Time up for era that fails to give an women’s voices an equal weight
AS SUMMER gears up, with its festivals and summer schools, there are inevitably ‘manels’ of men sharing manly insights, almost always on a topic that affects us all.
This year will go down in record books as a year that brought issues of gender into the spotlight in Ireland, issues that have become part of the public conversation in ways they have never been before.
So it’s especially surprising (and troubling) to hear the MacGill Summer School this year has a line-up of 45 male speakers and moderators compared with 15 female speakers and moderators.
On its website, the MacGill Summer School 2018 says it has a “very full agenda which will reflect many of the issues of our time with over 50 eminent and highly qualified contributors who will look at and analyse these issues in a dispassionate and informed manner”. But why are there so few “eminent” women? Given the current conversations around representation and the need to elevate (or even just include) women, it’s not a good look.
Organisers have said they couldn’t find any women to talk – so they just invited a bunch of men.
Joe Mulholland, director of the school, originally defended the number of women speaking, saying he had done his best to gender-balance the panels. He said it was MacGill’s policy “to have as many women as possible”.
But, he said, “certain difficulties have to be taken into account. At times it is difficult to find the person with the correct aptitude for some of the topics that are discussed in sessions. An effort is always made to ensure as many women as possible are included.”
This is problematic, as speaking at important industry events is a vital professional development opportunity and a key way for women to build their profiles. Did they consider potential problems of finding childcare and babysitters
‘Did they consider the problems of finding childcare faced by working women?’
that working women have — burdens men often don’t share? Did they expand their search?
Did they look for feedback on whom they might invite to make the pool more diverse? Did they wonder why only a quarter of the attendees were women and think about what they could do to attract more?
Social Democrat TDs Catherine Murphy and Róisín Shorthall said they would withdraw from their respective panels at the school unless something was done to tackle the gender-balance.
Ben Tonra, Professor of European Foreign, Security and Defence Policy at UCD, threatened to withdraw too. “Fix it @ MacGillSummerSc fix it now or I’m not coming. Full stop. No debate,” he tweeted.
Speaking on RTÉ’s ‘Today with Sean O’Rourke’ yesterday, Mulholland apologised for his use of the word “aptitude”, saying it “was a totally wrong term to use and I apologise for that and withdraw it. It wasn’t what I meant, the right qualification or whatever, but it’s sometimes difficult”. He admitted he had “failed obviously from the point of view of gender balance”.
We have a problem. In the public arena, there is never any shortage of middle-aged men who are asked to step into the spotlight and give expert opinions. The world is filled with all-male panels at mostly male conferences, featuring male keynote speakers and discussions dominated by men.
One study of TED talks found male speakers outnumber females by a ratio of three to one.
The depressing Missing Voices survey, monitoring female expertise on panels and carried out by Lucy Keaveney and Dolores Gibbons during October 2014, found female voices are mostly heard reading scripted items (for example, news and weather).
They are also more likely to be heard on topics like health, education, caring and cookery, maintaining the stereotype of a passive follower, carer or victim.
During the survey, 44pc of the women who featured on ‘Newstalk Breakfast’, ‘The Pat Kenny Show’ and 50pc on ‘Lunchtime’, were interviewed as victims of circumstances.
A Twitter account called Academic Manel Watch (@ManelWatchIre) highlights men-only experts panels at conferences and events. It finds all too many of them.
SURE, it would have been great to have female barristers, political analysts, authors, comedians, etc, behind MacGill’s foldaway tables, contributing to the testosterone-heavy banter and bluesky thinking, but for many reasons that isn’t going to happen this summer. But it isn’t good enough any more and we need men’s help.
Men have an important role to play in all of this. You might think you can’t do much unless you’re the organiser. But, yes, you can.
Male speakers can promise not to appear on or organise all-male panels, like Ben Tonra did.
And the rest of us can walk out if we find ourselves listening to another manel.