Normally on a serious occasion you expect people to be dressed more or less alike: it might be sporting, it might be “black tie” or office clothes, national dress or the uniform dark suit favoured by the House of Commons. But at the Women of the Year lunch this autumn there was a remarkable lack of conformity. Without moving your head more than two inches you could see a black trouser suit, a sari, a bare-armed summer frock, formal gowns in every conceivable colour – there were hardly two the same.
Maybe that’s an illustration of something that is often different between women’s gatherings, and men’s or mixed, which would be far more likely to have something specific in common: they’d all be lawyers, or veterans of the same school or share the same party or religion or be members of the same union. The fact that the women at that lunch were happy to sport just about as many styles as there are ways of dressing and come from so many cultures emphasised the extent to which they could be totally diverse in so many ways and still have any amount in common just by being women.
Maybe because of all the restrictions women have traditionally suffered in so many ways, the single fact that they were females, let alone successful females, was enough to unite them whatever they did and wherever they came from.
What do you think? Have your say below
