Alibhai-Brown Yasmin - Why Women Need Quotas : (Provocations)

I was first encouraged to think about the weirdness of women being treated differently from men while I was growing up in Greece in the late 60s. My mother, despite being a enthusiastic mathematician, was prevented by her father and five brothers from going to university to study physics. This just wasnt done. Sending a girl to spend all her time with men in university what would the neighbours think? Today we see this sort of attitude in Afghanistan and many other less developed countries, especially those where religion dominates politics. But in post-war Europe not so long ago, similar attitudes prevailed. This was especially true in countries where religious beliefs were strongly held. Until all faiths allow women the same right to be preachers and priests or imams, women will always be held back.

So instead, thwarted by her family, my mother, this very clever but frustrated woman, pursued other interests. She was the best electrician and mechanic anyone ever met. She fixed everything in our house and those of myriad relatives. This was an unpaid hobby. She also became an expert poker player, financing all her expenses and many of ours through her gains over the years. She rode a motorbike, wore leather jackets, smoked while my father wasnt watching and was wonderfully unconventional for her time. She also believed in all of us, her son and daughters, having similar opportunities, and though Greece was still a very prudish country, she had no problem with us mixing freely with members of the other sex. She commandeered a spot next to our summer house and turned it into a volleyball ground where everyone from the neighbourhood would get together and play every afternoon and so it was that my younger sister became a professional with the top volleyball team in Greece and was on the national team for years thereafter.

But mixing with boys was so frowned upon by the rest of our enormous family of uncles and aunts and many cousins (my father was one of ten, my mother one of seven) that my female cousins were forbidden to come and stay with us because there were boys around. Boys? I used to think. What is so special about them? And if boys can go wherever they want, why cant girls? Interestingly, this freedom was not extended to all aspects of our lives. My father was concerned, when I was in my early teens, that I would be seen by neighbours going out with boys on my own, even though I was in a mixed school. Appearances had to be kept up.

However, in this mix of confused values it was perfectly OK to go out partying from a very young age as long as my brother was with me! So my brother and I perfected a solution. His friends liked to really party; my friends, who in fact were his own schoolmates , liked more sober pastimes classical music and chess. We would therefore get ready to leave together, say our goodbyes to our parents, exit the house and, after a few hundred yards, separate and go our own way. We would then meet, each agree on a story and return home together. It worked a treat, but it infuriated me deep down: why were women so restricted and not men? And why did my brother, useless as far as I was concerned, who never did any work at school and got away with it, automatically have such a right that I had to fight for? It was incomprehensible to me. Perhaps this was the first stirring of feminism inside a young Greek girl.