I instantly said obviously it was a gay couple and the surgeon was also the father (and smugly congratulated myself on being woke) . This wasn’t correct. Then I wondered if the surgeon was the step father or the grandfather and could claim the child as the son. Or that the father in the car was the adopted father and the surgeon the biological father or a sperm donor. I wondered if the surgeon was actually the father in the car – who had died but been resuscitated? Finally my son said its none of those -  the surgeon is the mother. Apparently no one in the class got it right either.

For me a female business woman it was a shocking reminder of my own unconscious bias. I just didn’t imagine the surgeon as a woman.

I think it is a timely reminder of why we still need events like International Women’s Day. Within my lifetime (I’m in my 40’s) there has been active and legal discrimination of women, it took till 1975 for women to be allowed bank accounts in their own name. Single women couldn’t apply for a loan or credit card without a signature from their father – even if they earned more than their father. Single women couldn’t get a mortgage without the secure signature of a male guarantor. I remember my grandmother telling me about how she had bought her first house in the 1940’s. She paid for the mortgage but had to get her father to guarantee it, when she married the house became the property of her husband. When she divorced him because of his infidelity, he took the house despite not ever paying towards it. It was the 1950’s and she had to start over again with 2 small children.

In 1971 when my mother graduated from Warwick University with an economics degree she was unable to find a graduate job because at every interview she was asked if she was married and had children (which she was). She was also asked about how many more children she was thinking of having (of course if she had got the job perhaps I wouldn’t have come along?).

It was 1970 that the Equal Pay Act came in to place largely following a strike by women at the Ford Motor Company in in Dagenham in 1968. Even with the Equal Pay Amendment Act of 1983 – equal pay is still a real issue – in December 2021 the Institute of Fiscal Studies found that there had been little advances in closing the gender pay gap in the last 25 years. Female graduates are for example  still on average paid 10% lower than their male counterparts.

I left a job in 2003 because I realised I was being paid £10,000 less than my male counterparts despite billing far more than them. Did you know that 1994 was the year that women began to be allowed to wear trousers to work in the then Big 6 accountancy firms?

It has been just over 100 years since women in the UK gained the right to vote and yet recent studies show that it is likely to be a further 100 years before there is true equality between men and women on a global basis.

This is why we still have female networks and International Women’s Day, its why we ask for male allies and mentors for women in the work place. Bright women do now reach the top of every profession, we have had 2 female prime-ministers in the UK in my life time – and yet there has never been a female chancellor. In comparison the tax profession looks much more diverse The Association of Tax Technicians has had 6 female Presidents since its formation in 1989 and the Institute of Taxation has had 3 female presidents since it was founded in 1930.  Perhaps for me what is more key is that the CEO’s of ATT and CIOT are both female.