But I always interrupted. I shouted over him to say things like “When I grow up, I will be a doctor”, or “Maybe I’ll go into engineering”, or “I will be President!”. I fantasised about becoming an army general so I could set my father free from prison, where he was being held as a political prisoner. Every time I saw a plane fly overhead (which was not as frequent back in those days), I would declare that I would grow up to be a pilot. I thought I had limitless options. I was a dreamer.

The response from most adults, both men and women, was always the same: “If God wanted you to be anything other than a wife and mother, he would have created you a man.” My kinder relatives would at least attempt to base their prejudice against women on something more than “God’s will”. They would say that women were not designed to do certain jobs, that it went against the natural order. My uncles and cousins would explain that every woman they knew who attempted to take a man’s job had failed. They insisted that it was actually a blessing to be a female and I should be happy since they had to work, while I got to enjoy the fruits of their labour and protection.

For many women around the world, a similar, deeply ingrained misogyny remains a part of everyday life. Yet there are also countless examples of women who prove this persistent myth to be wrong. Today, especially in the West, there are women who do — and excel at — all the things I dreamed of as a child and much more.

Nevertheless, there is now a ridiculous campaign in America (which is fast spreading to other countries), that seeks to fast-track the closing of the inequality gap and eliminate all prejudice against women in one fell swoop. The result is a caricaturing of a very complex situation: it is one thing to develop animation characters for Disney that feature girls and women as superheroes or to swap a woman for James Bond, but it is quite another to place women in high-profile positions when they are clearly unqualified for the job. As we are starting to discover, doing so only affirms prejudices.

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Enter Kamala Harris. When Joe Biden was searching for a running mate, it seems he had just two requirements: black and female. The Democratic Party agreed, pressuring Biden to select a “diverse” candidate for vice president; at one point, he boasted of having to choose between four black women. Biden plucked out Harris from his narrow search field and what did he get? A vice president who is unhelpful in advancing his agenda and unable to connect with the American people.

This week marked the second time Biden slipped up and referred to his deputy as “President Harris”. But don’t be fooled. His mistake says more about his own level of competence than Harris’s. As we approach the one-year mark of Biden’s presidency, it is obvious that Harris was set up for failure from the start. She had neither the experience nor the demeanour to be a successful vice president. Biden’s approval ratings may have slumped, but they have nothing on his Veep’s.

Her failure is so embarrassing that even traditional allies are starting to flee. CNN, which traditionally fawns over black female Democrats, published a blistering hit on her late last year, painting her office as dysfunctional. A former employee described her management style as having destructive patterns. Since her disastrous trip to the southern border last June, at least seven of her close aides have resigned.

While I have never been a fan of Kamala Harris, it does sadden me to see her fail so miserably. I had hoped the first female vice president would prove a success. After all, her failures affect more than just the White House and the Democratic Party; they affect women everywhere. On one level, Harris’s failures affirm the beliefs of misogynists who incorrectly believe that women are not capable of holding such weighty positions. It provides fodder to those men like my uncles and cousins, validating their prejudices against women.

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More depressing, however, is the impact it could have on women: it’s not too difficult to see how Harris becoming the target of ridicule could dissuade young girls from taking such positions in the future. For them to see a woman finally make it to the position of Vice President and then fail so ignominiously is a massive discouragement to every girl dreaming of a big future.

But this is also the problem with quotas more broadly. Equality and empowerment can’t be achieved through bureaucratic box-ticking. It has to be fought for and earned. Harris, however, is a clear example of someone who has acquired her position due to her immutable characteristics, rather than her own abilities and achievements. The consequence of this isn’t hard to discern: any successful woman will wonder if she, too, were hired to fulfil a quota requirement, asking if she earned her position or were handed it.

What today’s activists fail to understand is that the key for any woman to succeed remains the same as it has always been: to prove that she is capable. Simply ticking the boxes of “female” or “minority” and expecting a good outcome might make you feel good about yourself in the short term. But in the real world, it is never enough. In the case of Harris, it is a recipe for incompetence.

I wasn’t wrong to dream of something better when I was a little girl, despite my family’s disbelief. Girls today deserve to do the same, with strong and successful female leaders setting an example. How sad, then, that arguably the most powerful female politician in the world embodies neither of these qualities. All America is left with is a failed black woman. And there’s nothing progressive about that.

