The BBC recently aired a Russian documentary about the country’s last independent television station. As it happens, it did so just a few days before “Dozhd Optimistic Channel” was shut down by the Kremlin’s war-driven surge of tyranny. It tells the story of how a glamorous, rich Russian woman called Natalya Sindeyeva decided to use her husband’s banking fortune to start a TV station as a vanity project and gradually found herself becoming a dissident fighting for a free media.
When it started 12 years ago, Dozhd was never meant to be a news station. The idea was to chat about lifestyle, fashion, culture and other such things. But when major events happened, like bombings, protests or police violence, it ended up being the only widely available channel able to broadcast footage of them.
Inexorably, this pushed the channel further down a different path. And then, after years of tug o’ war with the state, it was closed.
The documentary, shown as part of the BBC’s Storyville series under the name Tango with Putin, is an example of how, in an authoritarian environment, supposedly frivolous projects and “soft” cultural activities can morph into contentious acts of rebellion against autocracy. Dictators don’t just want to control the footage you see and the ideologies you encounter. They want to control the very stuff of ordinary life – gossip, beauty and leisure.
That is why discussions of the outfits worn by Xi Jinping’s wife are heavily censored in China and why an apolitical rock band like Plastic People of the Universe was banned in communist Czechoslovakia.
These are not theocracies, yet they share the same prudish desire to control the small, harmless pleasures of ordinary people. If the people are allowed to explore original thinking in one zone, the habit might quickly spread. Unfortunately, this sort of suppression is often not as unpopular as one might assume.
Under the guise of policing the “moral life” of the nation, a government can frequently secure broad support for media blackouts and persecution, especially if it can count on support from a religious authority, like the Russian Orthodox Church. Thus, a nation wastes one of its greatest gifts: the creativity, courage and independent thought of entrepreneurs like Ms Sindeyeva.
Dozhd, with its female-dominated management, would be an admirable icon for International Women’s Day, but in the UK the focus was on more mundane matters, like pay differences between men and women. To address the gender pay gap, the Government said it was going to start some schemes encouraging companies to make pay grades and negotiability more transparent.
But it may be time to admit that we are hitting the limits of what policy can achieve by assuming the pay gap is caused by discrimination. It is more likely, nowadays, that women end up being paid less because they spend more time raising children and caring for family and that these are regularly matters of personal choice.
The headline pay gap in the UK, often cited in these debates, is 15.4 per cent. A large portion of this is accounted for by women working in less well-paid professions, like care work, and another large chunk (roughly half) is due to the fact that more women than men work part-time. Among part-time workers, women are actually paid 2.7 per cent per hour more than men. No one is blaming this on misandry. It’s probably because the cohort of women working part-time includes more professionals taking time to raise their children. Compare full-time workers, and the pay gap is only 8 per cent. (The headline figure is bigger, because part-time work is paid less per hour than full-time).
The general picture, as David Goodhart has pointed out, is that women earn less because caring for others is either unpaid or badly paid. This, rather than some old-fashioned row about sexist brutes in the office, is the debate we need to have.
