Equality Matters!

Women are supposed to be able to do anything that a man can do. Well, within reason! Let's not get carried away, after all. We all know that there are physiological differences that mean that both genders can never do exactly the same things as each other. 

However, we have got used to women becoming bricklayers and men becoming midwives. As a general rule, we mostly agree that, even if men sometimes get paid more for doing the same job, women can work in most fields that were previously male-dominated. (And vice versa, of course. Except that in the latter case, the men often still get paid more than the women. And they often float to the top of the profession more quickly. There is something fundamentally wrong there.) 

So in the midst of all that, along comes Bernie Ecclestone, maintaining that a female driver “would not be taken seriously” in motor racing. Asked about the possibility of women drivers returning to Formula One racing, he said: “I doubt it. If there was somebody that was capable they wouldn’t be taken seriously anyway, so they would never have a car that is capable of competing. There was a girl that was driving in GP3 for a whole season so it is not something that hasn’t happened.” A reporter went on to ask: “But it is not going to happen in the main event?” Ecclestone replied: “No. I don’t think so.” 

So there we are. He's not against women racing drivers per se; he just doesn't think they will be very successful. In fact he went as far as to suggest the sport may never see a female racer again. And yet there were women in the sport on the past. Almost 40 years ago the Italian driver Leila Lombardi became the last woman to start a Formula One race at the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix. In fact she took part in 17 Formula One World Championship Grands Prix and was the only female Formula One driver to have a top six finish in a World Championship race (1975 Spanish Grand Prix). 

But she was in a minority. She was one of the only two women who managed to qualify for a formula one race. The other was the first woman ever to race in a Formula One Grand Prix. She was Maria Teresa de Filippis ( who incidentally only died the other day, at the grand old age of 89), another Italian, who participated in five World Championship Grands Prix, debuting on 18 May 1958, but scored no championship points. Though largely unsuccessful in her Formula One racing career, she won races in other series and is remembered as a pioneer in the sport. 

Personally I can't see the attraction of driving at speed round a race track but, nonetheless, if women want to do so, they should not be discouraged. 

The same sort of attitude seems to apply to women who play what I still think of as computer games. Our granddaughter spends quite a lot of time playing shoot'em up and kill'em games and is often regarded as a little odd for doing so. It's OK for a girl to play Candy Crush Saga but other things are seriously a male preserve! 

How odd!