.’



Yet in her South Africa homeland, one woman, on average, is murdered by her partner every eight hours.



There is a danger, too, in glibly blaming every ill on sexism. Ms Majoo attributes ‘the easy availability of porn’ to it. But I dispute this. Porn in my view has much more to do with our overly liberal society — for which women, quite as much men, are responsible — and the availability of technology to access it.



So I argue for a better sense of proportion, and for a degree of levity to be injected into the debate. We Brits are celebrated for our humour. It is up to each one of us to decide whether we are offended or not: by saucy seaside postcard cartoons, by mother-in-law gags, by wolf whistles; even by crass and illiberal Antipodean jokes.



And we should save our energy for the real battles and reserve our outrage and energies for women in oppressive regimes the world over who genuinely warrant our help.

