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Category: Misogyny

  • Whitlam’s revolution and why it matters now

    This is a slightly revised version of a vote of thanks given after a panel to launch of the ‘Women and Whitlam’ book with contributors, Elizabeth Reid, Marie Coleman and Blair Williams in conversation with editor Michelle Arrow. This was part of the ANU Meet the Author series, organised by Colin Steele at Kambri Cultural Centre Cinema, April 18. The podcast is available at  Meet the author – Michelle Arrow, Marie Coleman, Elizabeth Reid and Blair Williams.

    If you’re interested to know more about the book itself, check out this Q and A Michelle Arrow did with BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman.

    As the Honorable Tanya Plibersek observes in her foreword in popular memory, “the Whitlam government can feel like a three-year blur of movement and change.” But those revolutionary changes took years of hard, detailed policy work, much of it in the “long, cold exile of opposition” for 23 years. Moreover, despite the parlous representation of women in Parliament, the judiciary and senior levels of the public service at the time, these changes were co-created in partnership with women who were directly affected by major policy changes. As Plibersek avows, as we now say, Nothing about us, without us.

    Women were brought into the governing apparatus, but were connected to large numbers of women beyond, mobilised through the Women’s Electoral Lobby and the wider congregation of the Women’s Liberation Movement, embracing vibrant, diverse, debating streams of feminists – liberal feminists, radical feminists, socialist feminists. I swam in the latter stream.

    Plibersek draws two great lessons from Gough Whitlam – first that governments must be brave and bold, and second that they must be practical. She quips: “You can buy Blue Poles and sewer Western Sydney.”

    The many contributors chart how expansive this revolution was for women. Legislation and policy changes initiated included:

    • Equal pay for work of equal value, extension of the minimum wage for women, early analyses of the gendered segmentation of the work force and of gaps in pay and superannuation
    • The establishment of paid maternity leave provisions for women working in the Commonwealth Public Service
    • No fault divorce and the establishment of the accessible Family Court system, moving marriage law away from the patriarchal precepts of medieval ecclesiastical courts and Christian notions of guilt
    • Support for women subject to domestic violence, and for divorced, widowed and unmarried mothers, through the Supporting Mothers’ Benefit
    • Provision of broad public health support through Medibank (pushed back under Fraser, but reanimated as Medicare under Hawke) and specific women’s services – cheap, accessible contraceptives, breast screening, pap smears and moves toward to the decriminalisation of abortion (although that was not effected across all states and territories until 2019)
    • Free tertiary education for women and men (precipitating a great wave of university enrolments including many working class and older women)
    • Robust support for the arts – leading to the establishment of the Australia Council, the Australian Film Commission and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School which afforded opportunities for women performers including Cate Blanchett, Margaret Roadknight and Patricia Amphlett (aka Little Pattie)

    And a range of other policy developments: support for the disabled, dedicated urban and regional planning, the end of conscription and the release of draft resisters from prison, all of which had positive effects for women.

    Born in 1949 into a working-class family in Sydney where I was involved in the anti-war movement, the women’s movement and students for a democratic society, I felt viscerally the effects of these revolutionary changes in Australian politics and society. They transformed, indeed revolutionised, my horizons for the future.

    This book consummately charts these revolutionary changes in Australian society – across diverse fields – women’s influence in politics, women and the law, women’s health, welfare, and social policy, women in arts and education. I was sad not to see the latter accompanied by a consideration of the revolutionary changes in higher education – not just in the numbers of women as students and staff but of the radical revolution in knowledge, challenging masculinist disciplines and misogynist practices.

    Still, the book shows the vital connections between these several fields across the broader terrain of Australian society. For example, the changes effected in family law (as remembered by Elizabeth Evatt and Camilla Nelson) were integrally connected with the broader changes in what was happening in socio-economic life and in social values.

    Authors contributing to this book combine moving personal memoir with consummate analysis of the processes they were engaged in and the changes they were precipitating. I especially relished Biff Ward’s evocation of sisterhood in the women’s movement in Canberra in the 1970s and her recollection of the party where the position of a Special Adviser to PM Whitlam was announced – a post awarded to Elizabeth Reid. Less rosy recollections pervade the chapter co-authored by Cathy Eatock and her late mother Pat – a woman who combined strong commitments to women’s rights and Aboriginal rights but who endured domestic abuse, difficulties with caring for a disabled child and homelessness.

    (L to R) Marian Sawer, Elizabeth Reid, Blair Williams, Mare Coleman, Michelle Arrow at the "Women and Whitlam" author event in Canberra. Picture: Supplied

    (L to R) Marian Sawer, Elizabeth Reid, Blair Williams, Mare Coleman, Michelle Arrow at the “Women and Whitlam” author event in Canberra. Picture: Supplied

    She lived for a while at the Women’s Liberation House on Bremmer Street (where she and her kids could only bed down when meetings were over) and with her friend Elizabeth Reid (who was her campaign manager when Pat ran as an Independent for parliament. Pat suffered racist interrogations and vilifications of her Indigenous identity. She eventually won a defamation case against Andrew Bolt.

    There are graphic accounts of media and popular misogyny in the period. There was the snide reporting of women appointed to new well-paid positions in the public service –  sexist jokes proliferated (e.g. to Margaret Reynolds that Chairlady sounded like Charlady). There was the infamous Canberra Times’ reportage on the Women and Politics conference in Canberra in 1975 which brought over 800 women to the capital.

    This occasioned a vigorous protest from many delegates who occupied the newspaper’s offices, demanding professional journalistic standards. Similarly in reports on the International Year of Women, and subsequently the large UN Conference in Mexico in 1975, divisions between women were often exaggerated and amplified. Yet, there were welcome signs of the popular penetration of new values – alongside the “Easy Summer Cooking” in The Women’s Weekly appeared an “Easy Guide to Family Law.”

    I focus finally on the key message for me about that revolutionary period and how this matters in our present feminist moment. Fundamentally, that is the need for sustaining an interaction between a large social movement and bold action at the heart of government. This is a potent double helix. As Elizabeth Reid and Biff Ward so eloquently show us, it was the mobilisation of women in small consciousness-raising groups, where the personal was political, in large meetings and conferences, and on the streets which put pressure on and legitimated this cascade of policy changes.

    The cover of "Women and Whitlam." Picture: Supplied

    The cover of “Women and Whitlam.” Picture: Supplied

    Moreover, in her work as Whitlam’s Special Adviser Elizabeth reached out through consultations with women right across Australia and they reached out to her in a flood of letters. Moreover, although women like her and a number of other women who authored chapters in this book might be recognised as ‘leaders’ in this period, there was a broader feminist ethos which stressed collectivity rather than individualist achievement.

    As Ranuka Tandan persuasively argues in her chapter – a grassroots women’s movement is vital. And a social movement relevant today and resilient in the face of future misogynist pushbacks must be one that embraces women in all their diversity, and that expressly and frankly confronts the entanglement of the oppressions of race and gender. Tandan celebrates First Nations women fighting on the street today.

    We might recall that when Elizabeth Reid made her famous speech at the UN Conference in Mexico she addressed that question, confronting how the feminist perspectives of women differed, diverging between what were then called ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ (what we might now call minority and majority worlds). It was exciting to be part of that large crowd outside Parliament House in the March4 Justice in 2020 and to witness the incendiary intergenerational outrage which ignited there.

    It is gratifying to see the boldness of young white women like Grace Tame and Britanny Higgins. But, as Ranuka Tandan and Blair Williams argue it is important to work to redress intersecting oppressions and to build and sustain the energy of a large, inclusive social movement, beyond the bright spotlight of the media, and now the relentless spotlight of social and digital media, with its even greater potential for misogyny. As someone who has worked in universities for decades, I end by highlighting how important universities are as sites for transforming knowledge for revolutionary social change, as places where books like this can be created, launched and most importantly read for their insights for our shared feminist futures.

    • Elizabeth Reid was appointed the world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a head of government by the Australian Labor Government of Gough Whitlam in 1973. Picture: Ginger Gorman  

    The post Whitlam’s revolution and why it matters now appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Tackling our deep discomfort with miscarriage

    Every year miscarriage affects up to 150,000 Australians and the people that love them. So why are we so damned bad at dealing with it? Journalist Isabelle Oderberg has written a groundbreaking book called Hard to Bear. The work investigates the science and silence of miscarriage. BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, had a chat with Isy about the book’s themes.

    Tell us about your own personal backstory that led you to write “Hard to Bear”.

    During our journey to complete our family, I experienced seven pregnancy losses. Obviously during that time I did a lot of reading in my quest to figure out why my body couldn’t do what I needed it to do. Being open about it publicly meant a lot of other people made disclosures to me about their own experiences. But I didn’t feel comfortable writing about it until our family was complete.

    Once we decided that it was, I started reading again. And I realised that while I had some answers, I also had a lot of questions. And there was a huge amount of work and unpacking to be done in this space. And I thought there was no one better than me to do it, with the lived experience but also the ability to put that aside where necessary and wear my journalism hat to approach the issue with a forensic eye, while never losing sight of the human element.

    There were so many OMG moments that just stopped me in my tracks. Like the moment I realised we had no idea how many people are actually having miscarriages in this country. Absolutely no idea.

    You’ve long been vocal about the silence around miscarriage. Unpick this for us. Why the societal shame and silence? How does your book try to change this? 

    One thing that drives me crazy in this space is acknowledgement of the silence without understanding of why it exists and where it comes from. So that’s a  big part of the book; unpacking it so we can move forward. We have a multitude of issues that feed this silence.

    Miscarriage exists at the intersection of two things we find incredibly uncomfortable in Western society: grief and menstruation. Also it’s wrapped up in Judeo-Christian tradition, abortion and misogyny.

    It certainly wasn’t always this way. I also do a lot of digging around other cultures that treat and talk about it completely differently. I really do find it fascinating.

    Your book is also funny. Why does humour play a role here? 

    I’m Jewish and I draw on a long cultural tradition of irony, satire, self-deprecation and Black humour. There absolutely is a lot of humour in this book, where appropriate. I want people to enjoy reading it to whatever degree that’s possible, without struggling under the weight of a heavy topic. We can acknowledge the sadness of something while still finding ways to smile along the way.

    Your book delves into the science (in addition to telling personal stories). Every year miscarriage affects up to 150,000 Australians and the people that love them. What do we know about why it happens and how it can be prevented? 

    I guess that’s a core part of the book: there is far too much we don’t know. And the things we do know aren’t properly explained to the people birthing the babies or their partners or families. For instance, environmental factors are a huge risk factor. But we don’t talk about it. Also, poverty. Nutrition.

    And as in medicine so often, there are often factors overlaying each other that increase your risk profile. I do examine some of the factors that can contribute, both the commonly known ones and the ones we’re not talking about. But if there was more extensive testing and funding for research, we’d know far more.

    Hard to Bear: Investigating the science and silence of miscarriage (published in April 2023 by Ultimo Press.)

    Hard to Bear: Investigating the science and silence of miscarriage (published in April 2023 by Ultimo Press.)

    How does “medical misogyny” play into this? 

    We know through the work of journalists and authors like Gabrielle Jackson (Pride and Prejudice) and Kylie Maslen (Show Me Where It Hurts) that medical misogyny affects almost all aspects of medical care for women or people with uteruses.

    This was acknowledged by the medical journal The Lancet when it wrote that the era of just telling women to try again after miscarriage is over. This issue affects up to 150,000 Australian families each year (and could be higher, we don’t know). We are decades past the time when we should have started talking about it openly.

    Conversely, what do you have to say about the need medical kindness around instances of miscarriage?

    The Australian medical system is not fit for purpose. It is stretched far too thin. And consecutive governments want to fix it with band-aids, if at all, rather than giving it an overhaul and structuring it from the presence.

    Where there are medical and allied health practitioners who do want to do better (and there are many of them), often they are restricted by structural barriers. And the other thing I would say is that where medical practitioners do express kindness and compassion – I can tell you from the hundreds of patients I’ve spoken to – it is remembered and valued for the rest of our lives.

    What role does hope have in this discourse? 

    This book is aimed at being fully accessible and fully inclusive. We are a village. We have to lift up parents whose journey to children isn’t easy and give them hope. Through sharing my story and doing this research, that’s what I want to do. Otherwise, I’m sharing for the sake of sharing and that’s just not my jam.

    Equally, hope must be felt in our fight to change the system. Because otherwise what’s the point? This book is absolutely a book of hope that aims to improve the experiences of my children and theirs. We can do it. We absolutely can.

     

    The post Tackling our deep discomfort with miscarriage appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Jeremy Vine’s ‘brain dribbles out of his ears’ as he exposes his own racism live on TV

    On Friday 31 March, former BBC host and now C5 presenter Jeremy Vine did little to dispel the notion that old, white, middle-class men are a scourge on society. He inanely mansplained to a woman, while indirectly arguing with the dictionary as well – all live on his TV show. Vine also showed a clear whiff of racism, too – unsurprisingly. It was all over the word ‘woke’.

    Vine: schooled in the word ‘woke’

    During 31 March’s episode of Jeremy Vine On 5, author and broadcaster Natasha Devon was on. The discussion turned to wokeness. Devon asked Vine to “define what woke is”. The host floundered, spouting something about:

    Woke is basically when you sort of, y’know, you kind-of read the Guardian and this and that…

    It literally isn’t that, Vine – as Devon went onto explain:

    Woke is actually and African-American term. It means to be awake to injustice in society. If you’re woke it just means you’re not racist, homophobic or misogynist.

    As Vox wrote, the use of woke in this context dates back to the 1920s:

    In 1923, a collection of aphorisms and ideas by the Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey included the summons “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” as a call to global Black citizens to become more socially and politically conscious. A few years later, the phrase “stay woke” turned up as part of a spoken afterword in the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. The song describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two white women.

    So, woke comes from Black people resisting colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery. It’s entered more widespread use since the Black Lives Matter movement rose to prominence in the previous decade. Naturally, the right wing and liberals have jumped on the term with their usual racist and classist shithousery – and intentionally weaponised it to mean something its not.

    So, you’d think as an experienced broadcaster, Vine would know the etymology of the word woke – and therefore accept Devon’s correct explanation. But Vine is an old, middle-class white man – so of course he didn’t.

    Exposing your own racism and misogyny, Jeremy Vine-style

    The host said in response to Devon’s explanation:

    In YOUR [his accent, not the Canary’s] definition it means that, but not to everyone.

    Devon seemed to want to try and tell him that her definition was literally the dictionary’s one. Because it actually is. But even then, Vine still wouldn’t have it, saying:

    No, no – not to everyone. It’s come to mean something else.

    No, it fucking hasn’t Vine. Racist, homophobic and misogynistic people have hijacked it to mean something else. The rest of us are very clear on the definition – as people on social media pointed out:

    Vine gave the distinct impression he’s a bit racist and misogynistic, too. Black people couldn’t possibly have their own words, and a woman couldn’t possibly be right on what they mean – could they, Jeremy?

    However, old white men exposing their extremely unpleasant underbellies via the corporate media is hardly new:

    Herein lies the problem.

    Devon was articulate, accurate, and measured in her response. Vine was ignorant, racist and misogynistic in his. Clearly, his bosses realised his behaviour was rancid – or they were trying to silence people’s anger. The tweet from the official Jeremy Vine On 5 Twitter account that had the clip of the exchange in it had been deleted by 4pm on Friday 31 March.

    Yet despite all this, he is the one whose name is on the TV show, and it’s his old white ass that’s sat in the host’s chair. Colonialism, where white people (driven by white supremist patriarchy) still hold the keys of power, remains rampant across society – and TV is a microcosm of this. While Vine’s pathetic performance on his show may seem inconsequential, it actually sums up the colonialist mess we’re living in.

    Feature image via Jeremy Vine On 5 – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Equality in public life. Why does it matter?

    This week I was one of the fortunate attendees at the World Premiere of Julia, at the Canberra Theatre Centre. The remarkable script about a remarkable life was given wings through an extraordinary performance.

    The play received three standing ovations at the first show on Tuesday and three more on Thursday. Justine Clake and Jessica Bentley played the lead roles in Joanna Murray-Smith‘s incredible work. The subject of the production is the cultural wall of misogyny which threw itself at former  Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

    Even though we knew the ending already, or so we thought, Julia held us in thrilled suspense as it relived the days and years leading up to the “Not Now. Not Ever” speech.

    It took an emotional toll watching the unfolding torrent of vile abuse hurtled at the PM. The production, directed by Sarah Goodes created a powerful wave of emotion which leapt off the script and was met by the audience when Clarke landed “the” speech. It dropped me back to the 2019 Women’s March in front of Parliament House. A similar welling up of outrage and inspiration generated by the courage of one women standing up and saying: “I. Will. Not”. 

    There was a pulsing hum at the play “Julia” that was similar in tone to March for Justice in March 2021 (where protestors in 40 Australian cities campaigned on issues of gendered harassment and assault).

    It’s the intuitive rise in consciousness and energy sourced deep in shared experience between people realising they are among others who have also experienced pervasive devaluing of their humanity. There’s a euphoric liberation of being among your people. The rallying cry seems to be: “We Will Not”. 

    "Julia" is a new play by Joanna Murray-Smith in which Justine Clarke (Children of the Sun) embodies the life and career that led to former Prime Minister Julia Gillard's ‘misogyny speech.’ Picture Martin Ollman/Museum of Australian Democracy

    “Julia” is a new play by Joanna Murray-Smith in which Justine Clarke (Children of the Sun) embodies the life and career that led to former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech.’ Picture Martin Ollman/Museum of Australian Democracy

    So why am I writing this? I’m not a theatre critic. Far from it.  I direct, among other things, a program at University of Canberra which was inspired by the treatment of women in the political arena. Specifically, the lack of gender equality in political office, the sexist barriers which have maintained it and the appalling impact this inequality has on our community. 

    Our Pathways to Politics Program for Women, is a national, proudly non-partisan initiative that aims to change the face of politics by equipping women with the skills, knowledge, confidence and networks they need to run for elected office and thrive as political leaders. Dr Meredith Martin from University of Melbourne has previously written in BroadAgenda about the commencement of Pathways at University of Canberra. 

    In my view, Julia canvasses the myriad of reasons why is gender equality in political office is so. When women hold political leadership, it is good for democracy, for communities and results in better governance.

    A report by Kings College which examined 500 pieces of research into the impacts of women leaders found:

    • Women policy makers prioritise issues that benefit the most vulnerable in society, such as healthcare, welfare and education. As such, more women leaders seem to make for more equal and caring societies;
    • Women may be more likely to focus on these issues because they have greater experience of deprivation, and because they are often responsible for caring for others;
    • On average, women work harder than men to represent their constituencies, which is linked to a stronger sense among voters that government is responsive to their needs;
    • Increased representation of women in elected office is associated with counteracting corruption and focusing resources on the quality and consistency of public service delivery;
    • States where women hold more political power are less likely to go to war and less likely to commit human rights abuses;
    • Women bring collaborative and inclusive leadership styles into political environments that are often characterised by division and one-upmanship.

    These results are not surprising to those who have been fighting for more diversity, inclusion and equality at every decision making table. Without women, governments who are in the market for ideas will not understand the gendered impact of their choices, or worse, may choose solutions steeped in misogyny. 

    The terrible impacts of sexist policy, such as Robodebt, become obvious when we listen to the voices of people who were caught in its pernicious trap. The system design being revealed in the Robodebt Royal Commission started with a particular view about the people – mostly single women with children – who receive income support payments; that they are lazy, untrustworthy cheats.

    Robodebt did exactly what those in the market looking for a solution to “the problem” wanted it to do. It treated people like lazy liars who steal from the system and it punished them. 

    Sam Mostyn, Australian businesswoman and climate change and gender equity advocate, speaking at the National Press Club. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh

    Sam Mostyn, Australian businesswoman and climate change and gender equity advocate, speaking at the National Press Club. Picture: Hilary Wardhaugh

    On 9 March the Chair of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, Sam Mostyn delivered an address at the National Press Club outlining the Taskforce’s recommendations. This group of women brought a spectrum of expertise to their year of listening to women share their lived experiences of  what is holding them back and what needs to be done. 

    Mostyn’s speech as always, was so reasonable in its delivery that it was irresistible. She landed a beautifully righteous feminist agenda which was both compelling and full of grace. 

    “The starting point” she said, “is the vital importance of women….We know what needs to be done and what is utterly essential to lift women out of poverty”.

    “The challenge” she said, is: “Do we, as a nation have the courage to act?” Mostyn issued a personal challenge to all of us: “Do you care and what are you prepared to do?” 

    Applications are now open for Pathways to Politics in every state and territory (except Tasmania). Apply here.

    Programs like Pathways to Politics is rising to that call. Pathways is delivering change which, like the metaphorical flowers in Julia, are growing, literally before our eyes. There are now over 350 graduates of the program who will be joined by over 130 each year with the national expansion.

    In just a few years, alum have achieved electoral successes at every level with more standing at every election. We are creating a network of women who are skilled up, connected, collegiate and energised. It is putting more women, especially those who also bring diversity in their economic background, race and sexuality at decision making tables where they have previously been absent or alone.

    Women in numbers, change the narrative. When the marketplace of ideas includes women’s experience, we change the direction and focus. The evidence is that women decision makers bring their experience as care givers, of living in poverty and of fighting the tide of sexism into their policy making.

    Would a diverse group of women have started from the view that income support recipients are unworthy? Would they have purchased a solution which treated people like criminals? Not Now. Not Ever.

    “Sexism is boring,” said Clarke. That line in Julia sums it up. Indeed sexism is boring. It’s also hurting us and holding us back. We all deserve better. As Mostyn recounted in her speech, “gender equality should be as normal as drinking water.” Achieving gender equality in political office is vital to all of our futures and it will require women in numbers to make and secure long term change. We must be at every decision making table.

