Before they caved, the Bank of England’s case for their all-male line-up also rested on the meritocracy argument: historical figures were, they said, chosen using an ‘objective selection criteria’. To join the ‘gilded list’ of ‘key figures from our past’, a person must fulfil the following: have broad name recognition; have good artwork; not be controversial; and have made ‘a lasting contribution which is universally recognised and has enduring benefits’. Reading these subjective designations of worth, I realised how the Bank had ended up with five white men on its banknotes: the historical gender data gap means that women are just far less likely to be able to fulfil any of these ‘objective’ criteria.
In 1839 the composer Clara Schumann wrote in her diary, ‘I once thought that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?’ The tragedy is, Schumann was wrong. Women before her had been able to do it, and they included some of the most successful, prolific and influential composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.71 It’s just that they didn’t have ‘broad name recognition’, because a woman barely has to die before she is forgotten – or before we consign her work to the gender data gap by attributing it to a man.
Felix Mendelssohn published six of his sister Fanny Hensel’s pieces under his own name and in 2010 another manuscript previously thought to be his was proven to be Hensel’s.72 For years classical scholars argued that the Roman poet Sulpicia couldn’t possibly have written the verses signed with her name – they were too good, not to mention too smutty.73 Judith Leyster, one of the first Dutch women to be admitted to an artists’ guild, was renowned in her time, but after her death in 1660 she was erased, her work attributed to her husband. In 2017, new works by nineteenth-century artist Caroline Louisa Daly were discovered – they had been previously attributed to men, one of whom was not even an artist.74
At the turn of the twentieth century, award-winning British engineer, physicist and inventor Hertha Ayrton remarked that while errors overall are ‘notoriously hard to kill [. . .] an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat’. She was right. Textbooks still routinely name Thomas Hunt Morgan as the person who discovered that sex was determined by chromosomes rather than environment, despite the fact that it was Nettie Stevens’ experiments on mealworms that established this – and despite the existence of correspondence between them where Morgan writes to ask Stevens for details of her experiment.75 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery that the sun is predominantly composed of hydrogen is often credited to her male supervisor.76 Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of injustice is Rosalind Franklin, whose work (she had concluded via her X-ray experiments and unit cell measurements that DNA consisted of two chains and a phosphate backbone) led James Watson and Francis Crick (now Nobel Prize-winning household names) to ‘discover’ DNA.
None of this means that the Bank of England deliberately set out to exclude women. It just means that what may seem objective can actually be highly male-biased: in this case, the historically widespread practice of attributing women’s work to men made it much harder for a woman to fulfil the Bank’s requirements. The fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can’t help but be biased against women. By default.
The case of the Bank’s subjective selection criteria also shows how male default can be both a cause and a consequence of the gender data gap. By neglecting to account for the historical gender data gap, the Bank’s selection procedure for historical figures was designed around the kind of success typically achieved by men; even a requirement as seemingly benign as that the figure not be controversial, well, as the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously put it, ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’. The result was that the Bank not only failed to correct for the historical gender data gap: it perpetuated it.
Such subjective designations of worth masquerading as objectivity crop up all over the place. In 2015 a British A level student called Jesse McCabe noticed that of the sixty-three set works included in her music syllabus, not a single one was by a woman. When she wrote to her exam board, Edexcel, they defended the syllabus. ‘Given that female composers were not prominent in the western classical tradition (or others for that matter),’ they wrote, ‘there would be very few female composers that could be included.’ The phrasing here is important. Edexcel doesn’t mean that there simply aren’t any female composers – after all, the International Encyclopaedia of Women Composers alone has more than 6,000 entries. What they are talking about here is ‘the canon’, that is, the body of works generally agreed to have been the most influential in shaping western culture.
Canon formation is passed off as the objective trickle-down of the musical marketplace, but in truth it is as subjective as any other value judgment made in an unequal society. Women have been locked out of the canon wholesale because what success looked like in composing has historically been almost impossible for women to achieve. For most of history, if women were allowed to compose at all, it was for a private audience and domestic setting. Large orchestral works, so crucial for the development of a composer’s reputation, were usually off limits, considered ‘improper’.77 Music was an ‘ornament’ for women, not a career.78 Even by the twentieth century, Elizabeth Maconchy (who was the first woman ever to chair the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain), was being curtailed in her ambitions by publishers such as Leslie Boosey, who ‘couldn’t take anything except little songs from a woman’.
Even if the ‘little songs’ women were allowed to write were enough to earn you a place in the canon, women simply didn’t have the resources or position to ensure their legacy. In her book Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music, Anna Brer compares the prolific seventeenth-century composer Barbara Strozzi (who ‘had more music in print in her lifetime than any other composer of the era’) to one of her male contemporaries, Francesco Cavalli. As head of music at St Mark’s in Venice (a position not open to women at the time), Cavalli had the money and the stature to ensure all his works, including the many he did not publish in his lifetime, were kept in a library. He could pay for an archivist to look after them, and he could, and did, pay for the Masses he composed to be sung on the anniversary of his death. In the face of such inequality of resources, Strozzi never stood a chance of being remembered on an equal footing. And to continue to insist on the primacy of a canon that excludes women like her is to perpetuate the male-biased injustices of the past.
As well as going some way to explaining their exclusion from cultural history, the exclusion of women from positions of power is often given as an excuse for why, when we teach them about the past, we teach children almost exclusively about the lives of men. In 2013, a battle raged in Britain over what we mean by ‘history’. On one side was the then British Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, brandishing his proposed new ‘back to basics’ national history curriculum.79 An army of twenty-first-century Gradgrinds, he and his supporters insisted that children needed ‘facts’.80 They needed a ‘foundation of knowledge’.