According to the Office for National Statistics, women in their 40s earn 20% less per hour than their male counterparts. This is the motherhood penalty – and the more children a woman has, the wider the gap. Young women start out earning almost the same, deluded by beating boys at exams. Motherhood knocks most out of the running.
So what’s new? This is a year for reflection for my generation, especially women. What happened in 1968? What really changed? The year of riots saw feminism ignite too, a year hazed in an illusory miasma that nothing would be the same again – but of course it was. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot, 16,000 US soldiers died in Vietnam and Richard Nixon was elected. The world did not turn upside down. Feminist ideas more revolutionary than Che Guevara reached right into the heart of elemental things between women and men and families. Where is it now?
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