     

    • Picture at top: “Julia” is a new play by Joanna Murray-Smith in which Justine Clarke (Children of the Sun) embodies the life and career that led to former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech.’ Picture Martin Ollman/Museum of Australian Democracy

    The post Equality in public life. Why does it matter? appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Spain has got its very own SpyCops scandal and it’s looking as bad as the UK’s one

    The Spanish state and its police force is caught up in a Spycops scandal. Women have accused an undercover police officer of sexual abuse, after he infiltrated activist groups. Another cop has been found to have been spying on protesters. Now, a third case in Spain has been reported. This should all sound very familiar – as it reeks of what happened in the UK.

    Spain’s own Spycops

    Six women have alleged that an undercover police officer sexually abused them. The cop reportedly infiltrated far-left and green groups. He coerced the women to have sex with him to win their trust and gain information. One woman says the officer abused her for nearly a year. They all argue their sexual consent was obtained on the basis of lies. As El Nacional reported, the cop went by the name Daniel Hernández Pons. He:

    was 31 years old and applied himself conscientiously to the role; he had tattoos, dyed his hair and was well-educated in the cause, especially in libertarian and anarchist issues. His entry point was the gym of a busy squatter social centre, from where he built a character who gained the trust of other activists, according to La Directa. He began to have a social life and gradually joined groups and became just one more member of the ecosystem of these alternative left groups in the city of Barcelona. He even got to be responsible for the keys to some squatted premises and social centres…

    However, this was not the only case. El Nacional noted that in 2022:

    it emerged that an officer originally from the Balearic Islands had been able to infiltrate social groups such as the Catalan countries students’ union (SEPC) and the Jovent Republicanà – the ERC party’s youth division – posing as an activist despite being, in reality, a newly-graduated Spanish police officer.

    This cop went by the name Marc Hernàndez Pon. However, in these cases people have so far not come forward with allegations of sexual abuse against him. But now, the scandal has further deepened. The Madrid branch of Extinction Rebellion said last week it had been infiltrated by a female police officer. It alleged that she “had sexual relations with at least one of its members”. Moreover, all this comes after Spain’s central government admitted last year that it spied on the mobile phones of 18 Catalan separatist leaders. It used Israeli spyware Pegasus.

    “Disgusted and helpless”

    The undercover cops revelations are in the public domain thanks to Catalan media outlet La Directa. It interviewed one of the survivors of the cops’ alleged abuse. She told La Directa that the experience:

    has caused me a lot of fear and anxiety. Now, when I see a policeman I get very nervous, and it has also affected my confidence. I have felt very used, she has used us as women and as activists, and this makes me feel very disgusted and helpless. If he wanted to investigate us, which I think would be just as serious, there was no need for him to generate such intense relationships, he has done many things that were not necessary.

    One of the women’s lawyers is Mireia Salazar. She told Agence France-Press (AFP) the goal of the complaint was “to know how far these practices go, which in our opinion, have no legal justification.” Meanwhile, politicians have begun to ask questions. Gabriel Rufian, a top lawmaker with Catalan separatist party ERC asked Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez:

    Where is your moral limit, where is your ethical limit? It is not just a threat to political freedoms, ideological freedoms, but also – it seems – sexual freedoms.

    Coalition party Podemos‘s secretary of state of equality Angela Rodriguez said:

    It is violence against women… And I think that the sooner that we know what happened and justice can be done, the better it will be for the reputation of security agencies.

    UK undercover policing: writing the manual?

    Of course, the situation in Spain has echoes of the UK Spycops scandal. As the Canary has documented, this extensive scandal has been ongoing for years – since at least 2003. Tom Coburg previously wrote about Mark Kennedy, one of the cops central to the scandal. He sexually abused several women as an undercover officer (UCO). Coburg noted that:

    At least two UCOs are known to have fathered children with women activists. Other UCOs known to have used sex to gather intelligence include ‘Carlo Neri’, Andy Coles (‘Andy Davey’) and ‘Vince Miller‘. Miller deceived and had sex with four women, including ‘Madeleine’.

    He also noted that:

    Kennedy is known to have spied on several protest groups, most of which were environmental groups. His undercover work was prolific and took place in England as well as Scotland, Northern Ireland, Germany, Denmark, France, the USA, and Iceland.

    Currently, there is an inquiry in the UK over the Spycops scandal. 27 women are giving evidence. However, as one of the survivors of Kennedy’s abuse, Kate Wilson, wrote for the Guardian, the Spycops scandal runs far deeper:

    These [undercover] police units illegally blacklisted trade union activists, and they spied on elected politicians, the families of victims of police violence and many campaign or protest groups. They used the identities of dead children with no thought for their families, they violated lawyer-client privilege and caused countless miscarriages of justice, and they sexually abused women.

    Police: functioning how they’re designed to

    Now, the Spanish state appears to have been copying the UK’s grotesque lead. As one of the survivors of Daniel Hernández Pons‘s abuse told La Directa:

    It’s hard for me to understand that level of involvement in people’s lives and it reminds me of his insistence on being with me, his insistence that he loved me and wanted to be in a relationship. He actually got to meet my parents and my sister. If I had known he was a cop, I would never have had a relationship with him… Nothing justifies the State and the police interfering in my life. I feel like I’ve been raped, I’ve been with someone I now realize I didn’t know and it creates a lot of fear.

    As always, this emerging information from Spain shows that this is not some ‘bad apple’ incident. The global system of policing is designed for this purpose – to protect the state and its interests at all costs. In the case of Spanish and UK Spycops, this involves sexual abuse and rampant misogyny. Meanwhile, with the UK’s Metropolitan Police, it uses institutionalised anti-Blackness, racism, and homophobia as well, to carry out its functions. So, the problem is the same the world over. How Spain deals with this latest iteration of police violence will be closely watched.

    Featured image and additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • What can we learn from sport governance challenges?

    FIFA’s threat to withdraw its recognition of its member federation, Football Australia, prompted gender equality measures to be adopted. This governance crisis led to the establishment of a Congress Review Working Group. (FIFA stands for The Fédération internationale de football association is the international governing body of association football, beach soccer, and futsal.)

    The Working Group recommendations led to significant structural change including mandated gender equality measures. A range of measures have been outlined in my recent research paper which is intended to be a roadmap for other sports to follow, including:

    1. Quota Percentages

    2. ‘Different Genders’ Mandated for Specified Positions

    3. Expanding the pie: Quotas by Numbers and/or Female Only Positions

    4. Graduated / Staggered Quotas

    5. Applying the ‘Rooney Rule’ to gender and the ‘Inclusion Rider’ to sport

    6. Transparency and Inclusive Language

    7. Other options including training and term lengths

     

    The report, Better Together: Increasing Male Engagement in Gender Equality Efforts in Australia, found that most men (76%) are gender equality supporters, but few (17%) prioritise taking action.  This serves to explain why the status quo, of ‘pale, male and stale’ [plus ‘able-bodied’ and ‘heterosexual’] has been very difficult to shift.  This report also recommended that male engagement could be achieved by ‘mak[ing] it easy’.  

    In the recent Football Australia governance crisis, advocacy group, Women Onside, sought to assist the Working Group established by the international federation, FIFA, through providing practical, ‘easy’ solutions.

    If you are also grappling with how to create structural changes to your organisation to achieve gender equality, particularly if your organisation exists within a federated model, then some of the following case studies and research presented by Women Onside may provide ideas and inspiration:

    1. Quota Percentages

    The Australian Sports Commission 40% target was tied to funding, but the threatened ‘stick’ was not ever implemented. Instead, while noting the challenges around quotas in a federated system, a 40:40:20 requirement was recommended for the entire football ecosystem.  This mechanism was successfully adopted by Paddling Australia.

    2. ‘Different Genders’ Mandated for Specified Positions

    It can be constitutionally required that, for example, the Chair and Deputy Chair roles are ‘different’ genders.  This is preferable to the ‘both genders’ binary format, but is insufficient as a standalone strategy to create gender equality (eg: the Australian Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission provision alone would only lead to a 30% outcome).  

    3. Expanding the pie: Quotas by Numbers and/or Female Only Positions

    Boards have traditionally been made up of representative positions, and in some cases each of the Standing Committee Chairs (including the Women’s Committee) have had a vote on the executive (eg: Capital Football).  Expanding the board to create ‘women only’ board positions, avoids the threat of an incumbent losing ‘his’ seat.  For example, the FIFA Statute requires that each of its six Confederations: ‘elect at least one female member to the Council’.  Any Confederation failing to elect a woman will have that seat ‘deemed forfeited’ until the next round of elections.  However, this ‘female member’ mechanism only guarantees that there will be a minimum of 16% female representation.  

    The idea of ‘expanding the pie’ has also been explored in the entertainment industry, where researchers promote the idea of ‘Just Add 5’ to address the finding that women have made up less than 30% of speaking roles in the top 100 US films each year for decades.  Achieving gender equality by 2020 would have required expanding the FFA Congress to twenty and adding five women each year.  To achieve this in a contested election requires a: ‘first past the post, provided you are a woman’ rule.  This is used by the AOC Athletes’ Commission.  Of the eight athletes elected at the Summer Olympic Games, it was mandated that there must be: ‘not less than three males and not less than three females’ and the Winter Olympic Games elected representatives: ‘must comprise one of each sex’.  This means that those athletes receiving the most votes may not necessarily be elected.  Where there is a tie, the youngest candidate wins; thereby also assisting with age diversity affirmative action. 

    4. Graduated / Staggered Quotas

    Following the major governance failures and corruption within the International Association of Athletics Federation [IAAF, now World Athletics], 95% of the IAAF Special Congress supported the recommended reforms.  Since 1 January 2019, the IAAF Council mandated a graduated gender balance.  Although still couched in binary terms (which is significant given the challenges in athletes for intersex athletes), the amended Constitution sets out the minimum number of women required to occupy the seats on the IAAF Council and the Executive Board.  Maria Clarke, IAAF governance reform Chair, hopes this created a ‘gender leadership’ environment.  At the 2023 Election, there will be a minimum of ten of each gender elected from amongst the total of twenty-six Council members.  At the 2027 Election, the Council will be 50-50, and the IAAF Executive Board (total of 9) must consist of three members of each gender.  (NOTE: A graduated approach, by adding one ‘female only’ position to the FFA Congress each year until the ideal of fifty-fifty is reached, would have taken a decade to achieve).

    5. Applying the ‘Rooney Rule’ to gender and the ‘Inclusion Rider’ to sport

    The Rooney Rule was designed as an equity measure for black and Latino men applying for coaching and team management positions in the US National Football League [NFL].  The Rooney Rule concept has effectively been applied to the corporate sphere to achieve gender equality, for example: then Australia Post CEO, Christine Holgate, required that head-hunters have a female on the short list for every role.  Going even further, Mirvac CEO, Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, required that every senior role short list be 50-50.

    Called the ‘Inclusion Rider’, entertainment industry ‘stars’ are encouraged to include a clause requiring broad race, gender and ability demographics in both onscreen and off-screen staff.  The idea of having influential people in positions of power stipulating express diversity requirements in their own contracts was given prominence at the 2018 Hollywood’s Oscars by Frances McDormand.  A similar call has been made for invited (male) speakers to refuse to attend male only conferences and panels [‘Manels’].  In sport, the players’ associations can use their leverage to negotiate with the national bodies and the clubs, not only for pay parity, but to demand that there be women in governance and in operational positions.  

    6. Transparency and Inclusive Language

    It was recommended that football stakeholders be required to include gender statistics in their annual reports on their websites.  For example, Basketball Australia publishes its Board Charter, a de-identified Director Position Profile and Skills Matrix, and female representation statistics.  Advertising all roles, including detailed job descriptions, should also be standard.  Research by Gaucher et al., (2011) found that to attract female candidates to positions, on an equal basis to men, requires inclusive language on websites and in recruitment documentation.  Inclusive language can be identified using tools, such as the Gender Decoder.

    7. Other options including training and term lengths

    Other change mechanisms include mandating term lengths (ASC 2015), ethical leadership (Ordway and Opie 2017) and ‘entitlement’ training, mentoring and sponsorship (ie: shepherding), pay parity and equal media representation.  World Athletics funds targeted recruitment and training programs and has established the Gender Leadership Taskforce to work with the IAAF Women’s Committee and male advocates to identify and upskill women with potential.  Changing structures, and influencing individual and institutional mindsets, rather than focusing only on changing women, is required.

    If you have come across other best practices that have worked, we’d love to hear them. Please email through to: catherine.ordway@canberra.edu.au

    • Please note image at top is a stock photo (Female Soccer player in action on a professional soccer stadium).

     

    The post What can we learn from sport governance challenges? appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • ‘No Births Behind Bars’: the scandal of imprisoning pregnant women in the UK

    Content warning: This article contains mention of infant death. 

    Nearly every week another imprisoned pregnant woman gives birth in the UK. She will go into labour in her prison cell and call for help. If her call is answered, and the prison guard believes that she’s in labour, she will – after being body searched by an officer – be taken to hospital in handcuffs to give birth while two police guards stand over her. This is the best case scenario.

    The worst case scenario is when a pregnant woman calls for help and the prison guard doesn’t believe she is in labour. Or her calls for help are ignored altogether and her baby dies. So, a campaign group is drawing attention to the issue and calling for change. However, the wider context to the criminal justice system incarcerating pregnant women is one of gross negligence and abject failure.

    ‘No more babies in prisons’

    On Saturday 18 March, a group of mothers, babies and toddlers from the #NoBirthBehindBars campaign group marked the Mother’s Day weekend. They staged a protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice. It was in solidarity with imprisoned pregnant women across the UK:

    Babies, children and their parents rallied outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London to demand an end to the imprisonment of pregnant women, London, UK Saturday, March 18, 2023 The protest was organised by No Births Behind Bars and Level Up.

    The group held up signs reading “No Babies in Prisons” and “Prison is No Place for Mums and Kids”. They also sang nursery rhymes in the London drizzle. People called for no more births behind bars – while the babies and toddlers dressed in yellow and green in honour of Mother’s Day:

    Babies, children and their parents rallied outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London to demand an end to the imprisonment of pregnant women, London, UK Saturday, March 18, 2023 The protest was organised by No Births Behind Bars and Level Up.

    The protest, organised by feminist collective Level Up, called for a statutory duty for judges and magistrates to take pregnancy and parenthood into consideration when sentencing women. However, the overarching aim of the #NoBirthBehindBars campaign is to end the practice of sending pregnant women and new mothers to prison altogether:

    Babies, children and their parents rallied outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London to demand an end to the imprisonment of pregnant women, London, UK Saturday, March 18, 2023 The protest was organised by No Births Behind Bars and Level Up.

    The seriousness of the situation is reflected in recent incidents of babies dying.

    Children are dying

    In 2019, an 18-year-old woman gave birth alone, without any medical assistance, in her prison cell in HMP Bronzefield prison in Surrey. Her calls for help were ignored, and her child – known as Baby A – died. A Prisons and Probation Ombudsman report found a series of failings in the teenager’s treatment. Prison staff working on her block were not aware that she was due to give birth imminently, and no one had a full history of her pregnancy.

    In 2020, a 31-year-old woman gave birth to a premature baby in the toilet of her prison cell in HMP Styal in Cheshire. The baby died following delays in getting medical care immediately after the birth and failure to perform CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). The mother’s solicitor said expert evidence revealed the baby could have survived if she had received immediate medical care.

    Research from the Nuffield Trust found that one in 10 imprisoned women who give birth in prison do not make it to hospital, and give birth in their cell or in transit to the hospital. Moreover, the Ombudsman report into the death of Baby A in HMP Bronzefield in 2019 found that all pregnancies in prison are:

    high risk by virtue of the fact that the woman is locked behind a door for a significant amount of time.

    Meanwhile, several countries – including Brazil and Mexico – have specific laws to prevent the incarceration of pregnant women. Yet the UK government has failed to follow suit.

    ‘Never a safe place’

    Janey Starling, co-director of Level Up, told the Canary:

    Prison will never be a safe place for pregnant woman… [However] there’s nothing that mandates a judge to take pregnancy into consideration when sentencing a woman. We know that pregnant women in prison are five times more likely to suffer a stillbirth, and twice as likely to give birth to a premature baby that will need special care. Ultimately, sending any pregnant woman to prison is a barbaric practice.

    In 2022, Level Up, the Royal College of Midwives, Tommy’s, and other organisations wrote an open letter to then-justice secretary Brandon Lewis and the chair of the Sentencing Council. It called for an end to the imprisonment of pregnant women. However, the latest figures show that 50 pregnant women gave birth within the prison system in 2021-22. So, it seems the government is doing little to prevent these vulnerable women from entering prison in the first place.

    Research from the Prison Trust shows that 72% of women sentenced to prison are given short sentences for non-violent offences. Theft is the most common offence. It estimated that around 60% of women in prison are survivors of domestic abuse. The research said 71% of them live with a mental health condition. Moreover, 48% of the women in prison committed their offence to support someone else’s drug use.

    Starling further said:

    the stories of pregnant women in prisons are often ones of poverty and trauma and a desperate need of support, not incarceration.

    Suzy’s story

    There are also significant numbers of women in prison on remand. Suzy (we’ve changed her name to protect her identity) is a 32-year-old mother from the Southeast. The courts detained her on remand during her pregnancy. She was moved several times from one group cell to another. Suzy told the Canary:

    I remember, as I was climbing on to a top bunk another inmate telling me ‘you really shouldn’t be here’. And it was so cold in my cell. It was winter and I wasn’t allowed a duvet, just a thin sheet. The prison guards wouldn’t let me go to the gym or even read my university books. I should’ve been eating for two but they wouldn’t give me any extra food. The other women were worried about me and gave me their leftovers.

    One evening I felt this terrible abdominal pain and called for help. I had started bleeding too. The officers just treated me like I was an inconvenience. Hours passed before they finally took me to hospital. I was body searched and put in handcuffs, it was so humiliating. Everyone at the hospital was staring at me. I was scared that my baby had died. In the police van on the way back one of the officers said to me casually ‘maybe it just wasn’t meant to be’. She was so uncaring. I heard them complain that this hospital visit delayed the end of their shift.

    And then the next morning, I was lying in bed, the blood was still on my sheets and the prison guards shouted at me to get up and start cleaning or they’d sanction me. Thankfully the other women came to help me clean up. I couldn’t do it by myself, I was too tired and upset. A couple of days later I went for a scan. Thankfully the baby was fine but the sonographer had to ask the two prison guards, one male and one female, to stand outside of the curtain while I received an intimate examination. That’s how invasive they are.

    Suzy was later released and found not guilty of the crime she’d been accused of. However, her story is not uncommon.

    Prisons: a ‘terrible environment’ for pregnant women

    Dr Laura Abbott is a midwife and associate professor at Hertfordshire University. She has interviewed dozens of pregnant women in UK prisons through her academic research. Abbott was “pretty horrified” by what she discovered. She told the Canary:

    I met pregnant women who had become sick and dehydrated because they weren’t getting enough food and water. Some women were not receiving medication they’d been prescribed by a doctor before they came in.

    There can be a culture in some prisons of staff making a point of not giving pregnant women any ‘special treatment’, but this is putting their health at risk. It’s also a terrible environment for their mental health. The women I interviewed experienced high levels of shame, stress and fear during their pregnancies.

    Abbott said that around 50% of imprisoned women who give birth have their applications for a space in a Mother and Baby Unit rejected. This means their baby is taken away and put into foster or kinship care. She told the Canary:

    These women are often on suicide watch, as the separation has such a severe impact on their mental health.

    A report last year by the government’s chief social worker Isabelle Trowler found significant issues and inconsistencies with the decision-making process for Mother and Baby Unit applications. Director of charity Birth Companions, Naomi Delap, told the Canary:

    I worry there are still decisions being made where the baby should not be taken away from their mother. Any separation of mother and baby has a profound impact. Even one (wrong) decision is devastating.

    Birth Companions was set up in the 1990s. It was in the wake of a Channel Four documentary that revealed pregnant women from Holloway prison were being made to give birth in shackles at the Whittington hospital in north London. Delap said a different approach is needed for both remand and sentencing:

    Practically speaking, this means a greater commitment to funding and using community alternatives, and a specific mitigating factor (for sentencing) against imprisonment based on pregnancy. Remand and recall must be actively prohibited for pregnant and postnatal women in all but the most exceptional circumstances.

    Despite all this, the government is adamant all is well with the situation for pregnant women and their babies.

    The government says…

    The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) maintains that judges already take pregnancy into account when sentencing women. A spokesperson told the Canary:

    Independent judges already consider mitigating factors when making sentencing decisions, including pregnancy, and custody is always the last resort for women.

    We have already taken decisive action to improve the support available for women, including specialist mother and baby liaison officers in every women’s prison, additional welfare observations and better screening and social services support so that pregnant prisoners get the care they require.

    However, Starling said there have been too many cases of women losing their children after short prison sentences:

    Even three months is enough time to lose your job and home. So when a woman is then released she’s been completely uprooted and lost everything.

    And it’s such a vicious cycle because to get your baby back you need to have a home… It just sends women into a spiral and rips them out from their communities and away from their support network. And ultimately, in the bigger picture, what’s it all for? Truly, what’s it all for?

    It would be great to see the government take their poverty away, not their children.

    A ‘stain’ on the justice system

    This Mother’s Day the #NoBirthsBehindBars campaign had its first birthday. Over the past year campaigning mothers and babies held protests at Parliament Square, the Royal Courts of Justice, and even staged a breastfeeding ‘sit in’ at the MoJ. But as Aisha Dodwell, one of the campaigning mothers, told the Canary:

    It’s a stain on this country’s justice system that we need to even be protesting to demand no more babies be born in prison.

    Ultimately, the campaigners hope that next Mother’s Day there’ll be no need to protest. They hope the government sees sense and stops sending pregnant women to prison altogether. You can sign the campaign’s latest petition here.

    Featured image and additional image via Elizabeth Dalziel 

    By Kate Bermingham

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • How women’s decisions about breastfeeding are made for them

    Much discussion around breastfeeding is about women’s choice to breastfeed or not. But who really decides on how a baby is fed when a $55 billion industry is at stake?

