Katy Hamilton

In the autumn of 1993, short, rather socially-awkward little me arrived at secondary school. It was an all-girls’ boarding school hidden in the Wiltshire countryside, small and supportive and gently eccentric, and it was to be my home-from-home for the next seven years. Of that time in my life, I remember great friends, choir trips, awesome musical productions, reconditioning a tiny tractor and doing wheelies on the hockey pitch, a lot of lying about on the grass, sneaking between dorms after lights-out to eat chocolate and generally cause trouble, and the almost nightly ritual of playing the piano and singing through books and books of songs from the shows. Life was good.

Probably, at some point, there were speakers who came to visit (or perhaps even the teachers themselves) to talk about the fact that we were young women with the world at our feet, and we could do anything we wanted. If that did happen, I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever. I don’t remember being a young woman with a great potential future ahead of her. I remember being a person, just a person, who was pretty good at some stuff, and looking forward to finding out what came next.

It was only in the years that followed leaving this idyllic set-up that I came to realise that there were many people who did not seem to share this broad and relatively un-nuanced sense of themselves in the world. They had been told very firmly that even though they were young women, they could still do anything they wanted. They worried about walking home on their own at night because they were used to getting catcalled. They chatted together and rolled their eyes, recounting stories of builders shouting, ‘Cheer up love, it might never happen!’. I was completely baffled. Why would you shout that? Why did it matter that they were women? How awful that they were in fear of walking to their own homes after dark.

That was at university. Later I realised that this was far from the end of it. That some women had forfeited the chance to aim for their dreams because they felt themselves somehow deficient, and that they would never reach what they longed for. That others, stupendously capable and passionate, had hit glass ceilings and encountered both blatant and insidious sexual discrimination. That still more simply tolerated, on a daily basis, low-level sexism at home and in the workplace. That actually, now I came to London and started to look up at the billboards and other advertising, it struck me that getting up in the morning and interacting with any form of media, or indeed just leaving the house and looking around you as you walk to the corner shop, is liable to bring you into contact with something endorsing an unequal view of the sexes.

Do you know what upsets me about this most? That I haven’t met more people who had the same happy experiences I did. That my early naivety in this area should actually be naivety at all. Because it shouldn’t be. Pretty soon, it’ll be a century since the first women in Britain were allowed to vote. And it’s only in the last three that we’ve got to the first female Master of the Queen’s Music; the first female conductor leading the Last Night of the Proms; the first female bishop. Simply put: that’s appalling.

So as we come to celebrate International Women’s Day today, you’ll forgive me if I view the event with very mixed feelings. I mean, of course it’s great that we have an ever-expanding, vibrant culture of creative and articulate women in a range of roles from high-powered company bosses to scientists, writers, composers, cabinet ministers, and so on. But I am still left blinking in disbelief that it is necessary to ghettoize these people into a week or fortnight of events to make sure that people notice them at all.

And that ghetto, it seems, is partially a place created in the name of benevolent support and promotion. Back in November, the BBC hosted a concert at Maida Vale of eight world premieres, works written by the winners of the Proms Inspire commission. This is an exciting and worthy scheme, and the concert was recorded for broadcast. Sure enough, last month, pieces by Louie McIver and Alex Woolf were broadcast on Hear and Now. But the works by Grace Mason and Lucinda Rimmer were saved up and transmitted… yesterday. As part of a special Hear and Now all about women in music. Of the remaining four winning composers, Sarah Gait and Freddie Meyers appeared in another Hear and Now in February; Thomas Gibbs in yet another; and as far as I could see, Thomas Brown’s Cairo has yet to be broadcast at all. So this great project to promote young composers has chopped their contributions up across at least four different programmes and used two of them to highlight not their youth or success, but the fact that they are women. Does that make anyone else deeply uncomfortable?

‘Minority’ groups undoubtedly deserve air time (literal and metaphorical) and promotion if they are to be fully understood and appreciated by the ‘majority’. That might call for feature events, positive discrimination, or other spotlighting tactics. But unless I missed the memo, women are not actually a minority. They constitute pretty much 50% of the population. If our society needs to change to help women find a more equal footing within it, then it starts with every single one of us, every day. Sexism is rife in both sexes; women are just as bad at putting down other women as men are. Likewise, many male stereotypes are equally unhealthy and unhelpful. It goes both ways. If you haven’t already, check out HeForShe, which seeks to even out that imbalance on both sides. And then think hard about the following.

• If you’ve found yourself getting hot under the collar watching a TV advert in which an excessively manicured, improbably thin ‘housewife’ is struggling to clean something and needs a team of male scientists to help her fix it, why haven’t you written to complain about it?
• If you saw a girl being catcalled in the street on a Saturday night, did you see a boy getting the same treatment?
• If you’re involved in a musical event either as a participant or an observer, have you ever had the sense, or been made to feel, as if some roles in music are ‘more appropriate’ for women or men than others? And have you questioned why that might be?
• If you’re a woman (or a man), and you are being treated inappropriately at work or at home, why are you taking it? If the answer is that you’re worried for your safety or job security, then ask for help. Because it is never ok to feel like that.
• If you’re a man (or a woman), and you see a woman (or a man) being treated inappropriately, why aren’t you speaking up for her (or him)? Because it is never justifiable to keep silent.

And if you are going to an event celebrating International Women’s Day over the coming weeks, then enjoy it. Learn from it. Spread the word. Stand up and be counted as someone for whom sex and gender are utterly equal. And then show us all why every day should be International People’s Day. I really miss feeling like that.