“I have a woman who does my hair, a woman who does the shopping, a woman
who helps find nice clothes. The key is to be very, very organised.”
Isabelle didn’t look in the least bit annoyed about this state of
affairs and I felt it was time to move on. The truth is, I felt dangerously
close to feeling inspired by Isabelle, and I decided to leave her to her
remarkable accomplish-ments and went downstairs to dig up some horror
stories in the Printemps concession.
But it was useless. In-between attending lunches and seminars – the Cartier
Women’s Initiative Awards, the JP Morgan Rising Talent Awards – the women
here can have their eyebrows re-angled by France’s premier eyebrow
aesthetician, shop for Prada and Louis Vuitton, and have their faces
re-organised at a Helena Rubinstein concession (wrinkles are fine, they’re
like battle scars, said the make-up artist in charge; it’s the purple
shadows under the eyes you want to watch out for – exhaustion is a sin in
the boardroom). I tried to remain obsessed by and yet belligerently resigned
to the fact that no male boss would ever understand a woman’s need to attend
the school play, but it was hard because wherever I went, I felt ever so
slightly buoyed by the ruthless ambient flattery I was constantly exposed
to. The Perception of Corruption and the Place of Women in Anti-Corruption
Systems pamphlet that was pressed into my hand, for example. “Whenever a
woman held a significant position inside the company… the company was better
protected or less at risk,” asserted its male author, René Ricol, and I
realised, this is what you do when praising a woman for her looks becomes a
sackable offence. You praise her for her integrity instead.
That’s one difference between Davos and Deauville. Weren’t we, as women who
wanted to change the world, supposed to be debating the sub-prime crisis or
the future of democracy in Pakistan? Instead, my programme offered me a
choice between what more macro-economic minds than mine would term soft
issues – “Sustainable cities – where the environment meets the individual” –
or subjects containing a conspicuously high “gender” and “women” count.
After the Lebanese journalist May Chidiac describes in her talk how she was
disabled by a terrorist car bomb in Beirut, her all-female audience did not
leave the conference hall enlivened by theories on Syria’s role in the
commercialisation of the Middle East. They streamed out of the lecture hall
visibly distraught. “Yes,” said one of them, “I do take it personally.”
I imagined the men in Davos. Would a man have taken it personally if a fellow
male had been blown up in Beirut? I stuck my head into a lecture hall where
Gender Equality in the Workplace was in full flow and heard one of Spain’s
most powerful senior litigators scream into a microphone. “If we are
organised we can make a real impact!” she shouted. “We have to be much more
active. Much more vocal. Denounce and just dare to say, ‘I’m the only woman
in the meeting.’ This is not normal. Men have to confront that it’s not
natural when you see all ties around the table.”
I disappeared off to one of the conference’s “quiet areas” and attempted to
“create my own network”. Within five seconds someone called Marie-Laure
Buisson was telling me about the time she was sexually assaulted by a famous
French politician.
“He grabbed me by the throat and tried to kiss me,” she said. “It was at the
Assemblée Nationale. In the beginning I was not really a feminist,” she
continued. “But I discovered the problem in the world was really huge.”
Marie-Laure and I exchanged business cards and only then did it occur to me,
Deauville is a single-issue conference. The women come here to talk about
themselves. That’s what we were doing – it had become extinct in Britain. We
were being feminists. “How can you be a woman,” asked Amélie D’Oultremont, a
cashmere-swaddled general manager from Belgium, “and not be a feminist?”
I found De Thuin exhausted in a press booth; she had managed to collapse there
without appearing less steely or more rumpled. “I feel something is being
set in motion,” said De Thuin. “There is a new movement of feminists. Women
want to talk about their experiences, share other experiences. This is not
about power. I think women are in the process of finding a new voice.”
A study published by the World Economic Forum ranks Britain as the 11th most
“gender-equal” country in the world. This, compared to the United States at
31 and France at 51. “In France we have the crèche system,” said De
Thiessen. “You are very behind in England, I think.”
When, later, Stéphanie Ferran, a Parisienne management consultant with Bain &
Company, asked me where I lived (“London”) she touched my arm in sympathy –
“London is a very difficult place for a woman to work,” she said. “I’ve seen
what it’s like in the City when my boyfriend worked there for two years. Who
are these girls who hang around in the nightclubs? It is difficult to know
whether they are models or… [she lowered her eyes in a manner that suggested
the unsayable word was “prostitutes”]. There’s no pressure for men to settle
down like there is in Paris.”
As I said, in Deauville I met high-flying Italian lawyers, axe-wielding French
entrepreneurs, uncontradictable Romanian marketing gurus, ball-breaking
Chinese managing directors and pioneering American vice presidents. I met
Spaniards and Russians and Belgians and Swedes. A handful of
Latin-Americans, even. In the film version most of them could have been
played by Michelle Pfeiffer or Gong Li.
And then I met Brits. Just a handful. But I could have seen that they were
Brits from an aeroplane. The British women looked exhausted and neutered;
mentally we were still stuck because of signal failures in the bowels of the
Northern Line somewhere between Moorgate and Bank. Imelda Staunton would
have played us beautifully in the biopic. Our hair was like straw, our
bodies unexercised, our faces lacked sufficient nuance and coverage. Perhaps
none of this matters. There is an argument that such ascetism is a symbol in
itself of the egalitarian work-place. But, Deauville taught me, there are
places on this earth in which babies, Christian Louboutin shoes and
stratospheric career paths co-exist.
