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Media Agenda Talk – ‘Women and the Public Sphere in the 21st Century’
00:34:50
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, everybody. Good evening. Nice to see you all again. As I'm sure you're aware, this is the last of the media Agenda talks tonight. I hope you've enjoyed them. I hope they've worked for you. I hope they've helped kind of give you some kind of angle into the more theoretical stuff you've been doing for MC408 this year. I really appreciate your feedback. I mean, let us know. Obviously, tonight's speaker is going to be brilliant, but if any of the others have been rubbish or particularly wonderful or you can think of other people you might have liked to have heard from, please email me directly or email Marion to let us know, because these lectures are very much for you. So give us the feedback about what's worked and what hasn't from your point of view, please, a couple of little notices. One is to remind those of you into photography that the Polis Tumbler Photography competition, pre Christmas, you know, it doesn't have to be stunning fine art, but if you've got any great images around the theme of texture, texture, then please send them in and there is a prize, at least one prize. And the other thing, for those of you who are going to enter the Stockwell PR competition, don't forget the deadline. We've already got some great ideas coming in on that, but please chip in. Much easier than you think. So tonight I'm very, very pleased that we've got somebody local, partly because I don't have to pay her bus fare or a taxi. But over the summer we had a great speaker at the summer Polis School Summer School from Change.org, who was talking about this rather, the first, I thought, rather odd campaign, which was to get a woman onto the British banknotes, or I should say another woman, because obviously Her Majesty is on them, but to get a woman onto the banknotes. And what was odd about this campaign was there was quite a lot of resistance. You think it was quite a good idea, but, you know, it was quite interesting how much resistance there was from the bank and elsewhere. Apparently there were no famous British women From the last 500 years, that kind of thing. And that's when I first heard about Caroline Criado Perez's work. Caroline is studying at the gender department, but I don't know how much studying she's been able to do because she's been extraordinarily busy in many ways. I think if there was a competition for Activist of the Year, she'd be certainly in the short list. There was the bank notes campaign and that rolled into other campaigns that she's going to explain, including a campaign to try and encourage and support women who get engaged with media. But then Caroline's incredibly active on Twitter and then she sort of hit a massive backlash online. So she's going to talk about her campaigning. Also going to be talking about, though, you know, what happens to you as a woman when you do do digital campaigning. So please give a very warm welcome to Caroline.
- [03:38]
B
Hi, thanks very much. I will try and be. I can't remember what adjective you used, but you know, fantastic, fabulous, very exciting. So thanks very much for coming and listening to me. I'm going to talk a little bit about my activism and also how that fits into sort of wider situation for gender equality globally. So, as you can see, the backdrop is banknotes. And that's what banknotes, well, they currently still look like that. That's what they looked like when I Woke up on the 26th of April, and I had no particular reason to think they were ever going to be, well, in the near future going to be particularly different. And to be perfectly honest, I've never really given banknotes much thought. But anyway, I woke up and I looked at my newspaper, my online newspaper, and I saw this story and I guess for most people, you probably think it's a relatively minor story. You know, Winston Churchill regularly tops Greatest Britain polls and he's our wartime leader. And the bank of England's a really establishment institution, so it's not exactly a surprising choice for them. But it was a choice that niggled with me and it niggled with me all day and to the extent that I felt that I needed to do something about it. And so you might be thinking, why was it that I didn't had a massive problem with Churchill? Or I just don't like men in general, which is a fair assumption. I am a feminist and lots of people think that's what it means. Most men are okay, I just got engaged, so at least one man's okay. Anyway, so, no, the reason was actually that it took the banknotes from this or five pound note, in fact from this to this. And that meant that it took all the bank notes from this to this. And for the less quick amongst you, I'm sure there's no one who hasn't got it actually. But anyway, just in case that meant that we went from one out of six of the historical figures on banknotes was going to be a woman to zero out of six. And I just felt that this was really unacceptable. It was another decision already that this year we'd had Michael Gove pretty much wipe women out of the national history curriculum because of the same idea that women haven't really contributed much. And I just felt that it was an unacceptable decision. But then why banknotes? I mean, there's so much that I could have been campaigning on. There's so much injustice, particularly from a gender perspective in the world. Why did I specifically choose banknotes? And so to kind of try and explain that a little bit, I'm going to put this banknote campaign in the wider context of gender equality today and just take you on a little bit of a whistle stop tour of it. So start off with this, which, as you can probably guess, is the pay gap. For those of you who are. For those of you who are women and are working in paid employment at the moment, you're actually not in paid employment, you're in unpaid employment. And you've been in unpaid employment since the 7th of November. That's, that's the extent of the gender cap in the UK. And that is despite the fact that in the UK for 40 years it's been illegal to pay women less than men. And yet we don't get paid for pretty much the last two months of the year. So just don't work for the last two months of the year. That's what I say. Poverty. 70% of the 2 billion people who live in poverty, 70%, that's a staggeringly high number, are women. And of course, that figure is strongly linked to the fact that 2/3 of the global illiterate who haven't had an education are women as well. And that's not because women are failing to learn, it's because people are unwilling to provide them with an education. And I think we all know what you know. Obviously, Malala is a really extreme case, but that's the kind of thing that happens when a woman stands up and demands what is her right, the right to knowledge. And that is a really scary thing for a lot of people, for women to have knowledge. And the lack of, I mean, tests and studies have again and again demonstrated the link between poverty and lack of education and how when you provide women with education, poverty decreases. So it's a really important issue. The World Health Organization this year declared violence against women. This is the 21st century, remember that? We're living in violence against women was declared a global health problem of epidemic proportions. And I don't think the World Health Organization uses the term epidemic lightly. And it's actually no wonder that they call it an epidemic. Because the stats are shocking. 