Jayne Dowle: A new French lesson for women’s working lives

What the Home Secretary chooses for her wardrobe obviously has nothing to do with me, and it won’t make any difference to her policies. But it’s good to see a high-flying fiftysomething woman confident in her own skin, especially in Britain. Because for far too long this particular gender, at this particular age, in this particular country, has been more or less invisible to the public eye.

So it has taken the appointment of an especially stylish and charismatic Frenchwoman to head the IMF to make us step back and think about it. And yes, I know it is shallow to judge someone on the way they look. But the age we live in is as visual as the Middle Ages (no pun intended), when the vast majority of the population couldn’t read, so had to rely on pictures to tell them stories. There is probably something deep to say here related to falling educational standards and our obsession with celebrity, but let’s not get distracted.

What is indisputable is that Lagarde is no desperate ingénue. She is a smart woman of 55 who celebrates the fact that sometimes, being female in a tough situation can be a bonus, not a hindrance, and talks openly about her “feminine and understated” negotiating style.

She even has the courage to blame the blokes for our international financial ills; pointing the finger at testosterone-fuelled bankers for the financial crash and tutting that the euro never had a good start because of its, “founding fathers… founding fathers, not mothers, notice. Regrettably, there was no woman at the table at the time.”

It is reductive to argue that we don’t have women like Lagarde in British politics or public life, because if you look closely, we do, or we certainly have the potential to produce them. It’s just that all too often, they are sidelined, pilloried, or never put themselves forward for high office.

Only 12.5 per cent of non-executive board directors in FTSE 100 companies are women. A figure which must make even the most traditional of men ask the question, why? Presumably, some of these traditionalists have daughters, daughters who they will soon be paying upwards of £30,000 to educate at university, presumably for a career in something meaningful.

But what happens to all those ambitious young women who graduate burning with the desire to achieve? By the time they are 40, too many of them are burnt out by the constant battle to scramble up the greasy pole of management whilst deciding whether the time is right to have a baby before the biological clock stops for good.

Is it any wonder that so many of them decide not to bother, or that juggling the two is just not worth the hassle, and disappear into the oblivion of maternity leave and frustrated ambition? That’s what happens to all but the most steely. And we still live in a culture where emerging from a chrysalis and making a comeback in your 50s only happens to pop stars and people on the telly.

But I think that the arrival of women like Christine Lagarde could be an inspiration, not just to the legions of other middle-aged women still firing on all cylinders, but to the younger women coming up behind. She candidly admits what a struggle it was to balance a stellar career with motherhood. And the more women like Lagarde talk about this, the more younger women come to the conclusion that there has to be a better way of doing things.

And, the answer, I predict, will be for ambitious women to have their children younger, and to see their fifties not as a long slowdown into retirement – which is getting ever further away anyway – but as the approach to their personal pinnacle. Don Valley Labour MP Caroline Flint, 50 this year, echoed this in a recent interview when she talked about having her son and daughter in her 20s. She didn’t say as much, but have kids young, and the needy years of child-bearing don’t clash with the time of life when a mother might be considered for ministerial office.

It sounds harsh, put like that, doesn’t it? But it could be a lot more effective than all the “equal opportunities” ever dreamt up by the likes of Harriet Harman, such as this latest idea to ensure the leader or deputy leader of the Labour party is always a woman. And, I won’t bore you with the stats, but evidence from the Office of National Statistics suggests that over the last decade, there has been a definite rise in women having children in their 20s.

So something is definitely going on. And Christine Lagarde makes us think. Not just about tailoring, but about the entire structure of our female lives.