We are all familiar with speeches that new appointees to top jobs make - the speeches designed to say nothing, cause no offence, ruffle no feathers, and avoid the crime of contemplation. Jenny Watson's inaugural speech as the new chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission doesn't cause offence or ruffle feathers, but she does have plenty to say and she has had a hard think about where women - and men - are at.
The EOC has often seemed to be in hibernation, curled up and quiet as a survival strategy in a hostile climate. It has always been under-resourced and under-powered. Mostly, it has been chaired by women who did not know much about inequality and injustice, who were too focused on not causing offence and ruffling feathers, and too interested in getting a gong in the new years honours list.
But Jenny Watson's speech carries the confidence of a campaigner. She used the occasion to contemplate the 30 years of the Sex Discrimination Act and the EOC, the time of a mighty but unfinished revolution. She elaborated an agenda that contrasts with this Government's culpable complacency about inequality.
What makes her speech quietly challenging is that it breaks away from equal opportunities as achievements, and instead explores a gender agenda that concerns social relationships: between men and women, between women and employers, between women and the state.
This approach transcends the usual limits of EOC-talk and considers the point at which, as Watson said, 'the shimmering facade of sex equality disappears', the point at which women find themselves on a 'fast track and its trajectory is downwards'.
This is the care track: however well-qualified or well-appointed a woman is, as soon as she becomes a carer, of the young or the old or the ill, then she is done for. Watson cautions that once women become carers they move massively into part-time employment, relative poverty, and an often lonely life of sacrifice.
It is the political economy of care that has always shadowed equal opportunities discourse; it is critical to women's conditions of existence, but marginalised from mainstream debates, which prefer to discuss equality as if it had nothing to do with the (unpaid) work of everyday life.
Watson's approach carries an implicit invitation to care workers to unite with equality activism.