    A new series of studies published in The Lancet shows how baby food corporations influence infant feeding practices both nationally and globally, working through systems of power which are both direct and indirect, and highly gendered. Through these systems, a commercial ecosystem favourable to early weaning and sales of commercial milk formula (CMF) products is established. You can watch the Australasia & Pacific launch event of the 2023 Lancet Breastfeeding Series here.

    Overall the Series helps to understand the commercial actors and structural forces that influence feeding practices across entire populations, and put an end to unhelpful and deeply unfair narratives that place responsibility for infant and young child feeding solely onto women and families. Authors call for wide-ranging actions that end this harmful commercial influence.

    Gendered power systems exploit vulnerabilities and policy gaps to shape breastfeeding practices 

    Sales of CMF products have been booming and are now $55 billion of global retail sales a year. The industry spends least $3 billion a year on marketing. This marketing spend completely swamps any spending by governments around the world on protecting, promoting and supporting breastfeeding. 

    Targeting parental anxieties and protecting breastfeeding effectively

    The first paper in the Lancet series identifies concerning global trends and patterns in breastfeeding, and describes how typical infant behaviours are commonly misinterpreted as signs of insufficient or inadequate milk, and result in early use of breastmilk substitutes, and disruption of lactation. 

    New mothers and their infants and young children are well understood to be uniquely vulnerable to marketing. For this reason governments have agreed globally since 1981 that promotion of breastmilk substitutes should not be allowed. This agreement, including numerous subsequent Resolutions by the World Health Assembly, is known as the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes. The Code covers specialised formulas, products known as ‘growing up’ or ‘toddler’ milks/formulas, and formula products for infants in the first year.

    Women and children have specific human rights related to good quality maternity care that enables well informed decisions about breastfeeding made free from commercial influence. Women’s rights to adequate maternity protection in the workplace, freedom from discrimination and to a friendly environment for breastfeeding are also well documented. Furthermore, breastfeeding provides for realising the optimal reproductive health of women, as well as being the best way for the child to survive and grow.

    The measures needed to provide an enabling environment for breastfeeding are well known but not widely implemented, and include the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative, the International Labor Organization’s standards for maternity protections in employment, and Code implementation. 

    Baby and toddler food selection in a supermarket in Toronto, Canada. Picture: Shutterstock

    Baby and toddler food selection in a supermarket in Toronto, Canada. Picture: Shutterstock

    The marketing playbook 

    Medical researchers have demonstrated that pharmaceutical companies use ‘disease mongering’ to promote sales of drugs, but less well known is how the CMF industry also pathologizes normal infant behaviour in order to create and reinforce parental anxieties and promote sales of high priced baby milk products.

    The second paper in the Lancet series describes how the marketing playbook for formula products exploits the common vulnerabilities and anxieties of parents, and plugs gaps in policies and programs needed to support women to breastfeed. For example, CMF products including specialised formulas are offered to women and health professionals as solutions to pathologized infant behaviours such as crying, fussing or sleeplessness, or in response to anxieties about insufficient milk or allergy. 

    With only around 10% of births in facilities meeting BFHI standards for staff competencies on breastfeeding, and adopting Code provisions for health workers, health professionals are commonly poorly equipped to help women manage these issues. It is not unusual for industry to provide their continuing medical education on infant and young child feeding. 

    Indeed, health professionals are a central to formula marketing and are viewed as key ‘category entry points’. Marketing also occurs via influence on scientific research and medical guidelines, as well as industry support and sponsorship for health professional journals, conferences and medical organisations.

    Marketing is also shown to use gender, positioning formula as ‘liberation in a can’, especially for women’s labour force participation and upward mobility. Breastfeeding and thereby women’s bodies, are portrayed as inherently difficult, unreliable, and inconvenient.  Formula is offered as a lifestyle choice and a solution to all difficulties of infant care, while breastfeeding advocacy is framed as harmful moral judgement that causes women to feel guilty. 

    Confrontational messaging depicting “mommy wars” (for example, the Sisterhood of Motherhood advert) divides women by challenging the importance of breastfeeding, and depicting public health messages as anti-feminist. Such industry messaging turns attention towards individual ‘choice’, and – importantly – away from structural factors and policy gaps which constrain women’s decisions on infant feeding. It emphasises breastfeeding as individual women’s responsibility, rather than a narrative that bearing and rearing children is a collective responsibility.

    Two-faced and gendered corporate power systems

    The global boom of milk formula sales has resulted in immense power of formula companies to shape the ‘ecosystem’ for women’s infant feeding decisions, using the same industry ‘playbook’. This extends to stakeholder marketing whereby the power of the industry is used to influence the regulatory and policy environment at global and national levels in their own interests. Women’s voices may be unrepresented in such processes.

    For many decades, the public face of the formula industry has been that of benevolence and corporate social responsibility, including the companies stating their so-called commitments to breastfeeding. 

    Less visible are corporations’ political activities to shape the infant feeding  culture or ‘ecosystem’, including extensive lobbying by an international network of front groups that often operate covertly to block or delay marketing regulations. These more hidden political activities undermine and under-resource the structural supports for breastfeeding in health systems, employment and public financing. 

    Industry lobbying against marketing regulations is well documented, but the size of baby food market is also affected by other public policies.  Industry discussions are open about how they use parental fatigue and uncertainty to sell their product – ‘what we are selling is actually sleep”. 

    In Australia, a 2016 baby food market report highlighted that changes to the paid parental leave policy ‘would influence whether breastfeeding was feasible’; longer leave would decrease sales, while ‘assisting the return to work would have the opposite impact’ . In Ireland, industry lobby groups including global formula companies have cautioned against maternity protection reforms and opposed extension of breastfeeding breaks.

    ‘Applied patriarchy’ and economic policies

    Uniquely, the Series highlights the bigger picture of how key economic institutions, and taxation and fiscal policies advantage industry at the expense of women and children, and undermine and under resource unpaid work. For example, the third paper in the Lancet Series discusses how women’s unpaid care work is unmeasured by gendered economic statistical systems, excluded by the United Nation’s System of National Accounting which sets rules for what counts in GDP.  Described by feminist economist Marilyn Waring as ‘applied patriarchy’, this system shows a rise in GDP when CMF sales rise, and a fall in GDP when breastfeeding increases. 

    Globally, women were estimated to provide over 23 billion litres of breastmilk a year in 2010. The Mothers Milk Tool provides updated estimates. Yet breastfeeding is under-recognised as an element of food policy and planning, and excluded from international and national food monitoring systems except in Norway.

    Breastfeeding provides important food security for babies, but despite this, women’s voices are silenced in relevant policy discussions. In contrast, as shown in paper 3 of the Lancet Series, the baby formula, dairy and other industry representatives are privileged to comprise around a third of government delegations to the global food regulatory body, Codex Alimentarius. Codex sets minimum benchmarks for national food policies and standards, including on how commercial milk formula can be packaged and labelled for marketing.

    The authors argue that addressing gender biases in statistical systems would make the economic gains from breastfeeding more visible and the implications for women’s well-being more evident, while also raising the priority of protecting breastfeeding in international and national trade decision making.

    Time to care

    Care of an infant is tiring and time consuming – exclusive breastfeeding as recommended for 6 months takes around 20 hours a week.  For over a century, the International Labor Organization has sought to to protect the health of mothers and infants through promoting minimum standards for working mothers. 

    The Maternity Protection Convention provides for a minimum standard of 14 weeks paid maternity leave, and breastfeeding breaks, with payment at two thirds of previous earnings, and funded from public revenue. 

    Yet, more than half a billion women globally lack any of these protections, more than three in ten did not have at least 14 weeks paid at two thirds of previous earnings, and the majority live in countries with no entitlement to nursing breaks. Providing maternity and parental leave and provide breastfeeding breaks at ILO standards was both feasible and affordable in diverse country settings, costing no more than half a per cent of GDP.

    Despite calls for transformative investments in the care economy in response to an escaling global crisis of care, governments rarely allocate necessary budgets. Instead superficial campaigns promoting ‘breast is best’ substitute for more difficult and costly measures addressing the structural drivers of infant feeding decisions. Without substantial societal investments, women’s choices are open to manipulation by exploitative marketing of CMF.

    Central to addressing the global boom in milk formula sales are fiscal policies which shape social protection systems providing women with income security and poverty alleviation, access to public services such as quality childcare, and ensure health financing and medical training systems which avoid creating financial pressures for health facilities and health professionals to accept gifts, donations or sponsorship from CMF companies, and instead offering culturally appropriate and women centred maternity care that is free from commercial influence. 

    Trumping human rights

    To date, trade and commerce trump women’s and children’s rights when it comes to infant and young child feeding in Australia, and internationally, indicating that transformational change to these gendered power systems is urgently needed. Key recommendations include;

    • Adoption of a framework convention on commercial marketing of foods for infants and young children obliging governments to regulate industry marketing and lobbying
    • Data collections which bring women’s unpaid work into visibility in economic accounting systems, 
    • Alignment of ILO standards on paid maternity leave with health recommendations for 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding, and 
    • Using fiscal policy including gender budgeting approaches to fully resource comprehensive maternity rights protection, and channel greater investment into maternal infant and young child health and nutrition.

     

    Please note: Picture at top is from Shutterstock

     

    The post How women’s decisions about breastfeeding are made for them appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • If you think society is less misogynist in 2023, think again

    Content warning: discussion of sexual violence

    8 March is International Women’s Day. Women and allies around the world are joining together in celebration of our strength, and we’ll be commemorating all of us who have died at the hands of men.

    We are, of course, gathering in solidarity against against sexism and misogyny. Over the past few months, I have spoken to a number of people who feel that misogyny isn’t as bad as it used to be; that somehow our UK society is learning to be better. They cite the fact that sexual consent and boundaries are now practiced in many relationships. But let’s face it, a man checking whether his sexual partner consents is the bare minimum of what he should be doing anyway. It’s disturbing that it’s taken us until 2023 to get this far. The bar is very, very low when it comes to how we expect cis men to act.

    If you think this shows that men are somehow better these days, you’d be wrong. The number of women who are being spiked on a night out is alarming, and in 2023, it’s now normal for notices in club toilets to suggest politely that men “stop spiking”.

    On top of this, violence against women during consensual sex is now completely normalised. We are often labelled and shamed as being ‘vanilla’ if we don’t want to be strangled, or if we don’t want to consent to a man’s kink. Strangling during sex is highly gendered, and is now the norm, rather than the exception. Men often strangle us without our permission. In 2019, the BBC wrote:

    more than a third of UK women under the age of 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sex…”

    Four years later, I would argue that not much has changed.

    Are rough sex laws really protecting us?

    The ‘rough sex’ defence has been consistently used by violent men who have murdered women. In 2021, the Domestic Abuse Act did, in theory, rule out this defence. The new law states that:

    Consent to serious harm for sexual gratification [is] not a defence.

    But campaign group We Can’t Consent To This has pointed out that the new laws aren’t working. The group said:

    in November 2021, the Court of Appeal decided Sam Pybus’s sentence of 4 years 8 months should not be increased, after he strangled Sophie Moss until she was dead, and claimed that she had encouraged him to do it. We think there could be no clearer sign the law is not yet working.

    The lead appeal judge argued that Sophie had consented to being strangled; quite how the misogynist judge could know this is a mystery. And how exactly could she consent to being strangled until she was murdered? Pybus had a history of violence against women, and had strangled his previous partner, too. But, of course, Sophie was held accountable, even in her death, because Pybus’s actions were apparently consensual.

    In England and Wales, it has now also become an offence for someone to inflict harm through non-fatal strangulation. But We Can’t Consent To This said:

    With the introduction of a 5 year sentence for Non Fatal Strangulation, shockingly, it’s possible to kill a sexual partner and get a shorter sentence than you would have for not killing her. These short sentences for manslaughter are common – in each case the violence used is shockingly severe.

    Misogyny as the norm

    Of course, misogyny doesn’t just rear its ugly head during sex. It’s so normalised in our society that we don’t even see it for what it is. An obvious example of this is the treatment of famous women when they dare to challenge famous misogynist men. In 2022, the world witnessed Amber Heard and Johnny Depp in court. I felt sick when I heard how Depp had treated Heard. But I felt even more sick when I realised that the world was defending him; that it didn’t matter how disgusting he was towards women – nothing could pull him off his pedestal.

    The misogynist backlash Heard received – surprisingly from all genders – was absolutely sickening. As Canary guest writer Annie Stevens wrote at the time:

    Any man that uses terms like “idiot cow”, “withering cunt”, “worthless hooker”, “slippery whore” or “waste of a cum guzzler” (Depp’s words) to describe women is clearly a misogynist.

    And yet, despairingly, the world still stood by Depp, hero-worshipping him as a cis man who could do no wrong, even when his vile misogyny was shown to the world, plain as day. This case is a prime example of how society excuses and emboldens men to act however they want. Stevens wrote:

    there is no question that it will impact survivors here who have seen friends, family and colleagues back Johnny and claim that Amber is a liar.

    Women have already been pulling out of cases due to the fear of going through what Amber did. Not only that, this case has also emboldened abusive men.

    Prioritising feelings of men

    Since then, the case of another cis man, footballer Benjamin Mendy, has been in the public spotlight. He, along with his friend Louis Saha Matturie, was accused of multiple sexual offences, including rape, by 13 different women. It will, no doubt, have taken the women all of the courage they could muster to be involved in this prosecution, particularly after they witnessed how Heard was treated by the world.

    Unsurprisingly, the majority-male jury found Mendy not guilty of six counts of rape and one count of sexual assault. A retrial is due to take place after the jury couldn’t reach a verdict about one count of rape and one of attempted rape.

    Instead of focusing on whether a majority-male jury should even be allowed in such cases, the mainstream media commented on how Mendy’s life had been shaken up by the accusations. Rather than talking about how the women will have been traumatised by such a man, the BBC wrote that:

    The allegations and trial had been “absolute hell” for Mr Mendy.

    ‘Not all men’

    Of course, you might be a man reading this, thinking to yourself that “not all men” are misogynists, “not all men” are predators, and that “not all men” are sexist. But this is a tiresome argument, used by many of you around the world to excuse yourselves from doing any work on your own patriarchal behaviour. By saying “not all men”, you’re refusing to self-reflect. And this refusal is insulting to the very women who you claim to care about, and who you say you would never harm.

    The “not all men” argument is useless to us. It doesn’t make me or my friends any safer in our homes. It doesn’t prevent us from being harassed, or spiked in a club, or murdered by people who claim to love us. 1,425 women have been killed by men in the UK over a decade, between 2009 and 2018. 62% of women are killed by their current or former partner. Others are murdered by relatives. In 92% of the cases, the women knew their killer.

    Men, it’s time that you step up

    I have previously written about how UK society likes to victim-blame women for the misogyny we encounter. I said:

    As women, we are sick and tired of being told to moderate our behaviour. “Follow the rules”, they say. “Don’t walk alone in the dark”. “Don’t be drunk”. “Don’t dress a certain way”. How, exactly, does moderating our behaviour in any way address the root issue: the misogyny entrenched in our society?

    It is not, in any way, a woman’s responsibility to change how we act. The time has come for men to step up. Look at yourselves, your own behaviour, and the behaviour of your male friends. Look at how patriarchy is entrenched in all of you, and how you all need to do the work to unpick it. Call out your friends who have misogynist or sexist opinions, and challenge them. Don’t shy away from difficult conversations.

    And if women call you out for being sexist, don’t get defensive, and don’t let your male fragility rear its ugly head. Instead, take the time to reflect. When you want to open your mouth and protest, “but not all men”, think twice. After all, you can never, ever know what it’s like to live in a misogynist world.

    We need your understanding. But more than that, we need you to be actively willing to fight sexism and misogyny within yourselves and in society, wherever it manifests.

    Featured image via Eliza Egret

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Why I won’t be going to another IWD morning tea

    Last year, I boycotted International Women’s Day. I went to a lovely event at the National Gallery, booked myself into a hotel in the city, took myself out for dinner and to the ballet, and refused to do any work, give any speeches, or attend any morning teas.

    Why?

    I’ve worked to promote women’s rights and advance gender equality all day, every day for a quarter of a century. And I was tired. So very tired. Too tired and outraged by the sexism, violence, and discrimination that women and gender-diverse people face every day, to put on a smiling face, share some platitudes, and drink a cup of tea.

    From the time the banners go up announcing International Women’s Day celebrations, to the time they come down, multiple women will have likely been murdered by their intimate partners, sexual harassment will be happening in the very workplaces that are hosting these events, and women and gender-diverse people working in these organisations will still be being paid less than men. To add insult to injury, I’m often asked to do these events for free, and the events themselves are often organised by women as an additional responsibility to their own jobs, without additional pay or support.

    Here’s some things that should be grabbing our attention this International Women’s Day.

    In spite of some progress, still only 22% of CEOs in Australia are women, and 22% of Australian boards are comprised of only men. One in two women have experienced sexual harassment at work, and people who also experience other kinds of discrimination and disadvantage, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, women living with a disability, people of diverse sexual orientation and young women are all more at risk. In Australia, women still earn $13,182 less than men each year driven, first and foremost, by discrimination. And we still don’t have national data on the gender pay gap for First Nations women, women of colour, or women with a disability…

    As the day rolls around again, the predictable questions have begun. Why are we focused on the rights of women? Why is there an International Women’s Day, but not an International Men’s Day? (There is actually, look it up). Why all this fuss when women are already equal? I understand the confusion. Sure, things have improved. We’ve seen some progress absolutely worth celebrating. In the last 50 years, women have moved into employment and public life in ways which would have been unfathomable to previous generations. In Australia, women now make up 47.9% of the workforce. There are some high-profile women chief executives, and worldwide, girls and boys are getting closer to equality, when it comes to getting an education.

    And yet, the gender pay gap persists, and women and gender-diverse people are still significantly overrepresented in part-time and casual work, impacting their financial and job security, and career progression. Only 28 of 150 elected heads of state, and 13 out of 192 heads of government around the world, are women,and those very women in powerful positions, often find themselves subject to a torrent of sexist behaviour from men, online and otherwise. Furthermore, gender inequality is being reinforced by gender biases in new technology including AI systems.

    When we look at the lived realities of women in this country, particularly women of colour, First Nations women, women with disabilities, and women from the LGBTIQA+ communities, the disconnect is even more striking. In Australia, First Nations women are 35 times more likely to be hospitalised for family-violence related assaults, than other Australian women. More than 70% of women with disability have been victims of violent sexual encounters at some time in their lives.

    Almost 60% of women of colour in Australian workplaces experience discrimination based on their race and gender and lesbian, bisexual and transgender women are collectively three times more likely to experience depression. As women, we’re still far from equal, especially those of us who are also affected by other forms of discrimination.

    And yet, the solution to this, year after year, on International Women’s Day, seems to be cups of tea and cake. It’s become a bit of a joke. But it’s not funny. To me, it’s come to represent the minimisation that women receive from all corners of society, every day, and the disconnect between what our workplaces do to appear as though they care about equality, and real, long-term commitment to address these issues.

    Cupcakes.

    “The solution to this, year after year, on International Women’s Day, seems to be cups of tea and cake. It’s become a bit of a joke,” writes Dr Emma Fulu. Picture: Shutterstock. 

    The evidence shows that these issues are deep, rooted and embedded in our very culture and society. They require similarly deep and long-term solutions and, in fact, most organisations will need to transform their cultures, in order to become fully inclusive. This means that most workplaces have real, internal work to do, beginning with an understanding not only of the extent of the problem, but to the value it brings, a commitment to action and addressing systemic barriers to equality at all levels of the organisation, attracting, and retaining, women and diverse talent, and committing to, and measuring, cultures of meaningful inclusion and belonging, not just diversity.

    I understand that this is hard. I get the desire to skip those difficult conversations, to just repeat what has been done before, even if it didn’t work. But here’s the thing. These issues are not going away. Workplaces are facing pressure from all angles to create more equal, diverse, and inclusive cultures, in a way that’s truly meaningful, and not just about how it looks. In a recent study, 39% of all respondents say they have turned down or decided not to pursue a job because of a perceived lack of equality and inclusion at an organisation.

    When we look to Gen Z, who have just joined the workforce, that number grows to 77%. Regulators are also shifting their attention to the workplace. In Australia, new requirements for the public sector under Victoria’s Gender Equality Act is just one example.

    Workplaces are where many people start to change their mind about social change, and they’re hugely important. It’s where we’ll spend close to one third of our lives. In changing our workplace cultures, making them accessible and inclusive places where everyone feels like they belong, we can also create meaningful social change. And to me that’s a huge opportunity.

    Getting equality right, means a workplace where power and opportunities are shared equally. Where people can show up as their full human selves. Where the diversity of people’s lived experiences and perspectives is celebrated. Where people are paid fairly and equitably. Where the workforce isn’t segregated by gender. That would lead to greater innovation, economic prosperity and health and well-being for all. Surely that’s something we all want to work towards.

    People often ask me if I get depressed doing this work, day in and day out. While there are indeed days that I feel heartbroken – for example when another woman is senselessly murdered, or when our political debates are couched in racist undertones – most of the time I feel hopeful and optimistic.

    That is in large part because of the incredible courage, honesty, and resilience I’ve seen with moments like #metoo and Black Lives Matter growing to become global calls to action. The Respect@Work bill has passed, and there’s a new political mandate for action and accountability on gender equality, and far from being disheartened, it’s inspiring to be amid such an important period of change.

    So, this International Women’s Day, I won’t be boycotting the day. But you won’t find me at another morning tea, either. UN Women’s theme for IWD 2023 is ‘Cracking the Code: Innovation for a gender equal future’, which highlights the role that bold, transformative ideas, inclusive technologies, and accessible education can play in combatting discrimination and the marginalisation of women globally.

