I.

‘Chick lit’
Read the opening of a modern romantic novel. Which adverbs or adjectives in bold are
possible?
Jemima J by Jane Green

God, I wish I were thin. I wish I were thin, gorgeous, and could get any man I want. You
probably think I’m crazy. I mean here I am, sitting at work on my own with a massive
double-decker club sandwich in front of me, but I’m allowed to dream, aren’t I?
Half an hour to go of my lunch break. I finish my sandwich and look cautiously/ furtively/
privately around the office to see whether anyone is looking. It’s okay, the coast is clear /
fair, so I can pull open my top drawer and sneak out the slab of chocolate.

Another day in my humdrum / docile/ dreary life, but it shouldn’t be humdrum /

docile/ dreary. I’m a journalist, for God’s sake. Surely that’s a(n) stunning/ glamorous/
exciting existence. I love the English language, playing with words, but alas / miserably/
sadly my talents are wasted here at the Kilburn Herald. I hate this job. When I meet new
people and they ask what I do for a living, I hold my head up tall/ high/ highly and say,
“I’m a journalist.” I then try to change the subject, for the inevitable / necessary question
after that is, “Who do you work for?” I hang my head lowly/ low, mumble the Kilburn
Herald, and confess that I do the Top Tips column. Every week I’m flooded with mail from
sad and alone/ lonely/ derelict people in Kilburn with nothing better to do than write in
with questions like, ‘What’s the best way to bleach a white marbled lino floor? And ‘I have a
pair of silver candlesticks. The silver is now tarnished/ faded, any suggestions?’ And every
week I sit for hours on the phone, ringing lino manufacturers, silver-makers, and ask them
for the answers. This is my form of journalism.

Ben Williams is the deputy news editor. Tall/ High and handsome, he is also the office
Lothario. Ben Williams is secretly/ slyly fancied by every woman at the Kilburn Herald, not
to mention the woman in the sandwich bar who follows his stride thoughtfully/ longingly
as he walks past every lunchtime. Ben Williams is gorgeous. His fair/ light brown hair is
carelessly/ casually/ awkwardly hanging over his left eye, his eyebrows perfectly/
utterly arched, his dimples, when he smiles, in exactly/ accurately the right place. He is
the perfect combination of handsome hunk and vulnerable/ weedy/ helpless little boy.

Listen and compare. What is it about this extract that signifies it is ‘chick lit’? What is
your opinion of this type of book?

II. Desperate Husbands // A Slow Take-off for Female Pilots

1. Look at the titles of the two texts. What do you think they mean? Read the
introductions. Which text(s) do you think these phrases come from?
flight deck turbulent weather air traffic controller
domestic issues steep learning curve career path
had to pull my weight lost in admiration tank-like buggy
slightly taken aback swap the boardroom exhibited prejudice
household chores the breadwinner hostile to the idea

DESPERATE HUSBANDS
‘It’s a dirty job,’ warns Hugo Carey. ‘When people talk about having an anno
horribilis, they are not normally referring to the year in which they had their
first children and got married. But for me that year was also the year in
which I lost my job and became just one of the growing league of stay-at-
home husbands.’
A slow take-off for female pilots
When two children, a six-year-old girl and an older boy, visited her flight deck last week,
British Airways pilot Aoife Duggan asked if they would like to fly planes, too. The boy said
yes but the girl demurred, saying: ‘I think I’d like to be an air hostess – boys are pilots.’ A
surprised Duggan says: ‘I was like, “No! Come and sit in my seat, wear my hat.’”

2. Read about house husband Hugo Carey and read about Cliodhna [kli:ǝna] and Aoife
[i:fǝ] Duggan, the female pilots.

DESPERATE HUSBANDS
According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, Hugo is one of over 220,000 house
husbands – a figure that has leapt from fewer than 120,000 16 years ago. Although one of many,
it still came as a shock for him to swap the boardroom for the baby-changing mat. But he was
used to bombshells – he’d faced one just two years earlier when he and his wife Susie went for
their first baby scan.
‘Is this your first scan?’, asked the ultrasound technician. Hugo and Susie answered eagerly,
‘Yes, it is.’ ‘Well, it’s two, twins.’ Stony silence was followed by convulsive laughter. They all
started to giggle. Poppy and Thomas – now 18 months old – probably did, too. It was the start of
a journey of discovery for Hugo. He was made redundant when the twins were ten months old,
and with Susie, a fashion consultant, now the breadwinner, there wasn’t much choice. ‘I was just
going to have to pull my weight and become a hands-on, full-time dad.’ He was unfazed,
convinced he had a way with children. He now says, ‘Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so confident
if I had known just how steep the learning curve was going to be.’
For a start, their two-bedroom flat, which has no garden, felt terribly poky. His daily routine was
exhausting at first. The twins woke each other up, so he had to be up and out of bed at 6 a.m. to
let Susie sleep. And of course, the housework fell to Hugo. He had always been the chef in the
family, so cooking wasn’t a problem, but other household chores – cleaning, ironing, and
shopping – and looking after two small children, proved something of a challenge. He’s now
convinced that men don’t have the same patience as women, but he’s managed to raise his own
level of patience. At first, when out with the twins in their large, tank-like buggy, he would
march them everywhere at an angry pace, but now he has learnt to stop and give way to other
pavement users.
The humiliation of going down to the job centre has also been somewhat diminished by the
hilarity of signing on accompanied by a couple of loud, hysterical children. Officials now hurry
him through what is normally a long and tedious procedure.
After the twins’ first birthday, he decided it was time to locate the nearest playground. ‘I think
the mums were quite excited to see a man and I was asked if I wanted to attend their pub session
on the first Thursday of the month – they were probably just as bored as I was. I politely
declined.’
As the twins now approach their second birthday, Hugo can look back and admit that his role as
a house husband took quite a bit of adjustment. At first, he yearned for office life, but now the
rewards for his efforts have become much clearer. He says, ‘In fact, I am just grateful to have
spent these crucial months with my children. I’ve seen them grow up, take their first steps,
discover, and learn. I see lots of dads who obviously don’t get to spend much time with their kids
and they don’t seem to have a strong bond. I feel sorry for them.’
One problem that’s emerged is that because Hugo is now used to doing things for the kids, his
methods don’t always coincide with Susie’s. However, his relationship with his mother has
improved immeasurably – she had five children, and Hugo is lost in admiration for her.

