The chair that wasn't there

What should have happened when Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, saw there was no chair for her at a summit with two important men? Evidently, somebody, indeed everybody there, should have shouted “We need another chair” and some flunky rushed off to get one. Maybe fancy gilt chairs were in short supply, but they could have found something, surely, and one of the men should have sat on it. Then all would have been equal.

Von der Leyen’s retreat to the adjoining sofa was a pragmatic acceptance of defeat, but it was a mistake. And so was her detailed speech about the matter in the European Parliament last week. “The status of women is the status of democracy,” she declared, before going on to complain about her treatment in Turkey. “I cannot find any justification of how I was treated in the European treaties” she said, standing at the podium before MEPs, before adding that she had not seen any shortage of chairs in previous photographs of all-male meetings of the kind. “I felt hurt … I felt alone.” Oh dear. 

She should have moved on. Making more of the event sounded like whining, and no woman can afford to whine in politics or business. The fact of the chair insult, the film of it, was enough to demonstrate the problem – that women will still be marginalized, even if the woman holds one of the most prestigious positions in Europe. Through unthinking sexism, or deliberate retribution for women’s contemporary successes, men will make them pay. 

Does anyone think gender equality has happened? We’re still decades off.

What this contretemps in Istanbul last month showed was not so much sexism as plain brute rudeness. President Erdogan, as the host of the meeting, should have intervened to regularise the seating arrangements – but then he’s hardly famous as a woke kind of guy. You do have to wonder, if they’d all been men, would the outcome have been different? Imagine, hilariously, if Donald Trump were one of the three. Erdogan and Charles Michel would be knocked to the ground as the Donald, using the crash-through skills that served him so well at other international summits, made sure he had the pick of the two seats.