    And that’s exactly what I’ll be working on – transformative education using innovative technologies to drive culture and behaviour change. I’ll be continuing to have those hard conversations about transforming the structures, systems, and values of an organisation. I’ll be using my creativity, and my voice, to remind people that these issues haven’t gone away, that they touch all of us, whether we’re women, men, or gender diverse. And I’ll be saying then what I’m saying here now – that only then, will we get to a place of true equality where everyone feels a sense of safety and belonging at work.

     

    The post Why I won’t be going to another IWD morning tea appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • The ‘manosphere’: understanding Andrew Tate’s appeal

    Mega-influencer Andrew Tate is once again back in the news as he battles charges of organised crime and human trafficking in Romania.

    Tate gained infamy last year after being banned on most major social media platforms for promoting a variety of aggressively misogynistic positions designed to stir controversy and draw attention to his brand.

    But while widespread public attention was drawn to Tate only recently, his reputation as a thought leader and “top g” in the online “manosphere” community has been longstanding.

    Indeed, Tate’s ability to stoke and exploit the anxieties and grievances driving the manosphere are unprecedented, and have played a key role in him amassing millions of fans and hundreds of millions of dollars.

    The lure of the ‘manosphere’

    The manosphere is an overlapping collection of online men’s support communities that have emerged as a response to feminism, female empowerment, and the alienating forces of neoliberalism.

    While this is widely understood, a lot less energy has been directed to understanding why and how men are attracted to these extreme communities in the first place.

    The manosphere’s appeal can be perplexing, particularly for parents, teachers or friends trying to make sense of how the men in their lives suddenly adopt aggressively misogynistic views.

    But while the community’s content presents deeply concerning perspectives on women, it also offers explanations for, and solutions to, a very real set of issues facing young men.

    A tranche of data illustrates these growing challenges. Men are rapidly falling behind in education engagement and outcomes. Rates of young male economic inactivity have risen considerably over the past two decades.

    The intimate relations of young men also appear to be in decline. One report suggests rates of sexual activity have dropped by nearly 10% since 2002.

    Suicide rates have risen significantly in men in particular over the past decade.

    We’re also facing a loneliness crisis, which is particularly concentrated in young people and men.

    The manosphere appeals to its audience because it speaks to the very real lives of young men under the above factors – romantic rejection, alienation, economic failure, loneliness, and a dim vision of the future.

    The major problem lies in its diagnosis of the cause of male disenfranchisement, which fixates on the impacts of feminism. Here it contrasts the growing challenges faced by men with the increasing social, economic and political success experienced by women. This zero-sum claim posits that female empowerment must necessarily equate to male disempowerment, and is evidenced through simplified and pseudoscientific theories of biology and socioeconomics.

    For many young men, their introduction to the manosphere begins not with hatred of women, but with a desire to dispel uncertainty about how the world around them works (and crucially, how relationships work).

    The foundations of the manosphere may not strictly centre on misogyny, as is popularly imagined, but in young men’s search for connection, truth, control and community at a time when all are increasingly ill-defined.

    Profiteering off anxiety

    Since its inception, the manosphere has been rife with predatory influencers seeking to profit off the anxieties unleashed by this ambiguity.

    Driven by a desire to reassert a romantic masculine aesthetic ideal in a world of social media unrealities, members of the manosphere often become willing consumers of a wide variety of products and services to “solve” their problems. These range from vitamin and gym supplements, personal coaching, self-help courses, and other subscription-based services.

    But the influencers aren’t just capitalising on a sense of crisis passively – they actively cultivate it, as our research shows.

    Figures like Tate, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and “alpha” strongman Elliott Hulse expend huge amounts of energy and capital fomenting a sense of crisis around these issues, and positioning themselves at the centre. No more clearly was this illustrated than in Tate’s “Hustler’s University”, which created a series of exclusive chat rooms promising men a solution to their fears and centred on Tate’s personage and teachings.

    Such communities solidify the claims made by their leaders, creating feedback loops that contribute to a climate of tension and hysteria. Members are actively encouraged to ridicule those who aren’t willing to acknowledge the “feminist conspiracies” that supposedly underpin the social and political world. Non-believers are seen as contemptible, weak and ignorant, dismissed through an ever-growing newspeak lexicon as “simps”, “cucks” and “betas”.

    The community can also be mobilised to spread the message and brand of the influencer to the wider public, as demonstrated by Tate.

    Having successfully isolated and indoctrinated community members, influencers can then rely on them as a persistent source of support and revenue, allowing them to further reinvest and continue this cycle of growth. This suggests a key way to push back on the wider effects of the manosphere is the targeted disruption of such feedback loops and the prevention of future ones emerging.

    Empathy, patience and support

    Tate and the manosphere didn’t manifest spontaneously. They’re symptoms of a deeper set of challenges young men are facing.

    These problems won’t be addressed by simply deplatforming people like Tate. While this may often be necessary in the short term, savvier influencers will inevitably emerge, responding to the same entrenched issues and employing the tactics to greater effect, while avoiding the mistakes of their predecessors.

    In confronting the manosphere we need to understand and take seriously its appeal to lost men and the centrality of influencers in this process. We can be as critical of it as we want to be. But we also need to understand what it provides for many: a community and place of belonging, a defined enemy, direction, certainty, solutions to deep and systemic issues and, perhaps most importantly, hope.

    We also need to avoid the kneejerk stigmatising and dismissal of people who fall into the manosphere. Simple ostracism tends only to entrench attitudes and reinforce the narratives of persecution spun by Tate and his ilk.

    Instead, we need to use empathy, tolerance and patience to support men in ways that lead them away from these unpleasant boroughs of the internet and make them feel connected with wider society.The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    • Picture at top: Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND

    The post The ‘manosphere’: understanding Andrew Tate’s appeal appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Less than half of Muslim women report a positive experience within the Muslim community, report finds

    According to a new report, only 45% of Muslim women reported having an overall positive experience within their community. A Muslim Woman’s Faith Experience is a joint effort by Muslim Census and the Ta Collective. The report examines Muslim women’s accessibility within physical religious spaces like mosques. But it also tells us about their spiritual well-being and relationship with faith.

    Prior to this report, limited research existed that explored the challenges Muslim women face in navigating their faith in the UK. However, research has been undertaken to determine women’s accessibility to religious spaces. For instance, the latest statistics (2017) found that there are approximately 1,795 mosques across the UK. Of these, 28% do not offer space for women. In most cases, when mosques do offer space, women are met with restricted access and substandard conditions.

    Inaccessibility of mosques impacts spirituality

    The report finds that 61% of Muslim women believe that:

    the limited access to Masjids [prayer spaces for Muslims] that they experience has a negative impact on their spirituality and their relationship with faith.

    Shahida Rahman, trustee of Cambridge Central Mosque, notes how male allies must step up to improve the spiritual well-being of Muslim women. She told the Canary:

    It needs to start from within our own communities. And with a lot of mosques being male-dominated, as you know, it is very, very difficult. But the doors do need to be opened for sisters who want to be in these leadership roles.

    Rahman, who is in a mosque leadership role herself, adds that male leaders are generally reluctant to bring in new faces:

    Most of the mosques are run by men, where the committee have been in their roles for many years, it’s very difficult for them to sort of move aside and say, ‘Okay, let’s bring on new people or, women even’.

    It’s not only leadership at the grassroots level that’s proving difficult; sometimes access to the physical space proves to be an obstacle too.

    Being denied entry to mosques

    The report added that 20% of Muslim women in the UK have been denied entry to a masjid. In fact, almost a third of them have been denied on the basis that “there was no dedicated space for women or that it was better for women to pray at home”. Other reasons for refusing entry include Muslim women being inappropriately dressed. 

    In some cases, denying entry means Muslim women had no choice but to pray in unsafe spaces.

    One respondent noted that:

    The males go to the masjid and we are forced to pray in changing rooms, car parks etc. It becomes so that Salah is a box to check off – there is no ease, no Khushoo [sense of tranquillity or focus], no community.

    As a result, Muslim women are turning to alternative sources for spiritual connection and guidance.

    The report found that 39% of Muslim women solely use online sources to seek Islamic knowledge and advice. Rahman sees benefits in these digital services, but she notes that human interaction is crucial:

    We are seeing more and more services for women online. So that’s very positive. But having said that women do need to have that face-to-face interaction with other sisters in their community. When we went into lockdown, we all felt sort of isolated. There wasn’t much human interaction, so I think there are two sides to that.

    Feeling disconnected from wider Muslim community 

    Only 32% of Muslim women felt connected to the wider Muslim community due to their needs being unmet. The report goes further to say “the conflation of religious teachings and cultural practices” results in a disconnect within the Muslim community. For instance, even when they did seek guidance through religious networks, it was difficult to discuss gender-sensitive topics.

    Aasifa Usmani, programme manager for the Faith and Communities Team at Standing Together, notes that mosques should be inclusive of women’s issues:

    Women need to be made a priority and there is a lot of work to be done around that. And obviously, this is not an isolated incident just with Muslim women, this cuts across all faith institutions and how women feel excluded, and othered as well.

    Rahman believes that whilst every community is run a different way, culture can sometimes take precedence in mosques:

    I’m not surprised as a lot of this is related to cultural issues.

    The British Muslim Civil Society report, released in January 2023, made the recommendation that:

    more generally, mosques should not function, as they do in many cases, solely as spaces of prayer for men for a few minutes every few hours.

    The need for change

    Usmaani notes how religious spaces must provide more than one service such as prayer to instill community values:

    Spaces have triangularity, to connect to God, and spiritual needs. I’m glad the report mentioned importance of spirituality, because not every census captures that. It also goes to show that in our so-called secular society, actually, there are lots of women of faith

    The report’s findings were based on a survey of 1,200 Muslim women in the UK, alongside four focus groups with a total of 24 participants.

    Rahman agrees with the idea that mosques need to be more than a place just for prayer:

    It’s a place for social gatherings for sisters, a place of learning and a place or feeling where they can get away really from home and just be able to connect.

    It’s evident that Muslim women have been experiencing issues at the masjid for decades. More often than not, mosques are gendered spaces and women’s use is conditional upon the availability of space. As such, limited access to these spaces negatively impacts Muslim women’s spiritual connection. Only through male allyship and opening up doors for Muslim women in leadership positions can we collectively raise the bar.

    Follow Ta Collective, formerly My Mosque Story, to hear more about the experiences of Muslim women in UK mosques.

    Featured image via Giuseppe Milo – Flickr, resized to 770×403 under licence CC BY 2.0

    By Uzma Gulbahar

  • UK schools fight misogyny peddled by online influencer Andrew Tate

    Andrew Tate, a 36-year-old former kick boxer, is being investigated along with his brother on accusations of “forming an organised criminal group, human trafficking and rape”. Both men deny the charges. When this news broke, many adults learned for the first time of this British man’s existence. However, for many teenagers he was a familiar name.

    When Nick Hewlett, head of London school St. Dunstan’s College, was told about controversial online influencer Andrew Tate by a parent, he’d never heard of him. However, it soon emerged that many of his students were familiar with Tate’s misogynist posts on social media. Hewlett’s solution, and that of some other schools, is to talk openly to students about Tate’s rhetoric.

    Tate’s name was one of the most-searched-for terms on Google in 2022. He is known for his ‘motivational’ videos, in which he lays out his vision of masculinity and success. For him, success is synonymous with wealth, domination, and possessing women and luxury cars. In one of his most disturbing messages, he talks about women being “the property” of men.

    In a tweet, he wrote:

    A man without struggle is never going to be a powerful man… If you’re going to be a hero, you’re going to suffer.

    He also said:

    Masculine life is war.

    ‘Talks about women like objects’

    Just mentioning Tate’s name is enough to set off a heated debate among teenagers. 17-year-old Kieran told Agence France-Presse (AFP):

    At one point, I thought his message was good. He was encouraging men to go the gym. He talked about masculinity while a lot of men are lost. They are asked to behave in a certain way.

    After Tate’s arrest Kieran reconsidered:

    After his arrest, I talked with my mother and my sister and I realised how serious it was.

    Tate has been banned from a number of social media sites but that has not been enough to stop him reaching minors. Kieran said he has tried to block Tate from his social media but keeps seeing the content popping up anyway. Kieran’s friend Jon said he likes some of Tate’s messages, but has noticed that he “talks about women like objects”.

    “I’ve never liked him,” said Lilly, the only girl in the group.

    Toxic masculinity

    To deal with the problem, St. Dunstan’s has added Tate’s story to a lesson topic already being taught.

    From the age of 11, students learn about gender stereotypes and equality. At the age of around 13, they cover toxic masculinity. Hewlett said:

    We have 1,200 children here. So, inevitably, some are going to be falling under his influence – or his spell.

    If schools don’t respond to that, who is going to challenge their views? (…) You’ll create a generation of young people who have a completely distorted view of what success looks like.

    Natasha Eeles heads Bold Voices, a social enterprise she founded in 2018 that visits schools and universities to teach students about gender inequality. She said she first heard of Tate in May 2022. Currently, 70% of schools that contact her want her to talk about him. Last autumn, Bold Voices put together a toolkit to help parents start a conversation with children about Tate. The advice includes asking open questions such as “What do you think of him?” and explaining what misogyny and homophobia mean.

    Michael Conroy, founder of Men at Work – a social enterprise that helps teachers and social workers talk to young men – said:

    There’s a panic and fear among lots of parents, carers, teachers about Andrew Tate.

    Teachers say young men are frequently bringing him into the classroom by quoting him, whatever the context.

    For example, in a business studies class some will give him as an example, saying: “he’s the greatest businessman in the world”.

    While Tate is being held in detention pending investigation, his videos are still going viral, and he and his close allies are still tweeting. Asked whether a jail term would reduce Tate’s influence, Conroy was skeptical:

    If he stays in jail, let’s not be naive. Others will fill the space.

    Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Sky News

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    By The Canary

  • Andrew Tate: a biproduct of neoliberalism – not someone helping young men

    The Canary‘s multimedia producer Curtis Daly has been watching events surrounding Andrew Tate in recent weeks.

    Falling-down the rabbit hole

    As Sky News reported on 14 January, the latest developments are that:

    Romanian authorities have seized several luxury cars from influencer Andrew Tate’s villa as part of a criminal inquiry into alleged human trafficking that led to his arrest. The cars, which included a Rolls-Royce and a BMW, were taken from Tate’s villa in Voluntari on the outskirts of Bucharest and transported by police to a secret warehouse. The self-proclaimed misogynist was arrested in the capital on 29 December, on charges of being part of an organised crime group, human trafficking and rape. His brother Tristan and two Romanian women were also arrested. They have denied wrongdoing.

    As Daly notes in his latest video, it’s clear that Andrew Tate’s target audience is young straight men. This demographic, coincidentally, is also the most likely to fall down the far-right rabbit hole. In an age where the idea of gender – of femininity and masculinity – is becoming more fluid, the counter culture which has been pushed by the right is extreme, toxic masculinity. The vulgar misogyny that’s on display finds itself split between Andrew Tate fans who think that it’s a way of picking up women, and those who use the hatred of women as a front for being unsuccessful with them – also known as ‘incels’.

    In a world of misinformation – a combination of ultra masculinity, a rejection of modern identity, and being promised that this behavior somehow attracts women – it’s plausible that some young men find this appealing.

    Andrew Tate: a neoliberalist biproduct?

    So, in his latest video Daly argues that Andrew Tate is a biproduct of neoliberalism – not someone helping young men. As he notes, Andrew Tate is exploiting the false idea that being a man is somehow being erased. However, he also has an economic incentive to push this kind of narrative:

    Young men with low self-esteem are actually great for him. He manipulates them and sells them an idea – making a profit off people’s misery. Andrew Tate’s biggest business venture is ‘Hustlers University’ – which users can sign up for, which in turn will miraculously make them rich.

    It’s just one big scam – the business is essentially his personality. His persona of leaning into ‘anti-wokeness’ and his extreme misogyny appeal to made-up fears surrounding sex, gender, alpha males and beta males, coupled with a get-rich-quick scheme that promotes selfishness and extreme individualism.

    Sounds familiar in any way? Andrew Tate is quite literally a model by-product of neoliberalism.

    Watch Curtis Daly’s full video via YouTube below – and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button while you’re there.

    By Curtis Daly

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • It’s not surprising that one of the worst sex offenders in Britain is a Met police officer

    A Metropolitan Police officer has pleaded guilty to at least 29 sexual offences, including 14 rape charges. David Carrick was an armed police officer, serving in the parliamentary and diplomatic protection command. He joined the Met in 2001 after leaving the army, and his attacks span a period of 18 years. The police force admitted that there are likely to be more victims who are too scared to come forward, and other women who couldn’t face the ordeal of a trial. Carrick used his position in the police to terrify women into staying silent.

    Inaction by the Met over Carrick

    The Met suspended Carrick in October 2021. However, Sky News has reported that:

    the Met Police confirmed Carrick “had come to the attention of the Met and other forces on nine occasions prior to October 2021” but had not been charged over those allegations against him.

    They included allegations of rape, domestic violence, and harassment between 2000 and 2021.

    Barbara Gray, the Met’s assistant commissioner, said:

    We should have spotted his pattern of abusive behaviour and because we didn’t, we missed opportunities to remove him from the organisation.

    However, the force chose to ignore multiple complaints. It didn’t miss them, as Gray claimed. Not only did the police force do nothing about the allegations, it even armed Carrick, giving him a gun in 2009. He even passed another vetting procedure in 2017, despite the force knowing about the allegations.

    This shows, once again, how disgustingly misogynist the Metropolitan Police is. It has such little regard for women’s safety that it ignored multiple complaints, and rewarded Carrick by promoting him up the ranks into an elite armed unit.

    Rampant misogyny

    It is hardly surprising that one of the worst sex offenders in Britain could be allowed to thrive in the Metropolitan Police. The Canary has extensively reported on the rampant misogyny in the Met. It took the brutal murder of Sarah Everard for the Met to announce that it would investigate all cases of sexual misconduct or domestic abuse allegations against its officers. Sarah was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by then-serving Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021. He even remained an officer after police arrested him that month, and was only sacked in July, over a month after he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and raping her.

    Just months after Sarah’s murder, Cressida Dick – who was then the Metropolitan Police Commissioner – was accused of “presiding over a culture of incompetence and cover-up”. Dick resigned in April 2022 after she was criticised for her handling of racist, misogynist, and homophobic messages shared by a group of officers based at Charing Cross police station. The men sent WhatsApp and Facebook messages to each other, making multiple references to rape and violence against women. One officer was even referred to as “mcrapey raperson” because of rumours that he had brought a woman to a police station to have sex with her.

    It’s also important not to forget the Met’s handling of the murders of sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, who were stabbed to death in a park in Wembley in June 2020. Their family had to search for the women themselves after the Met didn’t immediately respond to their calls for help. When the police did finally turn up, officers took selfies of themselves next to Bibaa and Nicole’s dead bodies. Their mother, Mina Smallman, said at the time:

    If ever we needed an example of how toxic it has become, those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead black girls and send them on. It speaks volumes of the ethos that runs through the Metropolitan Police.

    Thousands of women have been murdered or abused by the police

    In 2021, a report found that at least 194 women have been murdered by the police and prison system in England and Wales. In 2022, freedom of information requests from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 82% of police officers who were accused of domestic abuse kept their jobs. The Guardian reported that:

    1,080 out of 1,319 police officers and staff who were reported for alleged domestic abuse during a three-year period were still working.

    The Guardian continued:

    The conviction rate of police officers and staff for domestic abuse is 3.4%, lower than the 6.3% in the general population.

    Institutional violence

    This being the case, it’s little consolation when the Met yet again sheds crocodile tears, apologising that one of its elite officers, Carrick, has been raping women for two decades. Gray said:

    We are truly sorry that being able to continue to use his role as a police officer may have prolonged the suffering of his victims.

    The Met will go on looking after their own, thriving on a culture of violence, racism, and misogyny. Its officers will, no doubt, continue to abuse and terrify women. These officers will be loose on the streets, arresting and traumatising women, children and Black communities with brutal and humilitating strip searches, while their undercover police officers will continue to invade women’s lives.

    Meanwhile, the state will continue to play its part, having passed a succession of new laws giving some of the country’s most violent men – police officers – inexhaustible new powers.

    The Met will start the process of sacking Carrick on Tuesday 17 January. Far too little, too late.

    Featured image via Guardian News/screen grab, resized to 770*403

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • “Be ruthless with structures and kind with people”

    Having initiated one of Australia’s most successful campaigns against sexual assault, Chanel Contos shares some valuable advice:  “Be ruthless with structures and kind with people.” 

    Chanel believes the decision to focus on changing the culture, rather than demonising individuals, is the main reason for the success of her Teach Us Consent campaign. As a result of Chanel’s initiative, Australia will soon see consent education introduced nationally in every school at every level. 

    In February last year, Chanel posted an Instagram poll, asking “Have you, or has anyone close to you, ever been sexually assaulted by someone who went to an all-boys school in Sydney?” The post went viral and Chanel was soon inundated with replies from all over the world. Seventy per cent of respondents answered, “Yes.”

    With over 200 responses within 24 hours, Chanel quickly realised an issue she and her friends were discussing privately was not isolated to a few exclusive Sydney schools. Teenage boys are routinely raping and sexually assaulting teenage girls, but rape culture is so normalised in our society that, often, neither perpetrators nor victims understand what has happened between them is a criminal act. 

    The problem, identified by Chanel, is that neither girls nor boys receive consent education at school. It isn’t until they leave school that young women realise they have been raped or sexually assaulted – often by boys they trusted, and considered as friends. It’s unclear how many young men gain sufficient insight to understand that actions they considered “normal teenage behaviour” were not only illegal, but hugely damaging to the young women involved. 

    Inspired by the response to her poll, Chanel, now working with a team of experts, set up a website called “Teach Us Consent” and started an online petition asking for sexual consent education in Australian schools. The petition quickly gained more than 44,000 signatures supported by over 6,540 stories of sexual assault. 

