FEMALE EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON U.S. ELECTION, GENDER ISSUES
She couldn’t look away, although at times she wished she would.
“I yelled at the television a few times,” admits Shari Graydon of watching the third U.S. presidential debate on Wednesday. “The very fact that Donald Trump is on the same stage as Hillary Clinton, and she is forced to treat him in any way as her equal, is insane.”
Like so many other Canadians, Graydon has been riveted to the ongoing spectacle of the U.S. presidential election, in which the first female candidate for the job is facing off against an adversary famed for making derogatory comments about women over the decades.
Graydon, though, is watching the race through an expert lens. The founder of Informed Opinions (informedopinions.ca) and ExpertWomen.ca has spent much of her career working to increase awareness of the underrepresentation of women’s voices in the public sphere.
While the bullying stance of the billionaire businessman makes her more than a little uneasy, Graydon adds that he’s done a service to helping people like her get the word out on the need for greater female public participation.
“Donald Trump has been the most effective recruitment tool the women’s movement has ever had,” says Graydon, echoing an opinion piece she wrote recently. “He shows us that the fight for women to be respected and heard is far from over.”
Graydon, who is based in Ottawa, is in Calgary this weekend for a conference at the University of Calgary entitled Speaking Her Mind: Canadian Women and Public Presence (speakinghermind.ca), a gathering of female public intellectuals from across the country.
Aritha van Herk, the conference’s co-organizer with Christl Verduyn of Mount Allison University, is well aware that when it comes to staging an event that endeavours to amplify women’s voices in the public sphere, her timing couldn’t be better.
“Yes, it does seem like very good timing, doesn’t it?” says van Herk, a creative writing professor at the University of Calgary and a renowned author, critic and public intellectual.
“We have Donald Trump news every day; we have a report that’s just come out saying Calgary is the second worst city in Canada for women to live: it all shows how very important this is.”
The weekend will cover a wide range of topics in panels, sessions and papers, featuring women experts in a variety of fields: from a rocket scientist (Natalie Panek) and bioethics expert (Francoise Baylis), to veterans of the entertainment world (Denise Donlon) and writers (Katherine Govier).
The idea for an academic gathering of female public intellectuals, says van Herk, came a couple of years ago when she was at a similar conference at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick.
All the female academics there, she says, “said to a person, ‘I’m not a public intellectual.’ When people compile lists of public intellectuals, they always list men. Women bring intelligence, experience and thoughtfulness to public discourse — we need to hear more from them.”
While van Herk and others across the country are working to include more female voices of expertise, public discourse has been taking a pummelling.
The third U.S. presidential election debate saw Trump refer to Clinton as a “nasty woman,” a personal attack with more than a hint of misogyny.
I used the opportunity Thursday to ask two conference invitees, both women with extensive backgrounds in the areas of women in politics and media, their thoughts on the often vitriolic events south of the border.
Like Graydon, Sylvia Bashevkin has been watching the U.S. presidential election through an expert lens — this one as a political scientist. “It’s a very important election, with a pathbreaking woman, and an equally path-breaking opponent,” says Bashevkin, a professor at the University of Toronto and author of several books on women and politics. “It’s an extremely unusual pairing.”
While Clinton’s profile as the most scrutinized woman on the planet has highlighted the seriousness of women vying for high office, Bashevkin says the public’s “comfort level” for a woman candidate for high office hasn’t kept pace.
“There is often a sense that they can’t deviate at all from the expectations of extremely polished manners and politeness,” she says of research into women in politics. “If a woman moves in the slightest direction, all of a sudden she is seen as the aggressor in the debate.”
Still, the perpetuation of such double standards doesn’t dissuade people like Graydon from speaking out — and encouraging other women to do the same.
“We need more women’s voices,” she says. “Those informed opinions aren’t being heard enough in public life.”