As the world feels increasingly topsy-turvy and we move into the age of strongman government and oligarchs, revelling in the daily rituals that reliably bring joy has never felt more important.
For me, it’s birds: Noticing them. I’ve had a morning of birds – 5 electric green parakeets on my balcony, blue tits skimming across bare branches, a heron soaring amidst the bracken, black crows cackling in wintry sunshine, fat white gulls swooping overhead as I swam in viscous 3-degree water, kidding myself there was warmth in the brightness of the air.
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That’s new for me. But now it’s an essential part of my day. Like my swim in the cold or morning meditation.
What are the daily rituals that bring you joy? (Tell us in the comments below.) Things you do every day or several times a week just because you love it – because it connects you to nature or makes you smile. It could be something as simple as taking 20 minutes to doodle or paint a picture, playing favourite music and boogieing around the kitchen, making a dish you love, calling an old friend. When things feel wobbly, digging into what we love helps.
That is all a preamble to today’s real subject: The rolling back of initiatives designed to help those who haven’t always got a fair crack of the whip. Which is to say, the much maligned Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda.
The strongman government rush to dismantle DEI
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that two of the most alpha chaps in the world, the richest man and the American President – Donald Trump and Elon Musk – have turned their guns on initiatives designed to help those get ahead who have started out from a far less enviable base.
Ah yes, men who have always been part of the powerful inner group punching down. How novel!
The speed of this has been striking, from Trump blaming the crashing of a plane in Washington on “diversity” hires in air traffic control to him banning all DEI initiatives within government departments as soon as he took office.
The tech bros have jumped on it – the overwhelmingly male Meta, Alphabet (Google) and Amazon have already ditched their DEI programmes. More worryingly, last week the bank Goldman Sachs, alongside management consultants Accenture (run by a woman) and Deloitte, followed suit. (See more of the companies ditching DEI here.)
This isn’t just in America either.
Anti-DEI feeling in the UK
Business people here in the UK are feeling the anti-DEI heat. At a recent meeting with a host of corporate panjandrums, there was much chat about curtailing DEI activities or camouflaging them under other initiatives, as some companies resist US head offices in global companies killing off their efforts.
I’m a proud to be on the Diversity Power List’s Honours List for 2024/2025 because of my work on Queenagers. I stand by this. And the statistics don’t lie. The huge exodus of women from organisations as they hit 50 – the “Queenager braindrain” – shows the reality of gendered ageism for women.
It’s also a fact that out of 100 FTSE CEOs, only 8 are women, a number that has barely changed in the last 20 years.
In addition, the number of women wielding executive roles is stuck at around 12%. When we look at the intersectionality of this – with women of colour or from working class backgrounds or who are disabled, gay or are otherwise different – the lack of equality is even more glaring.
That’s why this full-on assault against attempts to level the playing field is so baffling and disheartening. It also goes against the facts on the ground. Diverse teams outperform non-diverse ones. Diversity accelerates complex-problem solving and enhances morale.
Even Goldman Sachs acknowledges that more diverse teams with lots of different points of view – age, race, sex, class – make much better decisions!
The starkness of the inequity in all this has been brought home to me forcefully as I’ve have spent the last week reading our NOON Book Club book: June Sarpong’s Calling Una Marson: The Extraordinary Life of a Forgotten Icon, written with Jennifer Obidike. Marson was born in Jamaica in the 1920s.
Highly intelligent, she fought sexism and racism to establish her own magazine in Kingston and wound up at the BBC as their first ever black female presenter.
Baroness Floella Benjamin describes the book as “a long overdue tribute to a pioneer” while Sir Trevor McDonald calls it an ‘extraordinary story of an extraordinary woman’.
Getting women’s voices heard
What I found surprising is that I, as a journalist, had never heard of her. The racism she encountered because of the darkness of her skin both in Jamaica and in the UK is shocking, as is the sexism. And yet still she rose.
It’s not just Una. Like millions of others women, I’ve spent much of the last 30 years trying to make the case for more of our voices to be heard, for women to have more power, justice and equality. This has been my fight both as an editor and columnist in mainstream newspapers.
I was so grateful to Christina Lamb OBE for the tribute she paid to me when she won a big journalism prize last month for “standing up to the men” to allow her to report on how rape is being increasingly used as a weapon of war. She was referring to the time I was her editor at The Times and The Sunday Times, but unfortunately this particular topic – rape used in war – is as relevant today as it was then.
How we’ve raised our voices
Women getting their voices heard has long been a struggle even before the recent rise of strongman governments. My first book, Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs: 100 years of the best journalism by women, is stuffed with articles by Suffragettes who were force fed in their struggle to get the vote.
Let’s not forget that in the 1920s when women in the UK finally got the vote. And that in the 1930s when my grandmother was amongst the first cohort of women to be allowed to study for a degree. And then during World War II when women worked as Land Girls and in factories.
Women thought they were getting to equality. But then the men came back from war and needed jobs and a huge propaganda effort pushed women back into the home. It seemed all that liberation was over.
What we have accomplished
In the 1960s the pendulum swung again: This time we had women’s lib and bra burning and the struggle for Civil Rights. (If you haven’t seen the new Bob Dylan movie yet about this exact moment, then I highly recommend it.) Those women thought they had won.
Our mother’s generation battled for equality at work and at home. Women like my late stepmother Tessa Jowell MP fought for equal pay and maternity leave and for all children to get a good start.
I always thought that my generation would get further than the women before us – and my daughters would get further than me. I didn’t want them to face the kind of macho cultures and misogynist attitudes that dogged much of my early career. Yet here we are in 2025, with the struggle for equality nowhere near complete while we’re being dragged backwards.
Are we headed for strongman government here?
What is terrifying is how quickly this new orthodoxy is taking hold. BBC’s Question Time on Thursday saw audience members openly saying we could do with our “own Trump to sort out the immigrants arriving on boats”. There’s talk that the Conservative Party will be merging with Reform UK (which, Nigel Farage says, now has 200,000 members … although some are sceptical).
All we can hope is that just as the pendulum swung away from equality in the 1950s and came roaring back in the 1960s and 1970s, so these anti-equality actions will prompt a fierce reaction.
Perhaps it’s last gasp of a winner-takes-all Hobbesian system which pits us against each other and believes in the inherent superiority of a large strongman. The pictures of Elon Musk in the Oval Office last week with his toddler on his shoulders and his other kids was incredibly dynastic. As if he was showing his sons what they would inherit. As if he and Trump (with his own family dynasty) are sitting down to carve up the country – and the world – for themselves and their children.
*Shiver*
I’d happily be proved wrong about strongman government
I hope that impression is wrong. I hope the world realises soon the madness of imagining that 2 white male members of the billionaire elite are really “men of the people” who have our best interests at heart.
Let’s hope Abraham Lincoln’s observation that “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time” stays true and the pendulum swings back towards fairness and justice.
Until then (as a wrote a few weeks ago) we’ll keep the candle burning in the dark and I’ll keep enjoying the birds.
Lots of love
Eleanor
I have a few things that I try to appreciate when the state of the world (and my life!) get me down: the smoothness of freshly ironed sheets, the smell of honeysuckle outside my front door and when a tennis ball hit over the net gets stuck in one of the holes in a chainlink fence. I agree: It’s important to keep our eyes on the big things while also enjoying the small things….
I collect sea glass for meditative work breaks. I believe the further the wave is sucked back, the stronger the resulting force of return.
We are getting stronger, we queenagers.
Photography brings me joy. I started a daily photography project last fall when a severe drought was announced in Boston, MA of a brook(stream) that runs thru my neighborhood. Water is life.