    Recently, I interviewed Chanel Contos for an episode of  the Australian Academy of Social Sciences in Australia’s ‘Seriously Social podcast’. As the mother of 9 and 12 year old girls, the importance of her work really struck home to me. As an older feminist, I finished the interview simply bursting with pride that young women of Chanel’s generation are taking up the cause of women’s safety and equality with such thoughtfulness, insight and skill. 

    Chanel, herself,  was sexually assaulted at just 13 years old, but it was not until she left school she discovered the boy who sexually assaulted her went on to do the same to one of her friends. 

    She says, “I got really, really emotional about the fact I could have prevented it happening if I had fully understood what was going on; if I’d reported him or held him accountable in some way. But I didn’t.”

    “I didn’t know that someone you knew and trusted could do something like rape you. I thought rapists were that stereotype of someone who is going to kidnap you and hurt you. I didn’t realise that sexual violence can occur without physical pain being inflicted. And because I thought what happened was normal, I didn’t tell anyone. I just thought that was part of being thirteen.”

    “I thought, maybe if he knew what consent was – how important it was – maybe he wouldn’t have done it to me.”

    Chanel’s initial plan was to solicit some testimonies from girls within her own circle and pass them on to local boys’ schools. But then she decided on the Instagram poll – and it went viral.

    She says, “I was getting testimonies faster than I could physically read or post them.”

    Chanel couldn’t help but be touched by the responses. She told me, “… those stories – every single one of them – was so genuine … None of them were conventional or whatever. Everyone had their own voice and that made their stories feel so real … It was hard to ignore that.”

    When, inevitably, the media got hold of the story it took Chanel’s campaign to a level where it simply couldn’t be ignored.

    The Teach Us Consent campaign is designed to change lives. But it has also changed Chanel’s life. 

    She says, “If we think about the day before I launched the petition I was a big-time, chilled out, uni student. Doing my Masters degree and living in London during the COVID lock-down, I was spending a lot of time inside; sleeping in, staying up late. And then, almost overnight, after the petition started, I didn’t sleep for like three or four days.”

    Chanel spent the next 18 months working on her Master’s thesis during the day, then switching to “Australian time” and working on the Teach Us Consent campaign all night.

    She says, “It was a massive life change, but it means that now I get to work in gender equality and violence prevention and human rights, which is something I always wanted to do; I just didn’t really think I could do it.” 

    Chanel was recently appointed director of the Australia Institute’s Centre for Sex and Gender Equality. It is an inspired appointment, given the runaway success of Chanel’s Teach Us Consent campaign. 

    As a direct result of her efforts, NSW Police ramped up Operation Vest, their anonymous online tip site, Chanel met with the Prime Minister and, earlier this year, Ministers of Education from around Australia unanimously committed to mandating “holistic and age appropriate consent education in every school every year, from foundation until Year 10.” 

    Chanel was surprised that, once consciousness was raised about this issue, cultural change happened incredibly quickly. It went from cynical responses like, “What do you want the school system to do about it?” to everyone agreeing – the public, schools, police and politicians – that immediate action is required.

    Chanel marvels at the people who were “willing to put the most intimate parts of their lives on a public forum for the benefit of the greater good” and credits their selfless generosity for helping to effect this tangible change.

    Not all campaigns are as successful as Chanel’s, and certainly few get results as quickly. I asked her, “Why do you think your style of protest got the results it did?”

    First, Chanel thinks that people had a strong, emotional response to the testimonies posted on the Teach Us Consent website. To date, more than 6,500 stories of sexual assault have been submitted.

    But, having given it a great deal of thought, Chanel thinks what really made her campaign unique was “the fact that no individual perpetrator at any point got any blame. There was no individual finger-pointing.” 

    Chanel’s campaign was never about blaming perpetrators, it was about fixing the culture that was creating the problem. The mantra guiding Teach Us Consent was:  “Be ruthless with structures and kind with people.”

    She says, “I feel like that’s what the campaign did, which is why it had such an impact.”

    Towards the end of our interview, I asked Chanel, what she would do if she had a magic wand.

    At first, she says she would abolish normalised violence. But, as the discussion continued she revises her wish and decides that granting empathy to everyone would have the same result and a wider impact. 

    The success of the Teach Us Consent campaign should give us pause for thought. Of course, it is only natural to want to respond to sexual assault with anger and blame. But Chanel’s counterintuitive, empathetic approach encourages everyone to focus, not on who is to blame, but on how we can all do better.

    • Feature image: Chanel Contos. Picture: Supplied 

    The post “Be ruthless with structures and kind with people” appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Muslim women call for male allies to step up in UK mosques

    Muslim men are not doing enough to accommodate Muslim women in prayer spaces. Mosques usually have segregated worship places. Sometimes women will pray behind men in the same space. More often, mosques will have two separate rooms, with the men in the main prayer hall and the women in an alternative space. Based on this setup, mosques are gendered spaces, and women’s use is conditional upon the availability of space. And in some cases, mosques make no room for women at all.

    As per the latest statistics (compiled in 2017), there are approximately 1,795 mosques across the UK. Of these, 28% do not offer space for women. In most cases, when mosques do offer space, women are met with restricted access and substandard conditions. For decades, the onus has been on women to effect change – but there’s only so much they can do. It’s time for men to step up.

    The excuse

    By and large, Muslim women have been presented with the impression that it’s better for them to pray at home. While this view isn’t universal, it certainly has an impact on how women feel about attending their local mosque. The belief comes from a hadith – a record of traditions by the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) – describing a preference for women to worship at home. Yet, many Muslim women feel that has been used as an excuse to justify the current status quo.

    Tebussum Rashid, deputy CEO at Action for Race Equality, notes that she herself has fallen into this mindset:

    There’s a lovely little mosque near where I work in King’s Cross and there’s absolutely no space for women. I think to myself, the building has probably been established as a mosque many years ago for men and now, there’s probably not enough space to expand for men, never mind, women. I know that’s not an excuse, but in my head, I justified it that way – just to keep myself calm. 

    Likewise, Nafisah Atcha, organic content executive at Embryo Digital, suggests how this view has become the default way of thinking:

    I think that perception hinders women’s access to mosques. We forget that Allah has allowed women to pray from home because we have other duties. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be disregarded from the mosque community altogether.

    Other hadiths believe women should not be prevented from the mosque. Gender equality campaigner Julie Siddiqui says:

    It’s incredible how ingrained this idea has become – that it’s better for women to pray at home. That is a mindset. That is a whole way of thinking that is telling people that somehow women’s prayer is less important.

    During lockdown, it became overly apparent that Muslim men’s worship needs were being prioritised. A number of UK mosques were closed to women for coronavirus (Covid-19) health and safety reasons. Aasifa Usmani, programme manager for the Faith and Communities Team at Standing Together, notes how the pandemic left no option for women:

    Women’s spaces in mosques closed down to allow a wider space for men. It just shows that consulting us is not really considered important.

    For Muslim women, spaces prove impermanent and fluctuate without their input.

    More than physical space

    However, Usmani also noted that “spaces are not the be-all and end-all”. Even when spaces are created, poor conditions and an uninviting atmosphere discourage women from attending the mosque. 

    Siddiqui co-founded Open My Mosque, a campaign to highlight and speak out about inequalities in UK mosques. She describes how one visit to a mosque forced Muslim men to take notice:

    One of the male trustees had literally walked through the women’s entrance and found all sorts of things wrong, There were light bulbs out, doors weren’t opening properly, you know, all these things. He was shocked and a bit embarrassed to be quite honest. Of course, he was a good guy, but actually physically walking the route opened his eyes, because as far as they were concerned, the women’s section had lovely carpets and lots of light. But there’s stuff that goes wrong, that they didn’t even realise, and actually would not be allowed to continue to happen in the men’s area

    While the inadequate conditions have been known to Muslim women for decades, it’s not something that’s obvious to men.

    For Rashid, women can themselves contribute towards the uncomfortable feelings she experiences. She recalls how she was told to put on an abaya (a loose-fitting full-length robe) even though she was already dressed modestly for prayer.

    If women don’t have the same values – supporting, empowering and encouraging, then we’re not gonna have enough women wanting to go into the mosque. There’s an underside of judgement that other women are putting on each other about what is right and wrong. We need to focus on prayer rather than the micro-details like clothing, variations in praying and so forth.

    A community issue

    It’s not easy for Muslim women to stand publicly against injustice. On 5 September 2021, in response to two young women being thrown out of the Soho Islamic Centre, Siddiqui and the Open My Mosque team observed prayers outside the mosque. Despite the backlash, Siddiqui received hundreds of messages from British Muslim women who had experienced the same.

    Siddiqui says:

    To sort of openly shout about this stuff is not always easy. And it’s not always comfortable. But you keep your intentions clear and you remember why you’re doing it. You hear the reactions from people that are very sincere that no one else sees apart from me.

    There’s a stigma that if Muslim women speak up on these issues they’re contributing to Islamophobia. Siddiqui adds:

    We all talk about Islamophobia and the bad stuff that’s happening against us, but when it comes to our own prejudice and our own inequality and our own injustice to each other. No one wants to talk about that stuff, because that’s different.

    We have to try and push, knock at the door, literally, find our way in, but also raise these real experiences, tell the stories, do the videos, you know, take the photos, share them online. That’s how it’s done. Now, almost to a certain extent, a little bit of embarrassment works that I think works, frankly speaking, whether people like it or not, you know, that’s how these things change.

    Gender-inclusive sermons

    Although sermons are usually topical and issue-based, some Muslim women would love to hear about issues that are women-centric or concern other marginalised groups. Rashid says:

    … it’d be great if there were more women-specific topics like family life or menopause. I’d love to be able to kind of ask questions or listen or get some comfort. And I know there are women out there that are learned and knowledgeable about these things, but they don’t have the spaces created for them. You know, it’d be great if there was a sermon for women, by women.

    Whilst sermons are usually performed by men, introducing female speakers enables a sanctuary space for women.

    Likewise, Usmani says:

    But even when there are spaces, you feel that there is a lack of inclusivity like in the sermons, for example, when men talk no matter how well-meaning they are, they experience a very masculine experience. And sometimes it can become very, very monotonous.

    Usmani also notes how some mosques fail to be a safe space for minorities:

    The Muslim LGBTQI community could feel isolated and stigmatised and considered “sinful”. It is important that we validate and hear their concerns and not ostracise them. These communities have been grappling with their struggles and are often ostracised by their families and could often come across as open hostility by communities and families. Mosques should be a safe space for them to get emotional support and not to other them, Ramadhan and Eid could be very isolating for them.

    Change from the top

    Through a top-down approach, the community can work together to shift the current mindset. Rashid says:

    At the governance level, there need to be more women.

    These positions have to be more than hollow gestures, as Rashid says:

    Those already in leadership must have the intention and commitment for more inclusivity, Trustees also need to have etiquette around some of the conversations, you know, not only from a religious point of view but from a human point of view, as well.  What does accessibility actually mean? And it’s not just about the physical space – why are those spaces sidelined? Why do we have to go past the bins to get there? Why are women made to feel uncomfortable, because we have to pass the men and they might be staring at us? That’s their problem, not ours, all of that, and I want to change to behaviours and mindsets of men. And that can start at the leadership level, first and foremost. And then through that, through sermons, through behaviours, the ripple effect has to happen. There’s no point in having those spaces if the attitudes make us feel unwelcome.

    Siddiqui agrees that more women must be at the table. However, transparency is required in the recruitment system. She said:

    It’s become so common and I’ve seen it locally that, even when some of the women trustees have come forward but they happen to be related to the committee members, So how much of a challenge are these women going to give or how many of their ideas are going to be heard?

    Mosques need to go beyond lip-service and recognise women’s demands.

    Cambridge Central Mosque is one mosque with gender inclusivity at its heart. As one of the very few mosques which allow men and women to pray in the same prayer hall, Shahida Rahman tells us they’re breaking down barriers:

    It’s open to everybody, you know, regardless of what school of thought that you follow, it’s for all communities. And we do get asked the question, ‘is it a Shia mosque or a Sunni mosque?’ It’s open to everyone. It’s a prayer space. And it’s also a community space as well.

    The physical space in this particular mosque has been adapted to fit women’s needs. A mother and children room allows worshippers to join the prayers, separated by glass doors which prevent any noises from reaching the main prayer hall.

    It’s evident that Muslim women have been spearheading this campaign for decades. Only through male allyship can we collectively raise the bar by recognising gender inequality as a community issue.

    Featured image via R Haworth – Wikimedia, resized to 770×403 pixels under licence CC BY-SA 3.0

    By Uzma Gulbahar

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets?

    Four hundred years ago Emilia Bassano raised her voice. The world didn’t listen. Who was Emilia? Was she the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets? What of her own poems? And why was her story erased from history? Fierce and provocative, the play Emilia was written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and tells the story of a woman and her sisters who call out to us across the centuries with passion, fury, laughter, and song.

    The work is a mix of laughter and fury – a play that takes its audiences on an exuberant and moving journey though love, loss, identity, ambition, power, rebellion and what it is to be a woman in a man’s world. 

    With a cast of 13 incredible women and non-binary performers, this play – which will shortly be showing at Canberra Theatre Centre –  celebrates all voices through the trailblazing story of a woman who refused to take no for an answer. BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman speaks to director Petra Kalive.

    If you were explaining the show in a nutshell to someone who didn’t know anything about it, what would you say? 

    Emilia is the story a woman who lived in Shakespeare’s time and who many think was Shakespeare’s muse –  his ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets. But she was much more than that. A writer, poet, leader, mother and teacher. We are finally sharing her story and it is funny, powerful and inspiring.

    Like so many women, Emilia was erased from history. What can you tell us about her?

    Emilia was born in 1569 into a family of musicians. It is difficult to ascertain her heritage exactly, but she was definitely Italian, Jewish and likely of North African Descent. Her father died young and so she was placed in the care of Countess Susan Bertie, a noblewoman favoured of Queen Elizabeth.

    It was in Bertie’s care that Emilia was educated and introduced to court. Emilia became mistress to Lord Henry Carey, a very powerful nobleman and courtier and the patron of the Lord Chamberlin’s men (William Shakespeare’s company). Lord Carey provided Emilia with financial security, independence and literary connections including an introduction to Mary Sidney (a noble woman who developed and led the most important and influential literary circle in English history, now called Wilton Circle).

    Time as Carey’s mistress meant time to write but soon Emilia became pregnant and was married off to her cousin Alphonso Lanier. While married she continued to write and it was at this stage she met Shakespeare.

    It is suggested that they became lovers and there are many differing schools of thought about how much input Emilia had in Shakespeare’s works. In the first instance her knowledge of music seems to have been influential in Shakespeare’s works.

    Her name appears in multiple iterations across many of Shakespeare’s works, as does her home, Italy. It is interesting to note that Shakespeare wrote such rich female characters, with voice and agency and yet did not teach his own daughter to read. It begs the question, who else was urging supporting Shakespeare to realise these perspectives in his plays?We think Emilia.

    After the death of her daughter and multiple miscarriages, she goes to teach women ‘south of the river’ how to read and write. At the age of 42, Emilia published a collection of poetry called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews).

    Emilia’s book was the first substantial, original book of poetry written by an Englishwoman. It was about the Crucifixion of Christ from a female perspective. It was revolutionary for its time and within the text were messages and radical ideas for women to stand up, have agency and a voice.

    While she was a product of her time, the writings reflect progressive ideas for a classless world where men and women were seen as equals. I like to think of it as one of the first feminist works, subversively buried in religion so as not to alert the censors. Emilia died in 1645.

    UK's Times newspaper said Emilia is a “fire-cracker production” with “a clever mix of history and revolution”. Picture: Supplied

    UK’s Times newspaper said Emilia is a “fire-cracker production” with “a clever mix of history and revolution”. Picture: Supplied

    This cast is extremely diverse. Why have you taken this approach? What does that bring to the stage? 

    The play was written to be performed by an all female cast of diverse women and non-binary performers. It would not be the same play if this was ignored. Morgan Lloyd Malcom also wrote Emilia to be played by three different actors, which challenges the idea that a play about a person needs to be a vehicle for one actor. It allows a depth of perspective as these three different performers bring their different lived experiences to the role and I feel provides the audience more entry points into the work.

    In a way we are all Emilia. Personally, I want to see work on our stages that reflects the world in which we live. I would not say that this cast is ‘extremely diverse’, it simply reflects the reality of the world.

    We have spent a lot of time in theatre excluding people for no good reason. The play is about a story erased from history – I was determined not to erase the intersection of multiple female and non-binary experiences from the rehearsal room conversation and I thought it exceedingly important for an audience to experience that intersection of feminisms/experiences as well.

    What’s your favourite quote or scene in the play and why? 

    There are so many moments in the play that are my favourites. I love the humour in the work – it’s so funny and subversive. But the monologue spoken by Emilia 3, always makes me tear up a bit. It may seem unremarkable to you, but I think it is a lived experience for so many women (and especially women of colour)

    It is a wondrous thing when someone instills their confidence in you. Offers you their hand. Believes you can do it and you alone. Sees you not as a risk or a trifle, sees you not to be patronised or dismissed. And I see through my many years now how valuable that is to any kind of creation. And how lucky some have been to have had that from birth. An assumption that ‘you will’, instead of one that says ‘you shouldn’t’. 

    The play is described as being both hilarious and furious. What can you tell us about the emotional landscape of the play? 

    What Morgan Lloyd Malcom balances brilliantly is the deep fury and injustice felt from the generational legacy that our society holds at its core from silencing, disempowering and hurting women while celebrating our strength, and fallibility and humanity.

    Morgan balances laughing at the absurdity of the patriarchy while acknowledging the very real impact that has on women’s lives and bodies. And this is one of the most brilliant things about the play, it simultaneously holds those two seemingly conflicting truths. It uses the form of theatre, in a very Shakespearean Globe way to allow these ideas to sit in opposition.

    Morgan (like Shakespeare) is using humour to talk to the many to get her audience breathing and enjoying the storytelling, and using poetry and drama to elevate the story of a forgotten woman. It’s been an absolute gift to direct, to be joyful and playful (there has been so much laughter), but we are never far from the truth of the experience and impact that inequality has had on women and still continues to have.

    It’s amazing that the issues women had 400 years ago are still relevant today. As a a feminist, how does that make you feel? How do you hold onto hope?

    Yes, there is still a long way to go and while we consistently take steps forward, we seem to take steps back and sideways along the way too. I think power and privilege is a difficult thing to acknowledge and relinquish.

    But more and more, I am seeing and experiencing a cultural shift. Some people are stepping aside – but more importantly, so many people are speaking out and stepping up. That gives me hope.

    There is serious scholarly work exploring whether Emilia was actually Shakespeare and that he published her work and another woman’s work under his name. Does the production challenge us to consider if Shakespeare was really a woman (or two)?

    No the production doesn’t ask us to consider whether Shakespeare was a woman. It gets us to think about the fact that maybe he wasn’t a solo genius. It challenges the idea of the wunderkind. That Emilia significantly contributed to his work and works and that had he been writing today, the credit line to his works may have read – by William Shakespeare & Emilia Lanier with the Lord Chamberlin’s men. I believe it was a collaborative act – like all good theatre making.

    • Picture at top: In Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s electrifying new play, Emilia and her sisters call out to us across the centuries with passion, fury, laughter, and song. Picture: Supplied 

     

     

    The post The ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets? appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • ‘Senile’ wasn’t the only slur Wes Streeting used this week

    Wes Streeting caused a storm on Wednesday 9 November when he referred to Jeremy Corbyn as “senile” in parliament. But it wasn’t the only time in recent days that he’s thrown an outdated, offensive word at somebody.

    Streeting: insulting countless people

    As Politics JOE tweeted, Streeting called Corbyn “senile” in parliament. It was in response to the former Labour leader trying to raise a point of order about Rishi Sunak’s repeated referencing of him during Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs):

    People were rightly angry. The word ‘senile’ is an insult and mental health slur. As Healthline wrote:

    Today, “senile” is generally considered an insult and is not used except as part of archaic medical condition names. The more accurate way to refer to natural changes of aging, especially those related to mental and intellectual functioning, is “cognitive changes.”

    On social media, Streeting upset people with lived experience of dementia:

    As always, Corbyn acted with dignity – using the furore about Streeting’s comments to tweet a rallying cry over dementia:

    Streeting has since apologised. He said to Owen Jones on Twitter:

    In jest, but I accept in poor taste. I’ve dropped Jeremy a note directly to apologise for any offence caused.

    However, this wasn’t the only offensive slur Labour’s shadow health secretary has used recently.

    ‘Hysterical’

    On 8 November, accounting professor Richard Murphy quote-tweeted Streeting regarding a comment he made about the NHS. In response, Streeting said Murphy’s tweets were “increasingly hysterical”:

    He doubled down on calling Murphy’s tweets hysterical, saying:

    some of your commentary on the Labour Party in recent days has been hysterical

    The problem with Streeting’s comments is that ‘hysterical’ is also an insult – it’s misogynistic and sexist.

    As Shalome Sine wrote on her Medium page:

    Hysteria comes from the Greek root hystera, meaning ‘uterus.’ Originally, it was believed that hysteria and hysterical symptoms were caused by a defect in the womb, and thus, only women could become hysterical.

    She continued by noting that medical professionals claimed hysteria was an actual physical and mental health condition for years. Spoiler alert: the condition doesn’t exist. Even to this day, things like the pseudoscientific ‘conversion disorder’ are essentially psychiatrists dressing up hysteria for the 21st century. Meanwhile, medical professionals dismissing women with the neuroimmune disease myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) has its roots in the misogyny of hysteria.

    Streeting should know better

    So, as Sine wrote, even now this “ridiculous” idea still permeates society:

    Women are typically considered less reasonable. When we’re upset, we get asked whether we are on our period. When we’re not upset, and instead feeling emotionally level, we’re considered cold. This horrendous catch-22 leaves us with only one socially acceptable option: smiling and acting warmly toward those around us is the only attitude considered appropriate for us. For women, reasonableness is simply not a social expectation. Smiles are.

