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But what are these occasions for? Do women really look at Cheryl, Annie et al and think to themselves, wow, if I could only work that bit harder, I could be like them? Is it a way of encouraging Team Woman to keep up the good work? Isn’t there something a bit, well, minority-minded about the exercise at a time when girls comfortably outstrip boys at exams? If it’s an excuse for a party, that’s another matter, and these awards are a harmless way for companies to get women in the public eye hitched to the brand. The Harper’s Bazaar awards were an opportunity for the magazine to obtain some lovely pictures of its winners — its Inspiration of the Year, Natalia Vodianova, appeared on its cover, oddly, as Joan of Arc, in tribute to her work setting up playgrounds in deprived parts of Russia.
But there’s a weird, quasi-feminist feel to the awards, rather undermined by the assumption that women need a separate category for recognising their very special contributions — the premise is apparently that, as with Wimbledon, they’d be annihilated in a straight competition with the boys.
Perhaps once this sort of bonding exercise was necessary for women in a Mad Men world. The Barclays Women of the Year award had its first incarnation in the Women of the Year Lunch and Assembly established by Lady Lothian, a splendid character, in 1955, with two other women, in order to ‘bring together a wide cross-section of working women who had distinguished themselves in their careers, to enable them to meet each other and hear the views of world-famous women on important issues’. Now, working women are the norm (though apparently some with young children would rather it were otherwise), so the opportunity to pay homage to female achievers is not quite what it once was.
Obviously the women who get the awards are admirable individuals who have done fine things, usually to do with charity. But to see the inherent absurdity of the exercise, turn it round and imagine to yourself how a Spectator Men of the Year award would look. Man of the Year: David Cameron, Inspiration of the Year: Pope Benedict, Campaigner of the Year: Richard Dawkins, and so on. A Men of the Year ceremony, in other words, would quickly look like a general award for achievement. Indeed, the only version I can think of, run by GQ magazine, looks rather like that.
And are the easy-on-the-eye slebs who are singled out for distinction really women you can aspire to become? Vodianova, a supermodel married to a rich man, and Queen Rania of Jordan, a strikingly beautiful woman married to a king, have done quite splendid charity work but I don’t, somehow, feel that if I only worked harder I might become as they are. My role model would probably be my old director of studies at university, the historian Zara Steiner, but I can tell you now that she’d be baffled, and not wholly impressed, to be nominated for a lifetime award for female academic achievement by Cosmo.
And while women in construction, say, may need solidarity, there seems little need in fiction. If there is one category where women don’t need favouritism, it’s in novel-writing, but the heirs of Austen, Eliot and the Brontës treat the Orange Prize like it’s the Booker.
There has to come a point when women call a halt to the whole thing, possibly when there aren’t enough women in the public eye to go round the number of awards. As a sex, I think we’ve celebrated ourselves enough.
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