Does it matter whose ideas are heard? New research by the Open Society Foundations one Europe’s top 23 policy events showed that on average, conferences feature three male speakers to every woman.
Only one conference—the Organisation for Security and co-operation in Europe’s Human Dimension Implementation Meeting—approached gender parity.
Some, including the Munich Security Conference, Bruegel Annual Meetings (which discuss key issues in European and Global economics) and the Riga Conference (which discusses foreign policy and defence) had less than 1 in 5 female speakers.
A different perspective
Of course, as with female representation in any area—journalism, business, academia—the issue is not that an individual man and individual woman will necessarily have different policy ideas. But in the aggregate, women’s insights matter.“The policies being debated affect women and men equally,” explains Christal Morehouse, the report’s author and senior program officer for the Open Society Foundations.
“It’s perplexing that in 2018 women still don’t have an equal opportunity to shape them.”
This is the case in everything from research around families—women are still likely to do the majority of unpaid labour in the home—to economic policy.
Research published by shadow equalities minister Sarah Champion in March 2017, for instance, showed that UK women are bearing 86 per cent of the austerity burden.
“Policies need to work in diverse societies across Europe—if they’re shaped predominantly by one gender, they are unlikely to work for everybody,” says Heather Grabbe, Director of the Open Society European Policy Institute.
Where the problem originates
Of course, there are several reasons women may be underrepresented. It is certainly true that international conferences are often more difficult for women of a certain age to attend (as, again, women still take on the majority of unpaid labour in the home, including childcare).Anecdotally, organisers also suggest that women are more likely to turn down an invitation on a topic they feel unsure about, whereas male speakers are more likely to take the risk.
Yet in most cases the problem starts earlier, with men and women not receiving an equal number of invitations to speak.
One issue is that men are more likely to be promoted to senior roles—again, particularly in older age brackets where women may be taking, or have taken, a career break.
Conferences which aim to invite the most senior speakers therefore often miss out on female talent whose skills may not be reflected by an unfairly junior job title.
“Inviting speakers based only on the seniority of their positions just perpetuates centuries of inequality,” said Alla Volkova, the report’s co-author and progam specialist at the Open Society Foundations.
Who gets to have ideas
There are more insidious aspects, too. Women speak less than 30 per cent of lines in Hollywood films, contribute around 25 per cent of dialogue in boardroom discussions (in which they are often interrupted), and make up only a third of the European Parliament.Men’s research is more likely to be cited by other academic papers, and research shows that, in co-authored research, men are given far more credit for the results. In fact, women in the Obama administration became so sick of their ideas being credited to men that they began to use a technique called “amplification,” where they would support—and vocally, correctly attribute—each other’s ideas.
This is true in the think-tank world, too. Corinna Horst, Fellow and Deputy Director, Brussels Office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, says: “Some of the women regularly contributed to research and writing drafts, but were not being mentioned as authors.”
“You have the male heads of think-tanks being put on panels, but asking their younger female colleagues to provide speaking notes.”
Put it together, and it’s easy to see how an assumption that men are the originators, enactors and propagators of ideas takes hold.
In short: we’re all more used to hearing from men.
Changing the "mental Rolodex"
It’s unsurprising, then, that conference organisers putting together panels often find men’s names come to mind more readily. The over-representation of men in public discourse means that our “mental Rolodex” tends to skew male.Changing that requires an active process. At Chatham House, for instance, an “international gender awareness action plan” meant that the gender balance at their London Conference improved from 28 per cent female speakers in 2015 to 44 per cent in 2016.
The conference circuit could take tips from other industries, too. At Outside magazine, a new female digital editor introduced quotas and tracked the breakdown of male and female bylines in a team-wide spreadsheet.
By holding individual editors accountable, they began to see a relationship between lazy, male-focussed commissioning and less interest in their stories.
Or, as Grabbe put it: “Diverse views and experiences bring greater wisdom and a better connection with the needs and aspirations of citizens. If women are stuck on the margins, policy misses out on many great ideas and insights.”