    She also noted that hysteria also impacts on other genders too:

    Men could not be diagnosed with hysteria because they did not have wombs. Besides, they were supposed to be too strong for these ‘womanly’ diseases. In turn, they could not (or would not) be treated for their psychological distress.

    So, as Sine summed up:

    We have a lot to learn from this. Sexism and rape culture are woven through the language we speak. It’s important to recognize these words, learn our history, and change the future for the better.

    I, for one, know I won’t be using the word ‘hysterical’ any time soon.

    Yet Streeting repeatedly used it. Now, Murphy is a man – but the point is that using hysterical in any context legitimises people using the word. It’s this that we need to root out.

    For the shadow health secretary to use the word ‘senile’ is really bad. However, Streeting has clearly missed the connotations around ‘hysteria’, too – again, something you think he’d know as the shadow health secretary. The Canary has previously used “hysterical” or “hysteria” in articles. But we didn’t know better, and have since learned. So, hopefully Streeting may read this article and apologise and learn himself. We won’t be holding our breath, though.

    Featured image via Sky News – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • A loss for misogynists everywhere as Sanna Marin cleared of wrongdoing

    An independent body has cleared Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin of misconduct. This follows an official inquiry after a leaked video showed her partying in August. Of course, the real story here is one of misogyny and sexism.

    Marin: cleared of any wrongdoing

    AFP reported that dozens of complaints were filed to Finland’s chancellor of justice. This was after Marin was shown dancing and partying with friends and celebrities, spawning global headlines. The complaints alleged that Marin was unfit to work “due to alcohol consumption”, that her behaviour was inappropriate for a prime minister, and that she undermined Finland’s “reputation and security”.

    But the chancellor, an independent office responsible for overseeing the legality of government activities, and to which any citizen can lodge complaints, concluded that Marin had not neglected her duties as prime minister.

    Chancellor of Justice Tuomas Poysti said there was:

    no reason to suspect the prime minister of unlawful conduct in the performance of her duties or of neglect of her official duties. 

    He went further, saying the complaints failed to establish that Marin had omitted or jeopardised a “specific official duty”. Poysti noted that assessing the “moral and social” dimension of a prime minister’s leisure activities is “a matter for parliament”. He added that:

    political accountability is also weighed periodically in democratic elections.

    “I am human”

    At the time of the incident, Marin said she spent “an evening with friends”, and that the videos were “filmed in private premises”. On the weekend in question, she had no government meetings. Marin defended her perfectly normal actions, saying:

    I am human. And I too sometimes long for joy, light and fun amidst these dark clouds.

    The fact she had to defend herself for having fun speaks volumes. But the situation went further – with public opinion and faux-outrage forcing Marin to take a drug test. It was negative, despite numerous accusations on social media.

    What’s the difference between Boris Johnson and Sanna Marin?

    This story is rooted in institutionalised misogyny and sexism. As Amanda Cassidy wrote for IMAGE:

    this kind of pearl-sac clutching takes away from the actual politics. In fact, it risks turning real democratic debate into Daily-Mail style take-downs based around clothing and appearance. More than a few articles referenced PM Marin as ‘gyrating’, ‘grinding’ or ‘in high spirits’ all fluff words for what they are really implying.

    She continued by saying that:

    The problem some have (and which they blame on her inability to govern if something happened that night) is that Marin is also a mother (frown), and therefore has no business being out living life so obviously enjoying her ‘wild night’ (shake of the head).

    Overall, Cassidy concluded that:

    What this’ scandal’ has shown is that a lot of people are uncomfortable with women in positions of power. It shows the power of disinformation and right-wing hysteria. It shows the media’s need to blow things out of proportion.

    Meanwhile, in the UK, law-breaking partying politicians like Boris Johnson have their careers resurrected by the same right-wing media that slammed Marin. What could the difference between Johnson and Marin be, I wonder?

    Featured image via Reuters – YouTube

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Damning report shows our police force is beyond reform. It’s time to look at alternatives.

    A culture of misogyny and predatory behaviour is “prevalent” in many police forces across England and Wales, and fuelled by lax vetting standards, according to a report by His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC).

    Inspectors found cases where incidents such as indecent exposure were dismissed as a “one-off”, and where applicants with links to “extensive criminality” in their families had been hired.
    The findings of the report won’t come as a surprise to anyone who faces the brunt of this behaviour every day, and especially those from marginalised and working class communities. But it does show that our police force is beyond reform, and we need to start looking at alternatives to our current policing model.

    “Systemic failures”

    The report found:

    systemic failings, missed opportunities, and a generally inadequate approach to the setting and maintenance of standards in the police service.

    It further stated that:

    over the last three or four years, the number of people recruited over whom we would raise significant questions is certainly in the hundreds, if not low thousands.

    It added:

    Our vetting file review showed that forces had found language and comments on social media, attributable to vetting applicants, that were potentially discriminatory, inflammatory, or extremist.

    HMIC’s Matt Parr said that “it is too easy for the wrong people to both join and stay in the police” and that there were “significant questions” over the recruitment of thousands of officers.

    However as Kevin Blowe from the Network for Police Montioring pointed out, it’s hardly surprising that police recruitment attracts the wrong type of people:

    Time for a different approach

    Report after report has exposed the institutionalised racism and misogny at the heart of UK policing. We should no longer be shocked or surprised with these findings. We should be taking action to do things differently.

    Time and again we hear promises of reform. Following this report, the Met tweeted that it would be “ruthless in ridding the Met of those who corrupt our integrity”.

    This is not good enough. As Sisters Uncut tweeted, “They had their chance to reform”:

    As the Canary‘s Sophia Purdy-Moore wrote after the Met was put into special measures:

    It’s undeniable that the Met is institutionally corrupt, racist, misogynistic, and violent. HMIC’s findings present an opportunity to reconsider the role of police in our society, and to move towards systems and strategies that actually work to make the world a safer place.

    This begins with investment in and the empowerment of communities, not the police. We need strategies that actively prevent harm from occurring, and foster accountability when it does.

    Our police force is rotten to the core. The problems are systemic, and this report is yet further proof that the police do not keep us safe. It’s time to stop talking about reform. Instead, let’s look at ways to defund the police and fund services and actions that benefit our communities rather than perpetuating the violence, racism and misogyny marlignalised communities face on a daily basis.

    Additional reporting via AFP

    Featured image via Shoal Collective

    By Emily Apple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The revolutionary in Whitlam’s Government who fought for women

     

    In Old Parliament House, Canberra, (now the Museum of Australian Democracy), there’s an exhibition called Australian Women Changemakers. Along with the new crop of brilliant young changemakers such as Grace Tame, Kenyan-Australian refugee advocate, Nyadol Nyuon, and First Nations activist, Megan Davis, the exhibition also acknowledges the contributions of Australia’s second-wave feminists of the 1960s to 1980s – women like Anne Summers, Quentin Bryce and Elizabeth Reid. 

    Recently, Ginger Gorman, host of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences “Seriously Social” podcast, took Elizabeth Reid back to Old Parliament House to mark two “golden anniversaries”; 50 years since the election of Gough Whitlam in 1972, and the podcast’s 50th episode.

     

    In 1973, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam appointed Reid as the world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a head of government. This was remarkable at a time when not a single member of Australia’s 125 seat parliament was female.

    There may have been no female MPs in 1973, but Reid had an ally on the inside. Her old school friend, Caroline Summerhayes, was Whitlam’s secretary. Summerhayes provided barometric readings of Whitlam’s moods; predicting whether the reception to Reid’s feminist advice was likely to be fine or stormy.

    “Oh stay away. He’s in a foul mood!” Summerhayes would warn, or, “Yes, slip in. He’s in a good mood.” It is such small, but important, intel that greases the wheels of bureaucracy.

    Born, the daughter of active trade-unionists and advocates for educational reforms, Elizabeth Reid was an academic and part of the Women’s Liberation Movement when Whitlam first advertised for an advisor on women’s affairs.

    “I think it’s important to realise that we hadn’t ever been on the inside,” she says.

    “Of course there were women in bureaucracies, but they hadn’t gone into bureaucracies to bring about changes for women … [whereas] we set out to end patriarchy, to destroy sexism.”

    Prime Minister Gough Whitlam discusses International Women's Year with two members of the National Advisory Committee, Ms. Elizabeth Reid and the Secretary of the Australian Government's Department of the Media, Mr. James Oswin. Source: National Library of Australia obj-137047143

    Prime Minister Gough Whitlam discusses International Women’s Year with two members of the National Advisory Committee, Ms. Elizabeth Reid and the Secretary of the Australian Government’s Department of the Media, Mr. James Oswin. Source: National Library of Australia obj-137047143

    During the 70s, these kinds of feminist/bureaucrats became known as “femocrats”.

    Ironically, within the Women’s Liberation Movement, there was a great deal of resistance to the idea of feminists working within the system. Women’s Liberation was a revolutionary movement and, to many, working within a patriarchal system was tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. 

    But, Reid reflects, “I felt it was a challenge to the Women’s Movement … Never in recorded history had a head of government said, ‘Well, come on. Come in. Tell us what needs to be done.’”

    “In effect, when Whitlam offered to open the halls of power to the Women’s Liberation Movement, he called our bluff.”

    Despite photos from the time showing a young Elizabeth Reid surrounded by white men in suits, she says it never occurred to her that she wouldn’t succeed. But she soon found “you have to be savvy” to work the halls of power. 

    And, while still facing staunch resistance from within organised feminism, Reid’s mission was bolstered by a tsunami of correspondence from ordinary Australian women who felt, at last, there was someone in Parliament who might hear their voices. 

    “It was as if a wellspring opened up,” she says. “Many of these women would say, “I’ve been writing for years and nobody has done anything about it. But at last I feel there’s somebody there who can do something.”

    Reid responded to concerns that a single individual could not adequately represent the diversity of Australian women by spending the first year of her appointment travelling the country and listening to as many diverse female voices as possible. This, combined with the influx of correspondence, gave her a sense of the issues “that were really gnawing away at women’s spirit and souls.” 

    In Reid’s view, the “reform vs revolution” debate set up a false dichotomy; her aim was to work within the system to achieve reforms, while instilling a “revolutionary consciousness” at the heart of Australian democracy.

    At that time, single women were refused bank loans or mortgages without a male guarantor. Married women, temporarily unemployed, weren’t eligible for unemployment benefits. Widows received five-eights of the pension while widowers received full pensions. Women returning to Australia from overseas with their husbands, were not permitted to fill in their own quarantine and customs declaration. But always, at the forefront of Reid’s activism, was the recognition that the multifarious barriers faced by women sprang from a patriarchal system and culture.

    She says, “My focus was on getting Whitlam to understand what changes we wanted, and to understand that no single change was ever going to be sufficient.” 

    A key achievement during Reid’s tenure was the introduction of maternity leave to the Commonwealth Public Service. But, she singles out the establishment of the Royal Commission on Human Relationships (1974-1978) as the culmination of the “revolutionary consciousness” that she, and other feminists, determined was vital to driving structural and cultural change.

     

    Watch the full interview on Youtube.

    “That was a groundbreaking and controversial commission,” Reid recalls. “It helped change public discussion around families, gender, sexuality and how marriage impacted a woman’s role in society.”

    Despite these successes, strident opposition, not only from anti-feminists, but from within her own movement, took a toll on Reid. After she resigned from her government position, she went abroad to work with women in developing countries and didn’t return to Australia until the 2000s – when at least some of the hatchets were buried.

    Revisiting her old workplace with Ginger Gorman, Reid reflects upon a time when Australian democracy was at its zenith: when there was a genuine commitment to structural change; when cross-party friendships and co-operation were commonplace, and; when Australians (even minorities) felt their voices were being heard by their political leaders.

    Standing near the desk from which sixteen former prime ministers ran the country, Reid says, “In Australia, over the past couple of decades, I think we’ve been backsliding in our democratic traditions. I think this – this building – is a very good reminder that we once had sets of values that are very different from those we’ve been living with in recent years.”

    Elizabeth Reid will be delivering the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia’s Cunningham Lecture on Tuesday 29 November at their Democracy Symposium.  Reid’s will speech will be: “Protests and Democracy, Now and Then”?

    Picture at top: Elizabeth sits in Canberra’s Old Parliament House in Whitlam’s former office. Photo: Ginger Gorman 

    The post The revolutionary in Whitlam’s Government who fought for women appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • The psychological aftermath of China’s One Child Policy

    This afternoon (Sunday, October 16) All About My Sisters, a deeply personal take on the psychological aftermath of China’s One Child Policy is screening in Canberra. It screens again later this month.

    At the height of the One Child Policy in China, many baby girls were unwanted. Twenty years ago, when film director Wang Qiong’s parents—desperate for a boy—learned that they were expecting another daughter, they made a series of decisions that have haunted the family ever since.

    BroadAgenda Editor Ginger Gorman speaks with Wang.

    Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with BroadAgenda. Congratulations on your acclaimed documentary, All About My Sisters. Firstly, tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you and what kind of films do you make? 

    My name is Wang Qiong, a Chinese documentary filmmaker. My films are about苦 (the bitterness of life) – a concept from Buddhism –  and how people deal with it.

    For those people who don’t know anything about China’s history and the ‘One Child Policy,’ can you explain it for us in a nutshell? How did it impact baby girls in particular? 


    One Child Policy was a strict population control policy that restricted each family to have no more than one child as a respond to the population growth in China. It was established in 1982 and replaced by Two-Child Policy in 2015. Nowadays people are encouraged to have more children to deal with the aging of the population.

    The One Child Policy had a direct impact on baby girls as it combined with the long-lasting phenomenon of preference to boys (重男轻女). Because people were only allowed to have one child, many families, in particular those from rural areas, wanted to make sure their first child was a boy. Aborting baby girls then became one of the solutions, and abandonment was another.

    Film director, Wang Qiong. Picture: Supplied

    Film director, Wang Qiong. Picture: Supplied

     

    And what about your family? Who is in your family and how did that policy affect your lives?

    As you can see in the film, every single member in my family was hunted by not only the policy but also the tradition of preference to boys. To me the tragedy is given by the combination of these two things. In order to have a son under the pressure of the policy, my mother had eight pregnancies and my parents hid from here to there for almost ten years. I am the second child in my family and like Jin, I was not welcome.

    My aunt, the midwife who made the delivery when my mother was giving birth to me, once recalled that the moment I was born, the first thing my dad said was “a girl again?” with a heavy sign. I’m lucky that they kept me. But they had to send me to someone else to take care of as they needed to pretend that they didn’t have a second child.

    So I had to live my different relatives in the first five years in my life, and that experience had subtly influenced my relationship with my parents. There was a period of time when I was temporally adopted by my second uncle, I even forgot that I had parents – my life was all about the giant buffalo I had to take care every day, my uncle that beat me up often when I refused to eat as much as they required, and villagers who always teased me that my mom would never come back.

    Even after I returned to my parents as I grew up, I never feel at home even until today. Life was hard for my parents back then – they had to make a living, and to make a son secretly, they lost their patience with everything including their children. I was always scolded and beat up when I didn’t behave well. My first suicidal try was at nine (years old). Living with my parents was hard for me when I was a child and teenager.

    Wang says her family’s story was always opaque. Her sister “Jin’s story was told by my parents and other adult family members very fragmentarily every year.” Picture: Supplied

    Life was, and still is unquestionably much harder for Jin. We were both unwanted girls, but she was not that lucky as she was the chosen one to be disappeared. She survived the abortion, but she has to spend the rest of her life struggling in the complex family relationship. The best thing of her life is that she was given to a family that loves her. I will never forget the last word she said to me before she left the town – she said: life has given me love but more pain.

    Sometimes I hope that she can forgive because that might make her life easier, sometimes I don’t because it’s unfair to her. Once in the shooting I asked her if she still hate my parents (she even didn’t want me to call “our parents”), she said she started to understand them as she grew up and she understands how important a son means to a family. I don’t know if that thought had made her life easier, but it was very ironic and painful to me that she said that. She accepted a rule that almost killed her.

    I started to realize that how possible a person can be changed by a society. That’s the same power that convinced my parents to believe that boys are more important the girls and that forced my elder sister, Li, to bear a son for her husband. As a boy, my younger brother is the only wanted child in my family but that’s probably not from love – he’s here only because he can carry the family name by having a son or more in the future.

    What made you decide to pick up a camera and tell this heartbreaking and acutely personal story? 


    I made this film because I wanted to know more about my family and I wanted to reconcile Jin’s relationship with my parents. I also wanted to know what kind of society I was born in when I was unable to know anything about it.

    I can’t imagine how hard this must have been for you, your family and your sister, Jin (in particular). What can you tell me about the how confronting this process was – and how you navigated those minefields?

    It was hard for me to ask questions with my family, especially my parents. I remember when I was doing the interview with them, my hands were shaking. In China, families especially those from rural areas don’t usually have intimate conversations like this. We don’t talk about things. We just live the life. So I was extremely nervous and anxious when I was holding my notebook with all the questions I wrote down to ask my parents.

    What I did was to lie to them to make the conversations more comfortable. Instead of telling the real purpose of making this film, I told them it’s a school assignment, and they believed it. Talking to Jin was easier because we are very close and I felt trusted by her. We talked about anything since we were children. My conversations with Li was also challenging as I was not really close to her. I tried to get closer with her and it happened when I spent more time with her.

    A still from the film. Picture: Supplied

    All families have secrets. But how did to manage to get your family to talk about – and tease out – this topic that had never been discussed and unpicked? 

    To most of others, what happened to my family was astonishing, but to my family, it’s already “normalized”as they live within it and as it happened to other people around them too. They hear so many similar stories from people they know in the town. They don’t think they are “special”. I think the difficult part for them was for them to recall all the bad memories and to be emotional again in front of me. I don’t think I made any special efforts expect just listening to help them say it all out.

    You have been praised for your quiet, investigative voice in the film. But what did you learn from this process? What impact did it have on your family? 

    Before I started this project, I hated my parents for aborting and abandoning Jin. I thought they were just being stupid to be convinced that sons are better than girls.

    As I had more and more conversations with them, I started to understand where the decisions came from and the sufferings they had been through for making those hard decisions. This film lets me I know more about my family and where we came from. And I have learned that sometimes violence is not a choice but an effect from a bigger violence.

    What messages does your film leave the audience with about love and belonging? 

    Love needs willpower.

    Is there anything else you want to say?  

    We all suffered, and we are all expected to forgive.

     

    • Picture at top: Filming over the course of seven years, Wang captures moments of vulnerability, anguish and joy with insight and delicate artistry, connecting us with the universal desire for love and belonging that lies beneath her family’s difficult history. Picture: Supplied

    The post The psychological aftermath of China’s One Child Policy appeared first on BroadAgenda.

  • JULIA’S MISOGYNY SPEECH, 10 YEARS ON.

    It is the finest speech I have ever heard in an Australian Parliament. Julia Gillard is not a naturally gifted public speaker, mainly because she is formal and responsible in her manner of making a speech. But on this day of 9 October, 2012 she was on fire as she let loose on Opposition Leader, …

    Continue reading JULIA’S MISOGYNY SPEECH, 10 YEARS ON.

    The post JULIA’S MISOGYNY SPEECH, 10 YEARS ON. appeared first on Everald Compton.

    This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.

  • Stretchy but rigid: the neoliberal complexities of yoga pants

    Raise a hand – or better yet, a leg – if you own a pair of yoga pants. Marketed largely to women in Western countries, these items began to appear after yoga became a globalized mainstream practice in the 1990s. Yoga pants are so successful because they are deeply invested in the utopian promise – and perhaps the neoliberal trap – of middle-class feminine flexibility.

    Yoga pants are socially versatile in many Western countries. We see them at the shops, the school pickup line, and the office in addition to the yoga studio. They accompany women throughout the day, moving from domestic work to paid labour to fitness, beauty and wellbeing pursuits. Yoga pants discipline curves and bulges into sleek and intentional shapes. They mix selective ideals of beauty with the moral high ground of the person who keeps fit. Such social flexibility is key to their appeal.

    But yoga pants’ ability to stretch in many directions speaks to the diverse demands placed on those wearers’ bodies and lives. Desk jobs raise health risks that prompt the need for a “third shift” of fitness work in people’s discretionary time. Schools end before many workdays do, leaving parents to figure out how to address that gap. Social media perpetuates myths of ageless beauty that can inspire anxiety about the value of one’s own looks in competitive markets.

    As a response to these multiplying challenges, the flexibility of the yoga pant ironically attests to rigid social structures that are beyond the control of individuals.

    How might we perceive and question such rigidities, even as we enjoy the most comfortable clothes many of us have ever owned? In a workshop at the Australian National University, participants and I cut up four pairs of yoga pants. Deconstructing the pants and looking at them through a magnifying glass, we reflected on the contradictory forces of globalised neoliberal life to which yoga pants so powerfully respond. Getting so literal with fabrics, textures, and threads allowed us to explore their hidden metaphors.

    As we sliced scissors down seams, we reflected on the history of the word “flexible” in English. For many years, “flexibility” was considered mainly a property of physical materials. Only later did it offer a way of thinking about the capacity of the human body. In the late nineteenth century, advertisements in colonial India promised readers the hope of becoming more flexible – by taking a pill. Military training helped to popularize the idea of bodily stretches instead.

    A photo of a remade yoga pant from the workshop. Picture: Supplied

    A photo of a remade yoga pant from the workshop. Picture: Supplied

    By the early twentieth century, as yoga scholars have shown, flexibility became seen as an ideal physical goal suitable for women. Unlike muscular strength, flexibility could be compatible with feminine norms of grace and beauty without upsetting gender hierarchies. Yoga pants inherit this history as they weave together flexibility with femininity.

    Such gendered norms surrounding the yoga pant also affect pressures on men. Participants in the workshop reflected that comfortable, stretchy, close-fitting tights marked to men are usually presented in relation to endurance sports, such as cycling, and sold as high-performance gear. Men are only supposed to wear these clothes “while they are actually working out,” one participant noted.

