Thursday, November 29, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Thoughts on International Men’s Day

Posted: 28 Nov 2012 06:14 AM PST

From Glosswatch.

Patriarchy and misandry: same difference?

Imagine there's an issue you really, really care about. It's a serious one, one which causes harm to billions of people the world over. In some cases it leads to death. You attend conferences about it, write articles on it, try desperately hard to raise awareness. And then someone asks you what this issue really is – what are its causes, how does it operate – and you tell them "personally, I don't really care". Wouldn't you find that just a little bit odd?

This is the problem I'm having with Ally Fogg’s Guardian piece on International Men’s day. As the mother of two boys – and, on a far more basic level, as a human being who at least tries not to be a total tosser – I have no objection to engaging with problems that are more likely to be faced by men than women. I don't want to have rights that my sons couldn't also enjoy nor for them to feel afraid of expressing views that hold no stigma when they are voiced by women and girls. All the same, I tend to think that in order to challenge what Fogg describes as the "spider's web" of "specific social injustices that specifically or disproportionately affect men and boys", the most obvious port of call would be feminist analyses of gender injustice. If something is happening to men and not to women, it says something about what we think of women as well as men.

Fogg argues that the problems men and boys face "are often the same one":

What is it? Some would call it anti-male prejudice or misandry, some call it socialisation, some call it the workings of capitalism and some call it patriarchy. Personally I don't really care, most of the time it all describes the same effects

I am surprised Fogg doesn't care, not just because there's a world of difference between the voice that cries "misandry" and that which cries "patriarchy". I am surprised because it's not enough to "describe the same effects" without examining root causes and underlying ideologies. I don't see how we can treat others fairly unless we genuinely understand why we're being unfair – and why we've developed these unjust beliefs about others – in the first place. Simply hating men and positioning men within a power structure in which roles and attributes are not permitted to cross arbitrary gender boundaries strike me as two different things. Before we start shouting it's important to know what or whom we're shouting at. We can't shift our judgments if we haven't shifted our expectations first.

Despite his own professed lack of curiosity on the matter, Fogg goes on to have a pop at feminists and their silly, simplistic solutions:

The old refrain "patriarchy hurts men too" is undoubtedly true but it is not a solution. It implies that all we need to do is achieve full social justice for women and male-specific problems will simply wither away. That's not only a bit daft in theory, it is patently not working in practise.

But "patriarchy hurts men too" does not simply imply this. It reiterates that men and women are not defined in isolation, but in relation to one another. The perceived deficiencies of one poorly-defined group become the perceived qualities of another. Male-specific problems aren't just male-specific. You are not allowed to be weak; I am not expected to be anything more. A shift in women's position necessarily involves a shift in men's. One of the greatest barriers to "full social justice for women" – which, incidentally, has not yet arrived and hence offers no measure against which to see what would happen to men ­– is the failure to acknowledge that this would change how everyone is perceived and valued. If it is important to "support boys through early life through good fathering" (and I don't necessarily think it is – good parenting, not gender essentialism, is surely the key), then this will ultimately mean men taking on a greater proportion of unpaid work. This isn't about problems "withering away", it's about tackling them with honestly and a willingness to share.

Of course, I could be dismissed as one of those feminists who, for no apparent reason, finds men's rights "threatening". Luckily Fogg sees my fear as "misplaced": "I believe a unified men's sector can not only peacefully co-exist with the women's movement, but actually complement it". Yet what is being described is not a movement which "complements" feminism, it's one which undermines it by dismissing broader understandings of gender inequality in order to focus on specific examples taken out of context. And yes, it may sound like feminists are saying "you should do it our way" – but what is wrong with a feminist reading of gender inequality? If you see that as a straightforward portrayal of women as victims, then you've misunderstood feminism. And if you think something else is wrong with feminism but are choosing not to say what that is, then you're not "complementing" anyone. Unless you engage with the debate, taking an interest not just in cis, heterosexual boys and men but in gender stereotyping, sex and sexuality, you're forging your own path, alone.

Men's rights activists who refuse to engage with feminism – dismissing "those nod-along male feminist academics and activists who are less concerned with problems facing men than those caused by men" – remind me of privileged feminists who refuse to engage in discussions about intersectionality. What's often said of them is that they can't really care about equality as whole but simply want to exploit the notion of fairness in order to have a self-serving moan. Feminists can do better than this, and so too can men's rights activists. We can all do better, but it depends on whether "personally" we really care.

Glosswitch is a feminist mother of two who blogs at Glosswatch.

Top science journal admits sexism

Posted: 28 Nov 2012 04:00 AM PST

Top science journal admits sexismNature magazine rebukes itself for inadequately reflecting women’s contributions to science

Top science magazine, Nature is regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.

An editorial titled "Nature's sexism" in the current issue acknowledged that the magazine needs to improve the proportion of women they commission and profile.

It calls on every editor to ask themselves "Who are the five women I could ask?" when considering who will write articles, assess papers and be profiled in the publication.

This decision to "inject an extra loop" into the editors' thinking has been taken in light of internal surveys into Nature's recruitment, hiring and editorial practices.

From those surveys, Nature concluded that its editorial process contains an "unconscious bias" against women.

Just 14 per cent of the 5,514 referees who assessed Nature's submitted papers in 2011 were women. In 2011 and so far in 2012 a mere six of the 34 researchers profiled in the journal were women and only 19 per cent of its externally written ‘Comment’ and ‘Worldview’ articles included a female author.