But despite this, I wouldn’t dare trade our current set-up for what’s been proposed as an alternative. It would simplify the process, that’s certain. But it rests on one qualification, that trumps all else:

Are you a man or a woman?

That, in a nutshell, is a mandatory quota system. The dubious policy reared its ugly head again this week when the Fawcett Society launched their 2018 Sex and Power Index, which calls for, among other things, “a time-limited use of quotas across public bodies and the boards of large corporate organisations enabled by law”.

Time-limited or not, mandated quotas are one of the most blunt, crass, and ineffective instruments available to tackle issues of gender imbalance. They rob women of any sense of achievement they might otherwise feel from being rewarded a pay rise or a promotion.

Some claim that quotas are a pathway to a genuine meritocracy, which give women the opportunity to break through the glass ceiling, where their talents can finally be observed. But this justification is fundamentally anti-meritocratic, and – while I’m sure unintended – extremely demeaning.

The assumption is that women need more support than men to get into top positions. If there were evidence to suggest that women faced overt discrimination in the workplace – as there was 60 years ago – this argument might hold up. But the data we have today, particularly around the gender pay gap, tell a very different story. Women in part-time work are out-earning men, while women aged 22-39 in full time work have a negligible gender pay gap.

The lack of women in senior roles is largely a result of time taken out of the workplace to raise children (more on this later). Even the Office for National Statistics, which calculates the official pay gap data in the UK, notes that its findings do not include like-for-like comparisons, and provide no evidence of breaches in equality legislation.

You can skirt around the issue all you like, but quota systems are intrinsically designed to prioritise gender first and qualifications second. The merits and achievements of Jane are only considered after the pool of applicants has been purged of enough Joes to satisfy whatever percentage of roles the law mandates women fill.

It’s not simply the demeaning nature of quotas that should concern us, but also the unintended consequences of their implementation.

Mandated quotas have the catastrophic effect of taking legitimacy and respect away from women in positions of power, while simultaneously giving credibility to rogue Men’s Rights groups, which often (and wrongly) complain that women have an easier time of it, both in the workplace and in society overall. Any tensions that currently exist between women and men at work will only be exacerbated by a quota policy, and sympathies are likely to end up with the wrong group.

And what about the evidence from abroad? Despite all the baggage that comes with quotas, have they proven successful in giving women a deserved step up?

Look at Norway: in 2003, legislation was brought in requiring all public limited companies to implement a 40 per cent quota for women on their boards, to be achieved within five years’ time. On the face of it, small groups of women benefited. Those already in high-paying, senior roles were given further promotions, but there was “no discernible beneficial effect on women at lower levels of the corporate hierarchy.” As often happens in the modern-day gender debate (think BBC pay furore), the salaries of elite women became the focus, while the status of the majority of the working female population went largely unchanged.

But there have been other problems with Norway’s quota legislation. Between 2008 and 2013, 195 public companies became private and nearly 1,000 board member seats were culled altogether (denying opportunities for men and women to progress).

And for the firms that tried to meet the target, the quick increase in female board reps (9% in 2003 to a mandated 40% by 2008), led companies to promote “many women who were less experienced than the directors they had before.”

In 2011, The Economist reported a study from the University of Michigan, which “found that firms that were forced to increase the share of women on their boards by more than ten percentage points saw one measure of corporate value…fall by 18%”.

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What the evidence from Norway does highlight is that quotas aren’t the best way to achieve such diversity. As Spectator editor and Telegraph columnist Fraser Nelson pointed out a few weeks ago, there is plenty that could be done tomorrow to help more women progress through the ranks at work, like making “more childcare tax-deductible and, in general, take a little less away from working mothers trying to make ends meet”. Campaigns around voluntary shared parental leave could also do the trick.

But quotas are the least sensible way to go. They undermine women; they undermine business; and they leave no one better off, except the campaigners, who can pat themselves on the back for a job poorly done.

As we continue to make bold strides – to shed labels, reject stereotypes, and create inclusive communities – we must also slay the notion that a policy promoting radically different treatment in the workplace for different genders could ever be dubbed “progressive”.

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