Judith Woods: What the Dove ad really teaches us

A camera records the reactions of real women as they draw near two doors - beautiful and average. Photo / YouTube

Opinion

In the new Dove advertisement, which this week went viral on social media, there are two large signs over the entrance doors at what look like airports in different countries. One reads "Beautiful", the other reads "Average". A camera records the reactions of real women as they draw near. Some are confused, one backs away and retreats entirely, others stride forward. Most walk through the door marked "Average".

But, interestingly, the women with teenagers chivvy, drag and physically push their diffident daughters through the "Beautiful" door. It's life-affirming, it's instinctive, it's the most natural, nurturing thing in the world. I would do the same. Of course I would.

As mothers, we see what our girls don't - not just beauty, but boundless potential. We want them to be a better version of us, to seize every opportunity and not be held back by those powerful forces that we, with the benefit of age and wisdom, have overcome.

It's far from easy to convey to an awkward, coltish teenage girl that her feelings of embarrassment, her lack of confidence, her reluctance to stand out from the crowd are all in the mind.

And the harsh reality is that even if we do imbue them with self-esteem and ambition, and convince them that women and men are equal, the chances are we will be selling them a lie.

The bitter truth is that even today, high-ranking female managers are a rarity. And far from creating a snowball effect, the presence of one woman in a top-tier job halves the chances of a second woman landing a high-ranking position at the same firm.

According to US-based research published in the Strategic Management Journal, the "Queen Bee" theory commonly - pejoratively - used to explain why women don't appear to promote other women is a myth.

Women who've climbed to the top don't pull the ladder up behind them because they feel threatened by rivals. It is men who decide that one woman in senior management is enough to satisfy the demands of diversity, resulting in a situation where women in the US make up nearly half the workforce, yet just 8.7 per cent are top managers.

In the UK, the figures are less dramatic: according to the Office of National Statistics, 32 per cent of managers are women, though most occupy junior level positions; just 15.6 per cent of directors in FTSE 100 companies are women.

Yes, women do very often take time out to have children and, arguably, there's a price to be paid for leaving the workforce for a while. But it's iniquitous and wholly disproportionate to consequently suffer a lifetime earnings gap of £423,000 compared to men on a similar career path.

So it's down to us as the mothers of daughters and sons - perhaps especially sons - to bring our children up with the will to effect change and the resilience to cast aside meaningless gender barriers and establish a genuine meritocracy.

But we must always remember that while men and women are indisputably equal, they are not the same.

For a start, no male-orientated advertising campaign would be likely to feature doorways marked "Handsome" and "Average".

And if it did, every man would stride through "Handsome" without a second's thought. Every last one. Even Jeremy Clarkson.

But my abiding hope is that, in the future, if my daughters ever see actual or metaphorical signs like these, they won't panic or have a personal crisis.

Instead, they'll simply climb up, pull the signs down and nonchalantly trample them underfoot as they continue on their way.

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