The message from the Telegraph mire

It is fair to say that when even The Telegraph toes the metropolitan liberal line, cultural conservatives have no broadsheet newspaper to represent their views.

If one assumes that The Telegraph is ‘the conservative’ broadsheet, it is possible to find within its pages constant sources of surprise. For instance, yesterday, Christine Armstrong, the author of ‘The Mother of All Jobs’, wrote about the perils that broad adoption of working from home might hold for women.

“The risk,” she said, is that “women and mothers” might prefer working from home to working in the office. She supported this hypothesis by citing research undertaken by the University of Stanford, which found, “that women with degrees and children are 50 per cent more likely to want to work from home than men.”

Ignoring the superfluous use of the word ‘women’ when connected by a conjunction to ‘mothers’, why would it be a ‘risk’ for women to be offered working arrangements they prefer? Would that not be a good thing?

No, said Ms. Armstrong. For if more women than men accepted their employer’s offer to work from home, it would mean, “that we could end up with offices being dominated by men.” The logical extension of this, of course, is the horror that it would “change the culture of work,” undoing “hard-won progress towards what Boris Johnson calls a ‘more feminine’ approach.”

To be fair to Ms. Armstrong, she also made a reasonable argument about the effect choosing to work from home would have on the careers of those who did. She contended that, “flexible working policies have proved, again and again, that being less visible in the office is detrimental to your career. In terms of pay rises, promotions and status: bosses trust and reward the people they see frequently.”

However, would that even be a problem in this case? It was, after all, specifically presented as a choice. Nowhere in Ms. Armstrong’s short article does she suggest that businesses would force women to work from home and men from the office.

We do not make all our career decisions based solely on whether they maximise our “pay rises, promotions and status”. We also consider a variety of other matters, such as location, the nature of the job, and the hours and conditions in which we will be expected to work. And different people will give different weight to each factor at different times.

For instance, truckers and oil sector workers could earn significantly more in Iraq during the US-led occupation than they could doing the same job in Britain or America. Many, however, did not feel the extra money was worth the risks involved. Equally, if women preferred to work from home, they would have implicitly taken the view that the difference in career prospects between working from home and in the office was not worth spending great amounts of time commuting in order to work inflexible hours. Is that not a judgement women are perfectly capable of making for themselves?

Ms. Armstrong’s answer to this question is also no. Women, she appears to argue, should be prevented from deciding how best to lead their lives. Instead, businesses should take decisions that “on the surface, are pretty unappealing. For example, preventing someone who wants to come into the office five days a week from doing so, while forcing someone else who would prefer to work at home all the time to come into town for at least some of the week.”

Why this would be only “on the surface” and “pretty” unappealing is an important question. Would it not be a horrifyingly authoritarian encroachment on personal choice that, by definition, made life less pleasant for everybody? And would that not still be the case when one scratches beneath the surface?

I do not know the answers to these questions, but then, unlike Ms. Armstrong, I do not see it as my place to dictate to women how they lead their lives or manage their careers. What I do know is that the ideological argument she makes, expounded in her sort of middle-class, progressive-feminist patois, can be found in the opinion columns of The Telegraph often enough for the reader to assume that it is the paper’s general editorial position on such matters. The Guardian, of course, is rather less likely to publish articles on women’s issues from a socially conservative perspective.

No newspaper is obliged to maintain ideological purity, or even generally to favour one political viewpoint while accepting a degree of heterodoxy. They can print what they want, and take whichever editorial stance they choose. However, it is fair to say that when even The Telegraph toes the metropolitan liberal line, cultural conservatives have no broadsheet newspaper to represent their views.