    This difference in the gendering of social norms suggests that men may be protected from some of the strains of needing to be endlessly flexible to the demands of the world around them. But this marketing difference also hints at how men may be pressured to maintain the illusion of boundaries across their own complex social roles.

    Shameem writes that yoga pants have become a way to underscore gender hierarchies and impose on women the idea that they should be flexible (as oppose to muscular). As you can see with this image, this notion is reinforced if you search for "yoga pants" in a stock photo library! Picture: Shutterstock

    Shameem writes that yoga pants have become a way to underscore gender hierarchies and impose on women the idea that they should be flexible (as oppose to muscular). As you can see with this image, this notion is reinforced if you search for “yoga pants” in a stock photo library! Picture: Shutterstock

    Looking at textile fibers up close, we reflected on the unending social expectations that pile up on yoga pants, and by implication, on those of us who wear them.

    “It’s not enough anymore for the pants just to be stretchy,” one participant said. “They have to do more, like wick moisture.” “There are yoga pants that suppress farts,” another participant noted.

    Unlike rigid fabrics, where changes in the wearer’s body become obvious (your pants feel too tight), yoga pants conceal the transformations of time. Similarly, many of us who wear such pants may feel that each year brings heightened expectations for us to “do more,” whether in our work lives, our social communities, our political actions, our family roles, or our personal care. It’s no wonder that we look for a piece of clothing to relieve some of that burden.

    As highly engineered textiles, yoga pants of the current moment appear designed to foster the illusion of a human body that never sweats, passes gas, or changes shape. This superhuman body reflects the fantasy of neoliberal self-perfection: the individual who can endlessly meet the challenges created by capitalist structures of work, racialized forms of inequality, and gendered divisions of labor.

    As we cut yoga pants into squares, triangles, tubes, and ribbons, we speculated on how we might transform the yoga pant and its meanings. One participant upcycled a pant leg into a gorgeous glove; another made a mask. Others experimented with texture and tone by weaving wall hangings with twine and string.

    Participants speculated on how the yoga pant could be reimagined to serve the needs of more diverse communities, such as transgendered wearers.

    They explored how the pant could become a place of artistic play, removed from the need to constantly produce an idealized norm. The yoga pant became a blank canvas for colourful drawing, a tapestry embroidered with bright thread, and a place of new, surprising, social connection.

    These experiments remind us that the practice of yoga, a diverse constellation of mental and physical practices tracing important roots to South Asia, has long been a practice of inquiry. In many parts of its history, yoga has been used to develop a closer understanding of the invisible structures that shape observable reality. Today, postural yoga often invites practitioners to expand their powers of observation by noticing physical or mental sensations they take for granted. Perhaps practicing yoga, no matter what we wear, can also help us notice and critique the pressures of the rigid social structures that lead us to buy those pants.

    • Please note: The picture at top is a stock photo from Shutterstock.

    The post Stretchy but rigid: the neoliberal complexities of yoga pants appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Banishing imposter syndrome: ‘I’m the real deal’

    Former Channel 4 Editor at Large Dorothy Byrne says lazy generalisations can make women feel disempowered and undermine their ambitions. She gave this speech at the recent national Women in Media conference on the Gold Coast. It’s published here with full permission. Read the original here. 

    I’m thrilled to be here among you at the conference of an organisation I admire very much for the support it gives women in the media. Organisations like yours are vital for women. I come here to bring you my personal perspective on what I feel are the key issues for women in journalism today. I’ve been a journalist for 46 years and I’m convinced these are great times to be a woman journalist.

    When I started out on a local paper, the number of women going to work in newspapers in the UK was slightly greater than the number of men.But, over the years women fell by the wayside until women were in the minority, to a significant degree, for a variety of reasons. In my early days, all the most important jobs were held by men.

    ‘I had no role models’

    Indeed, on my first paper the sexism was so bad that only men were allowed to cover major crimes. As a woman, if there was a murder, I was permitted only to interview the relatives of the victims while the male journalists got to investigate the murder itself. That lack of opportunity hampered the career development of women but the fact that the key roles on the paper were all held by men also restricted our ambition.

    I ended up as the Head of News and Current Affairs at one of the UK’s main public service broadcasters. That young woman of 24 on the Walthamstow Guardian in East London would never have dreamt such a thing could be possible. I had no role models. But today in the UK things are very different.

    Women starting out today can aim for the top

    The new head of news and current affairs at Channel Four Television, who replaced me, is a woman. The editor of Channel Four News is a woman and the editor of Channel Four’s main investigative current affairs programme is a woman. The chief executive of Independent Television News which makes news for both ITV and Channel Five is a woman as was her predecessor.

    And finally, the Head of BBC News is a woman as was her predecessor. So a young woman starting out in journalism today knows she can aim for the very top and get there.

    That is a big change but of course, there are huge barriers for women.

    Motherhood and the menopause

    Still too many women are dropping out of journalism at different stages in their careers.

    One of the key reasons is that work in many newsrooms and programmes is incompatible with motherhood but today I will also highlight an issue now at the forefront of debate among women journalists in the UK; the menopause.

    If you take away only one thing from my talk today, please take away the need for women journalists to lead the discussion in Australia about the menopause. As women journalists, we did that in the UK and it was so transformational that this year Britain ran out of one of the most popular forms of HRT.

    But first things first; the dire state of maternity rights and childcare in the UK. Of course, poor maternity rights have always been a major barrier for women but there is a specific issue making it worse for female journalists at the present time.

    A ‘physically overwhelming’ longing

    In the UK good maternity rights are tied to staff jobs but more and more jobs in journalism are freelance so fewer and fewer women journalists get proper maternity pay.

    I myself was freelance when I had a baby as a single parent. As such, I was entitled only to basic state maternity pay which was not nearly enough to pay even a percentage of my mortgage. So I had to go back to work when my child was less than six weeks old.

    It was terrible.

    My longing for my baby would be so physically overwhelming at times that I had to ring her nanny and tell her to bring my daughter to the office as a matter of urgency just so I could hold her.

    Too many women face a tough choice

    But note, I delayed having a baby until I could afford a live-in nanny. I was lucky to get pregnant at 45, once my career was established.

    Too many young women today feel they have to choose between building their careers or having a baby in their late 20s and early 30s when their statistical chance of getting pregnant is higher than when they are in their late 30s or early 40s.

    This issue is not talked about nearly enough because young women fear that if they talk about their desire to have a baby, it will affect their promotional opportunities.

    Dorothy Byrne has been a journalist for 46 years. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    Dorothy Byrne has been a journalist for 46 years. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    A number of young women journalists have told me that they really want to have a baby soon but feel they just can’t afford it both financially and in terms of their career opportunities. They have asked me not to tell anyone about the conversation I have had with them because they fear it would prejudice their chances of promotion.

    That is scandalous and deeply depressing.

    Paying ‘lip service’ to flexible working

    I think older women should encourage open discussion of issues around fertility, pregnancy, and childcare in newsrooms to signal to young women that in a good organisation their right to have a child will not damage their career. Similarly, we need as women to insist major employers have proper policies on returning to work.

    Women in the UK are campaigning for proper statutory maternity and paternity pay for all women, not linked to a staff job, as a right. Until we have that, there will be no equality in the workplace.

    And all employers need to examine their working practises and investigate whether their current shift patterns are really necessary.

    Too often employers pay lip service to the notion of flexible working but don’t ask themselves basic questions such as, ‘Does everyone on the early shift really have to turn up at the same time? Could we stagger our shift systems better?’

    My first day in television

    Big policies are great, small practical changes are better. Female journalists also continue to suffer harassment and assault at work both from bosses and colleagues AND from men they are interviewing.

    But here there is some improvement. When I started out on local papers, women spoke openly in the office about being sexually harassed by police officers.

    I am not aware of a single instance in which an editor complained to the police.

    On my first day in television, my female boss told me that a director would take me out to show me the basics of filmmaking – and that he would sexually assault me. But I was not to take it personally because he sexually assaulted all the women he worked with. Sure enough, he assaulted me but who could I complain to as I had been told by my manager to expect this?

    I don’t believe that would happen now at a major employer, although I think young women especially are still vulnerable because so many people now work in very small companies where there is much less protection. Employers should not send women to interview men with a reputation for assaulting women.

    Some men with known reputations for sexual assault and harassment are being interviewed purely to publicise their films, books or other enterprises. Media outlets should refuse to send anyone to interview men who are known to prey on female journalists.

    Now bigger employers have sexual harassment policies and women journalists, some well-known, have started to talk publicly about having been assaulted.

    But journalism in the UK awaits its #MeToo moment. There are leading men known to have harassed and assaulted women who still have high journalistic reputations.

    ‘You probably don’t remember me Dorothy’

    If just a few of those top names were exposed, it would make a big difference. It would make men think twice. I myself, when a program producer, was assaulted in my own home by a man who ran a production company we were doing business with.

    Later, when I had risen to become a senior program commissioner at Channel Four, he had the gall to turn up at a session I held for production companies. At the end of my presentation, he stood to ask a question and, with a leer on his face, said, ‘You probably don’t remember me Dorothy.’

    I said, ‘On the contrary, how could I forget a man who sexually assaulted me in my own home.’ The whole room glared at him and he sat down and shut up.

    We need to warn such men. Tonight, you may see a woman as your victim, but she could be your boss tomorrow.

    It’s not for me to tell Australian broadcasters what to do but I can talk about my own country.

    In the UK broadcasters lay down a range of requirements for production companies supplying programs to them and I think they should include a clause stating that any production company proven to have tolerated or covered up sexual harassment would automatically be in potential breach of contract.

    But those are the negatives.

    My fear for women journalists now is also that we are not being sufficiently positive and that we may therefore inadvertently put off young women from entering journalism by failing to emphasise what a brilliant and exciting career it can be. We now expose the sexism women in the media face. That didn’t happen before.

    The wrongs done to us were accepted or relayed to each other in the evenings. They were not spoken out loud in the corridors of power by newsroom leaders. Now they are.

    But we also need to be careful to talk about what’s great about being a woman in the media. I am now the President of Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University.

    It’s a women’s college and quite a number of students are interested in a media career. I encourage them. One of my first points is that I am still a working journalist at the age of 70.

    In the past year, I have been executive producer on an international series about the sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell, a major documentary on the Russian dissident Navalny and an expose of sex abuse in the Falkland Islands. I am currently working on a major series on Kevin Spacey.

    ‘I don’t think I will ever retire‘

    Almost all my friends in other professions retired several years ago. Some went into highly lucrative jobs in the City of London after university. They retired as soon as they possibly could. Most doctors and teachers I know retired early, in their mid-50s. In contrast, I don’t think I will ever retire as a journalist. Why would I?

    To be a journalist is to have the opportunity to explore the great experiences life has to offer and to expose the bad ones.

    Conference delegates applaud Dorthy Byrne. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    Conference delegates applaud Dorthy Byrne. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    Better rights for women

    To be a woman journalist is to have a wonderful opportunity to change lives for all women in society. In my career, some women have told me they don’t want to be pigeon-holed into being defined as someone who does so-called women’s stories.

    They want to be thought of as a journalist, not as a woman journalist. In fact, they shied away from doing so-called women’s stories. I get their point.

    I too don’t want to do just women’s stories. But I definitely want to use my role as a journalist to campaign for better rights for women.

    Telling women’s stories

    The first film I produced and directed was about rape in marriage, then not a crime in the UK. Husbands could be charged only with causing injury during the rape. That film was part of a successful campaign, which changed the law.

    Over the years a significant part of my work has been about women and girls -rape, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, the denial of education, poor maternity care, and the mental health crisis among girls.

    That sounds like a grim list but it’s been thrilling to see how issues I have raised have been taken up in public and political debate; to have been part of making life better for women.

    This has been work which has brought me great fulfilment in my life. I’ve been proud to be thought of as a woman journalist.

    I would ask women who worry about being pigeon-holed if we don’t raise women’s issues, do you think men will do so? If we as women don’t tell women’s stories, those stories won’t be told at all.

    We should be sure we tell young women thinking about a career in the media that being a woman journalist is a magnificent thing. I also think that we need to be careful in our language not to put ourselves down as women.

    There are enough men who want to put us down; we don’t need to do it ourselves. Over the years, I have often been asked if I suffer from so-called imposter syndrome and even more often I’ve heard women say, ‘We all, as women suffer from imposter syndrome’.

    I say to them, speak for yourselves. If you have imposter syndrome, that’s fine. I respect your perspective on life.

    But I certainly DON’T have imposter syndrome. I’ve been a journalist for 46 years, for God’s Sake. Why would I have imposter syndrome? I’m the real deal.

    I feel the same objection when I hear people say, ‘Women lack confidence. Women are always putting themselves down.

    ‘Women aren’t pushy.’

    Do I seem to you like a woman who lacks confidence or puts herself down?

    I don’t seek to be pushy. But if you push me, I’ll push back.

    Lazy generalisations

    What people really mean is that women are statistically less likely to, for example, apply for jobs when they don’t have all the qualifications, speak up in meetings, ask for a pay rise.

    We should talk about those statistics and about how we can encourage women. But we shouldn’t confuse learned behaviour with the false notion that women are inherently so different to men. We are different to men but a lot of those differences are instilled in us by a sexist society.

    Lazy generalisations in sentences that begin with the words, ‘Women are… ‘ can end up making young women feel disempowered and undermine their ambitions.

    In my experience in journalism, women have taken longer to get to the top jobs than have men.

    Women need to support each other

    We have had to work harder to get to the same place as a man. I’ve told my own daughter that my single greatest piece of advice to her is, ‘Don’t work as hard as I have.’ We want talented young women to have the same fast track to the top that their male counterparts have benefited from.

    To do that we have to imbue them with a sense of self confidence, not emphasise their lack of confidence. Organisations like your own are vital. Women need to band together to support each other and campaign for equality.

    ‘These people are wrong’

    There is a view that women’s organisations are no longer needed. I lead a women’s college at Cambridge University now, as well as being a working journalist.

    As far as I am aware in the UK, there are only two all-female higher education institutions left; Murray Edwards College which I lead and another at Cambridge. People say to be that the idea of a women’s institution is outdated.

    But when they tell me that I always say, ‘Wow! Equality for women has been achieved and I missed it! I must have been locked in the toilet or out shopping or having my legs waxed. Who knew?’ Of course, these people are wrong.

    Same degree, different outcomes

    While the percentage of women entering higher education in the UK is now equal to the percentage of men and slightly greater in some years the percentage of women going on to further degrees is lower than the percentage of men.

    Statistically, women with the same degrees as men are likely to have less good jobs.

    It reminds me so much of my time starting out in journalism – equal numbers of women at the start – and the gradual attrition.

    As a women’s institution, we can campaign publicly about these issues, and highlight some of the reasons for this inequality. And that’s what a great organisation like yours does.

    We need to hold onto women’s organisations and encourage more. Thinking back, I would have benefited greatly if there had been an organisation for young women journalists when I started out.

    In defence of ‘women’s pages’

    I also think that all the newspapers which got rid of women’s pages should think again. Women still suffer from some specific hardships and prejudices.

    I am not confident that these issues are dealt with in general pages as well as they would be in a weekly women’s page.

    Dorothy Byrne sees value in women’s pages. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    Dorothy Byrne sees value in women’s pages. Photo: Emma Brasier.

    I used to turn first to the women’s pages in newspapers because I knew there would almost certainly be something there relevant to my life. In the UK, the Femail pages in the Daily Mail are really popular. Women’s Hour on the BBC is also hugely popular.

    And it never feels that it is excluding men; it raises issues that are of interest and concern to anyone interested in women and girls.

    Sexist remarks about older women at work

    When women journalists use their experience of being women, they can transform society. And I want to give you a brilliant and concrete example of this.

    Until a few years ago, the menopause was not recognised as being a major issue affecting women’s lives and careers in the UK. Women going through the menopause and suffering significantly didn’t dare talk about their problems at work for fear of prejudice.

    Some men made horrible sexist remarks about older women at work, generally in my experience because those women were better than they were. If an older woman criticised a man, he would scoff to his friends, ‘It’s her hormones!’

    A ‘proud old lady’

    Companies which had good maternity policies had no policies about the menopause at all. Three years ago, at the Edinburgh Television Festival, I made a major speech in which I highlighted the problems I myself had experienced with the menopause.

    I made a deliberate decision to use my experiences to speak out. I introduced myself in the speech as a proud ‘old lady’ and described how my kindly male boss sent me home because I had a ‘fever’ when all I had was hot flushes.

    He clearly didn’t recognise a hot flush and I was too embarrassed to put him right. I named him in my talk. I won’t do so again because he’s suffered enough.

    ‘The menopause’

    He certainly knows about the menopause now.

    I then gave statistics for the number of women who had considered giving up work because of the menopause – government statistics at the time indicated that about a quarter of women had considered giving up their jobs because of their symptoms.

    Somewhat to my surprise I admit, just mentioning the menopause gained huge publicity. Soon afterwards, Channel Four became the first British broadcaster to have a comprehensive menopause policy.

    One of my last acts before leaving Channel Four was to commission a film about the menopause presented by the popular presenter, formerly presenter of Big Brother in the UK, Davina McCall who admitted her own problems when she went through early menopause.

    Some in my office said the program would get poor ratings as only older women would watch it.

    Suddenly everyone was talking about it

    I pointed out that there are an awful lot of older women.

    In the event, it gained a good audience and a follow-up program was also commissioned.

    These programs told the British public the facts about the effects of the menopause.

    A survey for Channel Four and the Fawcett Society revealed that 77% of women had experienced one or more symptoms of the menopause they described as very difficult. Forty-four per cent said their ability to work had been affected. A tenth employed during the menopause had left work due to the symptoms. Fourteen per cent had reduced hours or gone part-time and 8% said menopausal symptoms had prevented them from applying for promotion.

    Suddenly, everyone started discussing the menopause – men and women – and more companies instituted policies that included training for all staff, medical advice sessions and women being given the right to work less if they felt unwell.

    All long overdue.

    ‘Who’s to blame for this?’

    The fact that women have babies was recognised in employment legislation decades ago.

    The fact they stop having babies and their bodies change was not mentioned. A major portion of both programs was devoted to giving the facts on HRT – revealing that many women were given poor or erroneous information by doctors whose own knowledge was way out of date.

    As a result, there has been a huge surge in demand for HRT by women no longer prepared to be fobbed off and told, ‘It’s natural so you have to live through it,’ or even more offensively, being put on inappropriate anti-depressants. Indeed, this year, one of the most popular forms of HRT started to run out in Britain. As it happens, it’s the form I use.

    I got really angry one day when I was told that no pharmacy near me had any and exclaimed inwardly, ’Who’s to blame for this?’ Then I realised it was me.

    Power to prompt change

    I am pleased to say the crisis has now eased and supplies are coming through again.

    I go into some detail about this because I believe the menopause is a major reason older women are leaving the workplace. In the UK, it was because women journalists, using their own personal experience, exposed the issue that women across the country rose up and demanded both HRT and proper policies.

    I think it’s a great example of the power for change we have as women journalists if we band together and speak out. We should expose the negatives but we should also shout loudly about our successes.

    I’ve been told about some of the exciting plans for your brilliant organisation and I will follow your progress with great interest.

    I just wish my 24-year-old self had known a great bunch of women like you.

    This is an edited version of Dorothy Byrne’s address to the 2022 Women in Media national conference.

    • Feature image at top: Dorothy Byrne addresses delegates at the national conference. Photo: Meg Keene.

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    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Iran on fire: Women forcing change

    On Sept. 16, 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, died in Tehran, Iran, while in police custody. Amini was arrested by the Guidance Patrol, the morality squad of the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran that oversees public implementation of hijab regulations, for not wearing a hijab properly.

    Soon after the news of her death was broadcast and a photograph emerged on social media of her lying in a Tehran hospital in a coma, people throughout the country became enraged.

    Amini’s death starkly illustrated the systematic violence of police and highlighted particularly the brutality of the regime towards women and minorities. She was Kurdish, a member of one of the most oppressed minority ethnic groups in Iran.

    All Iranian women who are routinely humiliated because of their gender can empathize with her. But Kurds and Kurdish women in particular understood the political message of her death at the hands of police and the state’s subsequent violent response to the protests.

    The huge wave of protests in Iran following Amini’s death represents a historic moment in Iran. People have taken to the streets shouting slogans against the compulsory hijab and denouncing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

    Protests have raged in 31 provinces, including Kurdistan and Tehran as well as cities such as Rasht, Isfahan and Qom, among Iran’s most conservative communities. Dozens of people have been killed by security forces and hundreds more have been arrested.

    A large crowd and cars are seen on a tree-lined city street, smoke billowing in places.
    In this photo taken by an individual not employed by the Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained by the morality police, in downtown Tehran, Iran, on Sept. 21, 2022.
    (AP Photo)

    The Girls of Revolution Street

    Although the current uprising may seem unprecedented, it is in fact part of a deep-rooted and longstanding resistance movement by women in Iran.

    In what is widely seen as a punishment to the hundreds of women who participated in the anti-regime protests leading to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the hijab became compulsory two years later in 1981.

    Consequently, publicly removing hijabs became a challenge to the regime in Iran.

    Decades later, in 2017, Vida Movahed climbed onto a platform on Enghelab (Revolution) Street in the centre of Tehran, took off her headscarf and waved it in the air as a sign of opposition to compulsory hijab.

    She was followed by other women and the movement quickly became known as The Girls of Revolution Street or Dokhtaran-e Khiaban-e Enghelab.

    The Girls of Revolution Street represented a fundamental challenge by younger women to Iran’s compulsory veiling laws. Their actions resulted in an increase in the number of women who braved the streets without hijab in defiance of the state.

    Unsurprisingly, when religious hardliner Ebrahim Raisi became president in the contested 2020 election, the message was clear: Women would be further oppressed.