A slow take-off for female pilots

Four decades after the first female pilot started work for a commercial airline, there are still
relatively few women sitting in Duggan’s seat. Of the 3,500 pilots employed by British Airways,
just 200 are women, yet the airline still employs the highest proportion of female pilots of any
UK airline. Globally, around 4,000 of the 130,000 airline pilots are women.
How much has changed since Yvonne Pope Sintes became Britain’s first commercial airline
captain in 1972?
She says, ‘Women are just as good as men, but they seem to have more domestic issues. I
actually met someone, just a few months ago, who said he didn’t know that there were any
women pilots. I couldn’t believe it.’
When Sintes, now 83, started her career, airlines actively barred women. Inspired by watching
the planes while growing up near Croydon airport, she tried to join the RAF after school but they
wouldn’t take women. So she became a flight attendant and gained her private pilot licence with
the Airways Aero Club. Then she became an air traffic controller and eventually, in 1965, a
pilot. She says her male colleagues ‘didn’t like me at all.’ Around half of them were hostile to
the idea of a female pilot, ‘Someone actually said they’d resign if a woman joined.
Unfortunately, he didn’t.’ Later, it was the passengers who exhibited prejudice. ‘The men always
looked slightly taken aback.’
According to Aoife Duggan and her older sister Cliodhna, who is also a pilot, reactions to their
gender are more likely to come from passengers than colleagues. Only a couple of years ago, at
her previous job for an airline in Asia, says Aoife, one man took one look at her and her female
co-pilot and got off the plane. Cliodhna says she still sees some passengers’ surprise.
‘We’ve had pretty awful weather recently. My last landing was in Gatwick and it was
particularly turbulent … one of the passengers said, ‘Oh my goodness, you look so small, I can’t
believe you just landed this giant plane.’
For both women, flying was a part of their childhood – their mother was a flight attendant, and
their father an airline pilot. They grew up around a flying club. ‘There were some women flying
at the club,’ says Cliodhna. ‘I was aware that there were women flying and I didn’t see my
gender as a bar.’ Aoife, seven years younger, grew up seeing her older sister’s career path and
decided to follow.
Why do they think so few women go into flying? ‘A lot of the time it’s a matter of younger girls
not being made aware that it’s a career option open to them,’ says Aoife. ‘It’s not the kind of
thing people talk about in schools. You get young boys who say they want to be a pilot or an
astronaut, whereas girls are not encouraged that way.’
For the past couple of years, British Airways has been trying to increase its recruitment of
women. ‘What we’re after is the best person for the job,’ says Captain Dave Thomas, BA’s chief
pilot and head of training. They are having some success – the number of female candidates for
jobs has gone from 5% to 15%. Thomas thinks the lack of women is mainly a cultural problem
which needs to be tackled at an early age. ‘We did a little bit of research, surveying children
between the ages of six and 12, and I think it came out as number two on the boys’ list of top
jobs, but I don’t think girls think of it as an option.’

Which words from Exercise 1 are in the articles? Were your ideas correct? What is their
context?

3. Read the articles again. Answer the questions about Hugo or the pilots, Cliodhna
and Aoife.
1) In what ways is what they do not typical of their sex? What are the statistics concerning
this?
2) What is the background to their current jobs or situation? Was it their choice?
3) Did they approach their roles confidently?
4) What problems did they face when they started?
5) What has been the attitude of people of the opposite sex?
6) What evidence is there of changing attitudes?
7) Which of these people are mentioned in the both articles? What do you learn about them?
 A six-year-old girl;
 Susie;
 Yvonne Sintes;
 A technician;
 Dave Thomas;
 Job centre officials;
 Their mother or father

4. Whose lifestyle, the sisters’ or Hugo’s, do you think is most enviable? Why?