Every year, every month, there are more of them, the Women of the Year awards when female journalists are invited to join other women for a celebration of our sex at some London hotel. The other week it was the Harper’s Bazaar magazine’s Women of the Year awards, followed closely by the Cosmopolitan magazine’s Ultimate Women of the Year awards, not forgetting the Bounty Celebrity Mum of the Year award (which Samantha Cameron just narrowly missed).
Then there’s the Veuve Clicquot Women in Business Awards, the Glamour magazine awards (this year’s winner: Cheryl Cole), the Asian Women of Achievement Awards and the Barclays Women of the Year — won, I need hardly say, by Annie Lennox. She also took the Harper’s Bazaar Lifetime Achievement award, which makes you wonder how often female celebrities — Emma Thompson, Sam Taylor-Wood et al — can be recycled by WOTY organisers. And let’s not forget the NLA Property Women awards and the Orange Prize for Fiction written by wimmin.
But what are these occasions for? Do women really look at Cheryl, Annie et al and think to themselves, wow, if I could only work that bit harder, I could be like them? Is it a way of encouraging Team Woman to keep up the good work? Isn’t there something a bit, well, minority-minded about the exercise at a time when girls comfortably outstrip boys at exams? If it’s an excuse for a party, that’s another matter, and these awards are a harmless way for companies to get women in the public eye hitched to the brand.
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