The editors have concluded from these findings that, although some of the imbalance is due to recognised external factors, those factors can neither fully account for nor excuse it.

They suggested that editors' unconscious assumptions that women are less competent than men causes them to unintentionally discriminate against women.

Nature hope that injecting the extra loop into their editorial thinking will correct that assumption and therefore result in a more reflective inclusion of women in their pages.

There is evidence that the consequences of the bias extend beyond Nature and into the wider scientific community.

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden found that women were being passed over during the selection processes for invitation-only authorship sections in both Nature and also in Science, another top scientific journal.

The researchers found that Science was publishing a comparable amount of female authors to Nature and surmised that female scientists' careers are being generally restrained because too few are being offered these opportunities of exposure.

"The consequences are that women are not as visible as men and are not provided the same opportunities for career advancement. The loss of women in science constitutes a brain drain for society," surmised Lund University in Sweden, where the research was undertaken.

It is perhaps unsurprising then, that Nature highlighted in their editorial a low proportion of female scientific researchers active in certain disciplines and the upper reaches of all disciplines.

Whether an extra loop in the editors' thinking can correct the imbalance in Nature‘s pages remains to be seen. They have stated that any changes will not involve the use of quotas, implying that they might weaken the quality of the publication.

Instead, the journal has promised to set themselves "internal targets" to focus on improvement, but did not specify what those targets might be.

However, that Nature has publicly acknowledged its need to correct the editorial bias against women counts as progress in scientific publishing. Science has yet to respond to the Lund University research.

According to Dr Catriona MacCallum, a senior editor on a leading open access journal PLoS Biology (Public Library of Science), it is likely that this editorial bias against women is pervasive throughout scientific publishing.

Why we should care about women bishops

Posted: 28 Nov 2012 02:57 AM PST

Apart from the fact that women have become a vital asset to the Church of England.

Last week’s vote by the Church of England’s General Synod to continue to outlaw women bishops may not have felt particularly significant to many feminists out there.

Perhaps busier organising Reclaim the Night marches that were going on around the country on Saturday; fighting the sexism on our pavements rather than that emanating from institutions from which we feel dislocated anyway.

It is the Church, after all, that continues to preach Biblical scriptures, the like of which tells us, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife” (Ephesians 5:22-24), and “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a women to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” (1 Timothy 2:11-12)

Is it any wonder, then, that many of us are apathetic about whether the women that choose to preach the word of God are excluded from the highest echelons of His ministries?

As some were heralding the result of the vote as a funeral knell for the Church of England, ‘suicidal stupidity‘ from an institution that has been ‘haemorrhaging credibility for years’, did we give a half smile? We shouldn’t have.

As Reverend Biddi Kings wrote for WVoN last week, women have become a vital asset to the Church of England since their ordination as priests was first permitted two decades ago.

With current numbers exceeding those for men in both training and ordination as priests, it is a mark of the institutional misogyny that female clergy remain mostly unpaid and in lower level positions.

Something, then, that we can all agree on, if we leave spiritual beliefs to one side, is that the experience of discrimination within the workplace is entirely unacceptable and illegal thanks to the Equality Act 2010.

It is this legislation, criticised ironically earlier in the year by an all-party committee that accused it of being ‘anti-Christian‘, which exempts all religious institutions from the legislation on employment and equalities.

Some Christians, however, deny that the comparison between the Church and the secular workplace is fair.

‘To be called to be a bishop is not to be called to be a CEO but to be a father in the church family,’ wrote Susan Leafe in justification of her vote against women joining the episcopate.

It is, nonetheless, treated as such in the eyes of the law, and in the wake of the General Synod’s decision, Frank Field a legislator and former member of the General Synod, has tabled a bill to strip the Church of its exemption from equality laws.

“Any organisation that thinks it can turn its back on half of the talent in the country, and thinks it will be taken seriously, needs some sort of serious wake-up call.”

Similarly, senior Liberal Democrats, including the chief whip, Alistair Carmichael, have questioned whether the 26 bishops (Lords Spirituals) that serve in the House of Lords should be allowed to remain there if the situation continues.

They are effectively a government sanctioned ‘male-only club’ which, as Giles Fraser describes, ‘could have been put down to an accident of history [before the vote]. Now it is deliberate.’

Interventions from Parliament, however, seem unlikely after David Cameron made clear at prime minister’s questions that, whilst he is, “a strong supporter of women bishops,” “you do have to respect the individual institutions and the way they work.”

Arguably though, the Church of England itself is a product of government interference.

Parliament appoints its spiritual leader, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Lords Spirituals, and would have had to ratify the legislation on women bishops – had it been approved by the Synod.

Therefore, if Mr Cameron is unwilling to make use of the establishment between Church and State to intervene on this issue, then shouldn’t disestablishment between Church and State be enacted?

After all, isn’t it contradictory for a institution which discriminates against women from entering the episcopate to have a women as the Defender of the Faith?

In a timely coincidence, the first woman bishop was consecrated in Africa a day before the General Synod vote.

Swaziland is a country where nearly 50 per cent of women will have experienced sexual violence before they turn 24, and ruled by polygamous King Mswati III, the last absolutist monarch.

A country neither lauded for its human rights record, nor its gender equality.

Yet, as he officiated at the ceremony for Ellinah Wamukoya, the Very Reverend David Dinkebogile stressed that he was there to consecrate a bishop, “not a black woman, not an African, not a Swazi woman.”

Herein lies a lesson in acceptance for traditionalists.