Victoria Lidiard (nee Simmons), the last known suffragette, died in 1992 at the age of 102. When I met her five years earlier she was still managing her roomy Brighton flat entirely on her own, a small, alert retired optician…
Centenarians at the wheel
Grannies are refusing to abandon their cars. A record 200 or more are still driving after their 100th birthday. This is a new phenomenon not just because we’re all living longer but because earlier generations of women didn’t drive.…
Childcare – The True Cost
Forget glass ceilings. The main reason women give up promising careers is because of the high cost and complications of childcare. It’s not hard to understand why mothers (and some fathers) find it impossible to carry on working as they…
FIFTY YEARS AGO
In the mid Sixties I found myself living just up the road from Winston Churchill. 14 Hyde Park Gate was a genteel boarding house for girls like me far from home and anxious mothers. As I was 17 and my…
Plugging the Pipeline – Or How to Keep Talented Women on the Road to The Top
The good news is that it’s now largely accepted that having women on boards is beneficial to the company. Studies by organisations such as McKinsey have found that diverse boards are more effective, more innovative…
Hong Kong Notes
August isn’t the best time to visit Hong Kong. It’s midsummer which brings the kind of heat most people try to avoid. But the challenge is fun. Hong Kongers have elaborate strategies to help. Interconnected shopping malls, tunnels, covered bridges…
Tagged with: Hong Kong
IF SCOTLAND by DAVID MACLENNAN
David MacLennan, the Scottish writer, actor, and producer, is the founder of A Play, A Pie & a Pint, Glasgow’s Lunchtime Theatre. In the 1970s he co-founded 7:84 Theatre Company with his brother-in-law, John McGrath, and later Wildcat Stage Productions. …
Why it got tougher for working mums
News this week that for the first time more women are applying for jobs in financial and professional services than men. That’s great, of course, but getting women into the professions isn’t the problem. Keeping them is the challenge. Writing…
Tagged with: working women
Welley Road Under Water
The papers are full of photographs of Thames villages under water, including the street where I lived as a child in the 1950s. The Welley Road house in Wraysbury was the first my parents ever bought. They knew it was…
Mailer Mayoral Campaign
A shorter version of this appeared in The Times, May 3 2012 VOTE THE RASCALS IN The mayoral candidate exploded with fury in a foul-mouthed tirade. No, not the recent spat between Boris and Ken but Norman Mailer in 1969.…
