Men at work

… from the east side of Waterloo Bridge

…from the west side of Waterloo Bridge

Men are at work on the Thames. Who's at work in the buildings around them in the powerhouses of England?

The  'most powerful' women in England is powerless. The many 'powers' she inherited when her father died are entirely nominal. The third most powerful woman heads a division of the international bank her father founded. The fifth is in charge of a division of an international media company her father runs. The fourteenth is deputy leader of an out-of-power political party, playing second fiddle to her male boss.

Lists like this can be fun. Lazy journalists use them to fill their column inches and broadcasting hours for lazy readers and listeners who aren't in the mood to engage their brains. There's little science behind who appears on a list or the order they appear. 

The ‘Power List 2013 - our list of the 100 most powerful women in the country today’ isn't fun. It’s a joke. Those who compiled it clearly found it a challenge to come up with 100 names. They could have quietly binned a failed project. They didn't.They should have come clean and reported that their research had found that women with power were few and far between. They didn't do that either. Instead, they stuck to their original plan to applaud, celebrate and promote the onward march of women into the corridors of power regardless of the facts.

Compiling a list of the country’s 100 most powerful jobs would  have given them the opposite challenge, ie limiting it to 100. Who should be on and who left out? The Prime Minister? The Head of the Civil Service? The Chancellor of the Exchequer? The Governor of the Bank of England? The Director-General of the BBC? The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces? The Lord Chief Justice? The Chief Executive Officer of Tesco? The Editor of The Daily Mail? The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University? The Chief Executive of the Arts Council? The Chief Executive of the NHS? The Met Police Commissioner? All these jobs are currently held by men. Whoever makes it onto the list, it will be overwhelmingly a list of men at work.

The journalists who came up with the idea of a list of powerful women worked for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. That the BBC still has a programme called ‘Woman’s Hour’ speaks volumes about the little progress women have made in the  60 years since England's ‘most powerful’ woman took on her role. Her coronation was symbolically linked with man's conquest of Everest around the same time. BBC Radio no longer offers women slaving away at home Housewives' Choice to help them through the day but women are a long way from conquering the Everest of equality. Men keep them down firmly in the foothills. Calm down dear.

England has changed in many ways since the 1950s. Its 'most powerful' woman wouldn't have inherited her job if she'd had any brothers.  Another young woman in her twenties was forced to abandon her chosen career becasue she married a man. Claire Rayner, who would go on to be successful in the female niche of agony aunt journalism, had overcome the difficulties of her horrible childhood and adolescence and was making an impact in the female career of nursing. They thought her good enough to become one of the boys and offered her a place to train as a doctor. They withdrew it immediately she signed her marriage certificate. It seemed absurd to train a married woman to become a doctor then. It is unthinkable that such a travesty could happen now.

Then, 'preposterous' might have been one of the politer reactions to the idea that a woman should be allowed to marry another woman. Now, it's almost old hat that a woman can marry a woman and  even a man a man. How times have changed. And how they haven’t.