    Zan, Zendegi, Azadi: Woman, life, freedom

    This recent uprising is a link in a chain of protests that together have the potential to bring about fundamental change in Iran.

    It began with the pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009 followed by popular uprisings in 2018 and 2019. The Green Movement was largely peaceful, but the uprisings grew increasingly more confrontational with each wave of repression.

    Women have been in the lead in all these protests, posing a real challenge to the regime. They’re the leaders of transformative change, the vanguard of a potential revolution, challenging the legitimacy of the current government..

    The current protests are focused on two main demands: dignity and freedom. Both have been absent from political life in Iran, and both have a prominent presence in almost all slogans during this uprising, particularly “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

    A woman holds a sign that reads Women, Life, Freedom at a protest march.
    Members of the Iranian community and their supporters rally in solidarity with protesters in Iran in Ottawa on Sept. 25, 2022.
    THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

    The recent uprising makes it clear that the demand for radical change in Iran today is strong and significant.

    With every wave of protest, the desire for freedom gets stronger, the voices get louder and success is within reach. Once again, Iranian women are at the forefront of demanding transformative change.

    With the strong support this time of men, political and ethnic minorities and other disenfranchised groups, they may be leading their country closer to a freer and more just society.The Conversation

     

    Feature image: Protestors take part during a demonstration in front of the Iranian embassy in Brussels, Belgium on Sept. 23, 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini. Photo: Shutterstock

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  • Want to do a PhD about cyberhate against female athletes?

    Remember when AFLW Carlton forward Tayla Harris got predator trolled simply for doing her job? 

    In case your memory needs jogging, back in 2019 a photograph taken by AFL Media senior photographer Michael Willson depicted Harris’ powerful kicking style, became subject to floods of vile online commentary.

    At the time, Harris correctly identified the harassment as “sexual abuse on social media“. In other words, she was sustaining an injury in an unsafe workplace. And this made what happened an occupational health and safety issue – not just for her, but potentially for every athlete. 

    For anyone interested in enrolling in a full-time PhD from February 2023, the University of Canberra is offering a scholarship to research ‘Online trolling and e-safety: Women athletes and women working in the sports industry’ together with Sport Integrity Australia.

    The Information session on the Women in Sports Industry partnership scholarships, will be held in person and on-line.

    Where: Clive Price Suite (1C50) @University of Canberra When: 27 September 5:30 until 7pm AEST

    What: Meet our industry partners and researchers, hear about our research in Women in Sport, and discuss your career goals

    Register your attendance by emailing UCSportStrategy@canberra.edu.au 

    Cyberhate in Australia is no small matter. The nationally representative polling I commissioned from the Australia Institute in 2018 found the upper cost of cyberhate and online harassment to the Australian economy is $3.7 billion. That figure only counts lost income and medical expenses — so the real cost is far greater.

    The same polling also showed women were more likely to report receiving threats of sexual assault, violence or death; incitement of others to stalk or threaten them in real life; unwanted sexual messages and publication of their personal details.

    Research around the world also repeatedly finds people of colour are attacked more. It further illustrates that being both a woman and a POC makes you extra vulnerable on the Internet. 

    As I discuss in my best-selling book, Troll Hunting, we know women in the public eye – people including but not limited to: journalists, politicians and sportspeople – are frequently subject to extreme and ongoing cyberhate that leads to real-life harm. In the most egregious cases, they may be killed. 

    Once I started investigating and reporting on cyberhate in the Australian press back in 2015, Aussie women in sport started telling me their own stories of being hunted online.

    These women were not just elite athletes like Tayla, but also female umpires, sports journalists and administrators.

    Heather Reid was the former CEO of Capital Football in the ACT. She gave up her career because of extreme and sustained cyberhate, and her organisation did very little to support her. 

    Although Reid had her day in court and won, her life was impacted in ways the justice system could never repair. She moved away from Canberra – a city she loved – with her partner. Reid also suffered extreme, ongoing health impacts as a result of stress associated with the vitriolic and homophobic online hatred against her.  

    Back in 2015, she told me: “This is my workplace and nobody should have to put up with abuse or harassment at work.”

    One last example: Freelance sports journalist and academic Kate O’Halloran has been the target of trolls on numerous occasions. At one stage, the predator trolling was so severe, O’Hallaron found herself afraid to leave the house. 

    Like Reid, she cops abuse that not only targets her gender, but her sexuality.

    Myself and my colleagues at the University of Canberra concur with Harris, Reid and O’Halloran; we do not believe your gender – or sexuality – should make you unsafe at work (or destroy your career).

    What we would like to know is: What’s the scale of this abuse against female athletes, non-binary folks and those working in the sports industry? What forms does gendered abuse take online? Most importantly, how can we stop it?  

    Dr Catherine Ordway lectures in sports integrity and ethics at the University of Canberra. (She’ll also be your primary supervisor if you successfully win this scholarship to investigate cyberhate against female and non-binary athletes. I’m also on the advisory panel!)

    Dr Ordway says: “Cyber violence against women and girls has now being recognised as, not only a work, health and safety issue, but a broader human rights issue.  Sport was designed by and for men. 

    “The deepest level of toxic, misogynist attacks are reserved for women who ‘dare’ to play, watch and work in sport – particularly if they are non-white, non-binary, and/or non-conformist in the cis heteronormative mould of femininity”.

    C’mon. Use the email address above to register your interest. You know you want to! (And it’s important you do.)

    This PhD research is proudly supported by the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation at the University of Canberra (home of BroadAgenda, publisher of this article!)

     

    Feature image at top: Women soccer players in a team doing the plank fitness exercise in training together on a practice sports field. Picture: Shutterstock 

     

    The post Want to do a PhD about cyberhate against female athletes? appeared first on BroadAgenda.

  • Leaning Out: tackling women’s Great Exhaustion

    In the new book ‘Leaning Out’, respected journalist Kristine Ziwica maps a decade of stasis on the gender equality front in Australia, and why the pandemic has led to a breakthrough. This short excerpt is published will full permission. 

    How do we begin to tackle the Great Exhaustion? (Editor’s note: Earlier in her book, Kristina defines ‘The Great Exhaustion’ as “…the absolute overwhelming feeling of emotional exhaustion like there’s nothing left in the tank.”)

    Part of the answer lies in changing the conversation. We need to move away from lean-in ideas that posit the solution rests with individual women alone, who should devote more time and energy to their ‘wellbeing’ and simply shore up their resilience. Beware corporate ‘feminist wellness’, selling a soothing balm of herbal tea and scented candles – faux feminist Prozac to help women recover from the uniquely gendered impacts of the pandemic – instead of structural change.

    Many are fond of quoting the late activist Audre Lorde, who once wrote, ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’ And while that is absolutely true – and they are wise words for a growing army of feminist activists who are now taking to the streets in pursuit of gender equality – self-care as an idea and now an industry has been twisted beyond all recognition from Lorde’s original meaning.

    This is ‘feminist wellness’ or self-care as a kind of escape, not, as Lorde intended, a restorative practice to give those seeking deeper, collective change the energy and resilience to persevere. This kind of feminist self-care is, at best, devoid of meaning in its attempt to move product or, at worst, a cynical attempt to divert women from the task at hand.

    No one ever said, ‘Nevertheless she persisted with her daily regime of scented candles and massage therapy.’ (Though if I close my eyes and listen, I can almost imagine Gwyneth Paltrow uttering those words.)

    Kristina is speaking tonight (Wednesday, September 7, 2022) at the ANU. Book tickets here. 

    The rise of the wellness industrial complex, particularly in relation to women, is mirrored by the way neoliberalism infected feminism in the 1990s. No structural inequalities to tackle collectively here, folks. This is an individual problem. But as Angela Priestley, the founding editor of Women’s Agenda, told me, ‘this isn’t something more lunchtime pilates will fix’.

    This is not what we need at this critical juncture.

    ‘It’s really important that we look at the higher-level factors that have led to all of this,’ Dr Adele Murdolo, the executive director of Australia’s Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health, told me. COVID caused lots of stuff, but it also just exacerbated a lot of inequality that was already there. It showed it up and it made it more apparent to everybody.

    ‘We need to have a look at gender and race discrimination in the workplace and develop policies and programs that are knocking that off at the source, which is a big job and not something you can fix in a month because it’s something that’s so embedded in our workplaces,’ added Murdolo.

    Cover of "Leaning Out: A Fairer Future for Women at Work in Australia." Picture: Supplied

    Cover of “Leaning Out: A Fairer Future for Women at Work in Australia.” Picture: Supplied

    Lisa Annese, CEO of Diversity Council Australia, has said that ‘inclusion at work is an antidote to the great resignation’. She points to new research from DCA that demonstrates the link between non-inclusive behaviours and workers’ intentions to stay. Workers in inclusive teams are 4 times more likely than those in non-inclusive teams to report their workplace has positively impacted their mental health, and they are 4 times less likely to leave their jobs. ‘So you are investing in the wellbeing of your people, and making your business more resilient.’

    We need to develop policies, legislation and programs that change not only workplace cultures and attitudes, but also the way that workplaces are structured; at the moment, workforces are really about the full-time, unencumbered male employee. We need to look at making workplaces really flexible.

    Not flexible just for employers in terms of insecure work, but flexible for what people in families really need. We need childcare so that women are able to actively participate in the workforce. We need to tackle the gender pay gap, and not just as it relates to gender alone, but also taking into account ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation … all the intersecting forms of discrimination that make the gender pay gap even larger for some than others.

    ‘Bigger structural issues: pay equity, equal jobs of equal worth (particularly for women in undervalued caring jobs), childcare, giving people permission to voice the good, bad and the ugly is also part of the healing process,’ Leisa Sargent, the senior deputy deanof UNSW’s Business School and the University’s co-deputy vice-chancellor Equity Diversity and Inclusion,told me. ‘But I also think that making sure that employees are engaged in the decision-making process coming out of the pandemic is really important. We went through two years of being told what we had to do and how we had to do it, which is very disempowering.’

    We now need to create opportunities where people feel they have a say in how things get done, in flexibility, in opportunities to work in different parts of the business and to be stimulated.

    ‘And it’s also about a fundamental redrawing of the boundaries,’ added Sargent.

    Research from the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work suggests why a redrawing of boundaries may be particularly necessary, as the pandemic has only exacerbated the trend towards the intensification of work and highlighted the costs of insecure work, where women are heavily concentrated. The research found that the average worker did

    6.1 hours per week of unpaid overtime in 2021, a substantial increase on 2020.

    ‘Let’s make jobs plentiful, safer, secure and invest in social institutions that support people, in particular women, to work’, Alison Pennington, a senior economist at the Centre for Future Work, told me was the quite simple, yet powerful, prescription.

    ‘The treadmill of insecure work fuels anxiety and makes planning for a decent life nigh impossible. The reality is that the human cost of unchecked employer power is enormous. And there are multiple indicators that this power has deepened over the pandemic.’

    The solutions are structural and collective, going far beyond self-care, and even beyond direct psychological treatment for women’s mental health, though this is undeniably necessary and should be addressed with more targeted and innovative mental health support. At the time we spoke, Professor Jayashri Kulkarni, for example, had just opened Australia’s first dedicated mental health centre for women, a specialist model she would like to see replicated elsewhere.

    As we endeavour to ‘build back better’, we need these types of broad, wide-ranging proposals as part of the wider debate about women and work. The changed conversation around women’s workplace burnout and the factors driving that will play a significant role in moving the conversation forward from the lean-in feminism that has so far dominated the Australian landscape to something better, something more impactful and meaningful. If that happens, then women’s collective suffering during the pandemic won’t have been in vain.

     

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  • Exclusive: “Man Who Has It All” bares all

    Wooohoooo! BroadAgenda has obtained an exclusive interview with social media smash hit, The Man Who Has It All (MWHIA).
    We’ve teamed up with social media expert Dr Catherine Archer – who has deep interest in women’s online engagement – to give us the low down on why “The Man” has a cult following and not only makes us laugh until our bellies ache, but turns the patriarchy on its head. 
    Who is MWHIA, you ask? Read on. We’ve got you covered. Grab some tissues in case you cry laughing. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

    Catherine: The ‘Man Who Has It All’ is a self-described ‘busy working dad of three’ who apparently, ‘has it all’, including: kids, work outside the home, luminous skin, happy eyes, barely there legs, a simple but stylish home and voluminous cheeks. With more than half a million ‘friends’ (on Facebook, that is), including 12 of mine, 245k Twitter followers, a best-selling book and an online shop, this ‘dadpreneur’ appears to be winning at life.

    By now, you may have guessed that the Man who Has it all (MWHIA) is a parody social media ‘persona’, that takes our/society’s impossible expectations for women in general – and mothers in particular – and handballs them across to men.

    The Man’s identity is a closely guarded secret, but through his publicist, BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman managed to get some exclusive comments (in character) from him.

    Ginger: Tell us a bit about yourself? For those who don’t know, who are you?

    MWHIA: I’m bossing it as a busy working dad of three. I started a Twitter account called Man Who Has It All in 2015 to give men tips about how to have it all.

    Ginger: You say you have it all. What exactly is “it all”?

    MWHIA: When I say, “it all”, I mean kids, work outside the home, luminous skin, happy eyes, barely there legs, a simple but stylish home and voluminous cheeks.

    Ginger: How do you stop your social media popularity going to your head?

    MWHIA: I think it is so important that men are able to accept compliments about their work. I am proud of what I have achieved. With the right mentoring and tone of voice, men can actually succeed in business on their own merits, without playing the ‘man card’ to get ahead.

    There is so much advice out there now for dadpreneurs, boy bosses and male leaders on how to dress for your body shape and how to communicate more like a woman to succeed at work. It’s up to men to embrace it and be their best version of themselves.

    Catherine: I am not sure when I started following him on Twitter, (where he began offering ‘advice’ to men in 2015) or when I befriended him on Facebook, but like many women I found his posts incredibly funny because they took all those self-help adages aimed at women and just made them for men.

    For those who have grown up pre-internet and read girls and women’s magazines like Dolly, Cleo, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Weekly, New Idea and Marie Claire, the advice from MWHIA seemed startlingly like the advice trotted out to women on a regular basis.

    What is even more depressing for me, is that as an academic studying women’s use of social media (in particular, mum bloggers, now more likely to be called ‘mumfluencers’), I have seen similar impossible advice and beauty standards (for women, of course) infiltrate Instagram and other social media from many of the ‘mumpreneurs’ I have followed.

    It is probably a no-brainer as to why MWHIA is so funny and popular but being an academic I do like to apply theories to these things (and besides, BA’s Ginger Gorman asked me to put an academic lens on him).

    Ginger: How do you keep your skin and figure so nice?

    MWHIA: I pared my skincare routine down during lockdown to just 18 products to create flawless skin that resembles glass. I get up at 6am and drink 2 litres of water with freshly squeezed lemon juice.

    Next, I use a jade roller on my face before applying my sunscreen and serums.  I follow the same diet as Prince William, after reading a feature called ‘What William Eats In A Day.”

    I also do Hot Yoga and dancing to keep my core strong. Before bed, I always remove all traces of the day; dirt, excess oil, pollution and unwanted skin cells. I take pride in the way I look. So much so that my wife has actually never seen me with unwanted skin cells on my face!

    Catherine: Ten years ago, I started studying mum bloggers and at the time, amongst the fashion advice and blogs with titles like ‘the organised housewife’, there were also incredibly funny and painful stories, with the women often sharing the double standards of child rearing using humour and pathos.

    I also noticed that mainstream media were particularly derisive of these women’s writing/’blogging’. When then PM Julia Gillard invited what were seen as the ‘influential’ mum bloggers, and other female writers, to a dinner at Rooty Hill RSL and morning tea at Kirribilli House, the reaction from mainstream media columnists was incredulous and sneering.

    I started my research in 2012 and it was at the beginning of what was then termed the ‘blogging revolution’ when it was thought that ‘authentic posts’ from real women would change the world. But then, the advertisers/brands caught on that women were reading these posts and, and what with the ‘Instagram aesthetic’, the once raw posts of unfiltered motherhood of the early blogging days, gave way to aspirational #blessed #filtered #sponsored influencers selling us all the anxieties that would encourage women to spend big on what mattered – you know, diet products, skincare and Botox.

    Of course, many of the early and later influencers have welcomed the attention of advertisers and have gone on to forge lucrative careers with their content, just as the MWHIA has done.

    So why is MWHIA so appealing? He has done what many of the mum bloggers and other influencers have also achieved, using social media to profit but in his case also poke fun at society’s expectations of women.

    Activists and artists have often used humour to highlight societal issues and hypocrisy, way back to court jester days, and the internet has been a great place to do this. Mum blogger themselves used to poke fun at their label and some embraced it while others felt it was cringeworthy.

    To find out why MWHIA appeals so much, I did what all good academics do – I did some research, well actually I asked my female friends (real ones and those who are online ‘friends’ in an all-female closed Facebook group). Fortunately, as this is a news article, I didn’t have to take six weeks to apply for and be granted ethics approval.

    The women’s response was quick….

    It’s a witty, light-hearted flip on (what is often a shitty) reality. And the comments are GOLD!

    I love it so much, as a solo mum most of my parenting it actually made me realise how I didn’t need to live through the double standard so much, clearly just up to me.

    It gives me a good giggle, but it also reminds me that my anger at how myself and other women have been treated is absolutely justified. It’s one thing to *know* the double standards are there but when you’re reading his posts with the gender roles flipped it makes you realise just how absurd and deeply ingrained in us they are.

    When you flip the standards imposed on women and apply them to men, it really highlights how gaslighty and ridiculous the messaging can be. There is also a lot of posts highlighting gendered language, gendered careers and subtle everyday sexism.

    It makes me laugh, and points attention to double standards.

    I love it. Cut through, accurate and very funny! I find it so reassuring given the constant tidal wave of double standards in media and public discourse.

    I reckon it could be used in gender studies.

    It resonates – and makes you stop, think, and challenge how deeply engrained some of those stereotypes really area. And yes, it’s hilarious.

    It’s astounding how satire – seemingly so simple – can have such complex impacts. Let’s hear direct form MWHIA again:

    Ginger: What’s the best way to get “me time” in your hectic schedule?

    MWHIA: I get up five hours earlier than my wife and kids to give me time to chill in the kitchen, complete my gratitude journal and put my first load of washing on. I find it hard to relax until I have made the kids’ lunches, fed and walked the dog, put the slow cooker on and laid out the kids’ clothes for the month. Sometimes I have five minutes to think about how I can be kinder to myself and to others.

    Ginger: How do you avoid being sexually harassed at work? What advice would you give?

    MWHIA: There were posters in the men’s toilets in my last job telling us to walk home in pairs or groups to avoid being sexually harassed. We were also told not to wear short sleeves or tight fitting trousers. I think this is good advice.

    After all, girls will be girls and if it’s served up to them on a plate, most women can’t resist. The vast majority of women, especially older women, unfortunately would harass an attractive young man if they knew they would get away with it. I’m really lucky, most women I have worked with have been really nice and haven’t so much as laid a finger on me. There are some good women left!

    Ginger: When women are being opinionated and aggressive in work meetings – and cutting you off and talking over you, how do you manage this situation?

    When this happens to me, I adjust my posture and lean in. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make any difference and they talk over me anyway. I think the reality is that women and men have different strengths.

    Women are better at making decisions and chairing meetings and, like it or not, men are better at taking minutes, making drinks and taking the work tea towels home to wash at weekends.

    Ginger: You might have seen in the newspapers that some men are sick of being a minority in Parliament and they want quotas. They say the current system – where mostly women are elected – is not based on merit, but sexism. How would you respond to that?

    MWHIA: I don’t think men need quotas. I think men should get ahead by merit alone. Clearly the men currently in Parliament didn’t need a leg up to get there, so why should other men get special favours? Some men whine about structural inequalities, but I think these sort of men have too much time on their hands. Don’t they realise men in other countries have it worse?

    Ginger: How is your pitch to The Guardian for books by men that women should read going? (Women can’t help it if they’ve never heard of any male authors!)

    MWHIA: Unfortunately, I haven’t heard back from The Guardian. I just don’t think there is an appetite for male authors yet. Men’s Fiction remains a niche genre and you can’t expect everyone to be interested in such a narrow topic. Hopefully in another one hundred and fifty years we will start to see male authors being taken seriously.

    Ginger: Is there any other advice or thoughts you’d like to share?

    I’m encouraging everyone to comment on William’s parenting at the Jubilee Pageant in June if they haven’t already. Please wade in, especially if you didn’t see it.

    Say hello to a happy healthy summer (editor’s note: it’s summer in the UK!) and don’t forget to smile!

    Catherine: The marketisation of motherhood (and womanhood) in our neoliberal society and the ‘intensive mothering’ expectations placed on women, mean that sometimes closed Facebook groups can be one area where women remove the ‘mask of motherhood’ and share the humour, pain and frustrations where ‘having it all’ often means ‘doing it all’.

    I have researched this phenomenon with other academic colleagues, and we found that women sought these perceived safe spaces for guidance, connection, community, humour and to ‘vent’.

    The irony is that it takes a ‘man’ who has it all to shine a light on what female academics and feminists have been banging on about now for more than 50 years. In this case, it could be that mansplaining may be useful after all. It would be intriguing to know the real identity of MWHIA, but with this international man of mystery, ‘he’ gives us all a good laugh and also makes us think, and in these tumultuous times, that’s probably what we need right now.

    Finally, Ginger asked MWHIA what advice he would give to working women.

    His response was: “I think women have it easy to be honest. My wife gets home from work to a tidy house, gorgeous husband and happy kids. I’m lucky that she helps out. She’s very much a hands-on mum, especially now they’re a bit older. She takes them to the park on a Saturday morning for an hour so I can clean the house in peace. My advice to women would be to treasure and protect us; we are wonderful, mysterious creatures!”

    • Feature image: ‘The Man Who Has It All’. Picture: Supplied 

     

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