On Saturday, Newnham College played host to the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Women of the Year foundation. Founded in 1955 to celebrate and further women’s achievements in all fields, Women of the Year has for 60 years organised grants and support for charities working with women, as well as an annual lunch and lecture to which influential and successful women from all areas of professional life are invited
Previous ‘Women of the Year’ include human rights lawyers, philanthropists, Olympic and Paralympic medallists, anti-FGM campaigners and inventors.

The afternoon began with a speech given by Principal of Newnham College Dame Carol Black, discussing the ongoing work of the foundation in women’s education.

Women of the Year president, comedian, politician and Cambridge alumna Sandi Toksvig addressed the audience of Newnham alumni and former women of the year, reflecting on over twenty years of involvement with the organisation.

She told the distinguished crowd that over this time, Women of the Year has recognised the incredible work of huge numbers of women, from singers to shepherdesses. The focus of the event was a keynote speech by economist Alison Wolf, Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London. The speech, based on her book ‘The XX Factor’, explored the intersection between gender and class.

Wolf argued that the fault lines of the gender divide could no longer be drawn between men and women. Instead, the real division lay between middle class and working class women.

Wolf claimed that “the impact of this seismic shift” means “inequality among women is growing faster than among men”. She went on to explain that we are experiencing “the end of sisterhood”, as women have far less in common in virtue of being women than was once the case.

Most of Wolf’s research was focused on the difference between women who had graduated from university, and those who had not. She discovered that graduates had a much lower rate of fertility, and those graduates who did decide to have children had them much later.

Wolf attributed this phenomenon to an “outsourcing of carework”, especially middle-class, white Western women, who relied on what Wolf called the “global care chain”; this concept, pioneered by Professor Arlie Hochschild at UC Berkeley, is used to illustrate the crucial role of migrant women workers in the care sector in wealthy countries.

Speaking to Varsity after the talk, Journalist and Broadcaster Julie Etchingham, a graduate of English from Newnham, commended Women of the Year’s work in celebrating the achievements of women from across the spectrum of class.

Etchingham explained that whilst high profile and celebrity women do receive awards, much of the most important work of Women of the Year involves recognising the vital work done by extraordinary women who rarely receive public praise.