1 out of 3 women globally will experience violence against women. 1 out of 4 women will be sexually assaulted. The police. A woman is assaulted an average of 35 times before she calls the police, and yet the police receive a phone call every single minute on domestic violence. That's just in the UK. Women make up 89% of all those who experience four or more incidents of domestic violence. And two women die every single week just in the UK as a result of domestic violence, which makes domestic violence the number one cause of violent deaths for women. And then, even when you get into representation, the issue of women's representation, you might think, well, still, why banknotes? We've got problems in Parliament. Fewer than one in four women MPs as a woman. Out of 110 High Court judges, only 17 are women. I mentioned this earlier, the history curriculum, but I'll tell you a bit more detail. Key Stage 2 has no women at all in the national history curriculum. And Key Stage 3 has four women in total. And they're all grouped together under the changing role of women, rather than, you know, science or political activism or whatever else it was that these women were doing. Literature. They're just there because they're women and their roles were changing. Four of them. Next, the media. In terms of editors of national newspapers, only one in the UK is a woman, and that's down from a high. We reached a great high about six years ago of 17%, so we didn't break the 20% mark, but we did get up 17%. We're now down to one. And she's the editor of the Daily Star, which I always think is quite interesting. But she's holding on strong. And that's. This is pretty much the most likely place you're going to see a woman, actually, particularly on the front page. A nice, pretty picture. We make up 80% of the pictures in newspapers that are deemed not to be linked to the actual story or not to be linked to a really important story, story of the day. And they're pictures which are called a lift, and that's what they're there for. So 80% of those, that's where you're going to find the women. But the other stats aren't really very good. It's actually. It's almost exactly parity. 84% of lead stories are about men. 80% of pretty pictures are of women. And obviously young, attractive women like her. She's very attractive. I've got nothing against her. But, yeah, it might be nice to have some pictures of People doing other things. Anyway, so 84% of these stories are about men and 78% of them are written by men. And again, you might be thinking, okay, this is all pretty ridiculous. Women make up 52% of the population, so they should probably be 52% of news stories. But why does it matter in the context of the fact that women are actually dying? Why do we care about this? And we care because the way I always talk about violence against women is that it's the front line of feminism. It's where it's the fallout of all the other injustices that women face. It's where we staunch the blood, it's where we bandage the wounds. And it really is a sort of issue of dealing with the fallout of dealing with the wounds. And that's actually been. There are a couple of issues. First of all, it's been hampered, particularly in this country, but also around the world by an issue of cuts. And for example, in the UK there have been 30% cuts since 2010 to the women's services center, women's services sector. And they've just announced more cuts. And actually that goes up for black and minority women to 47% cuts. So it's not equal across the board. Cuts are disproportionately affecting women and disproportionately affecting the women's sector. And this is against the backdrop, of course, of a recession, which is any women's services worker will tell you, is when violence against women increases, it always does, always has done, and it probably always will until feminism is no longer needed. But, but what we have here is violence against women is increasing and cuts are also increasing to the sector that is helping deal with this. At the same time, prosecutions have also gone down 30%. So why is this happening? And it's happening because of the priorities of a male dominated parliament and a male dominated media. And don't be fooled by the fact that they very cleverly put all the women on the front row. If you look a little bit further back, they are all men, pretty much. This, of course, isn't to say that men are evil and bad. It's just to say that politics is incredibly responsive to the media. And if we have the situation whereby 84% of stories are about men and by men, then politics is going to be responding to those stories. They're going to be responding to who shouts the loudest. You know, we can't really pretend that we live in a society anymore where politics is just completely, completely about people acting on what they believe. Is the best thing to do. They act on focus groups. They act on what the big story is of the day. I mean, if you look at my campaign, for example, it was very interesting to see a kind of shift in the way politics and democracy is working now in that where perhaps once I might have gone to my politician and said, hey, I'm really cross about this. The bank of England is taking women off banknotes, and I think you should do something about it. For a start. I wouldn't ever go to my MP because he didn't even turn up to a vote on sex and relationships education. So I don't think he'd really care about women on bank notes. But also what happened is that once I started this campaign, once I got the media interested, suddenly politicians got interested too, and they all started lining up to start talking about it. So Ed Miliband spoke about it and Mary MacLeod spoke about it and Maria Miller spoke about it. And I didn't approach any of them. They just saw it was a news story, and I'm sure they thought it was a good idea. But it's just illustrative of the way that the media can really shape what politicians are talking about. So just a really small microcosm of that. But imagine that across the board. And you see that we have a little bit of a problem if the news, if women aren't being represented and their voices aren't being heard in terms of what politicians are actually going to do. And it ends up with massive cuts to the women's services sector. So that's really the first reason. And the second reason is that what is, I suppose what this demonstrates about what we think about women, the fact that women aren't represented, that we're not voted into Parliament, that we're not in the newspaper, and basically what it represents is that still in the 21st century, women are undervalued and our stories are not deemed important enough for the media or for the national curriculum. We're underpaid and we're under promoted and were beaten and sexually violated. Just to remind you again, to an extent, that the World Health Organization deems a health problem of epidemic proportions. So I know I focused a lot on men, and he is a man, I'll grant you that. But it's not actually just men who undervalue women. It's women, too. We undervalue ourselves all the time. And I've really realized this since I set up an organization called the Women's Room. And basically the catalyst for this was that the Today Program two days in a row had an all male panel discussing women's bodies. And the first day we got really cross and felt that this was bit Victorian really, and that possibly they could have got a woman on to talk about women's bodies. But we just sort of got a bit cross and then they did it the second day and we just sort of thought, this is enough. Particularly when John Humphrey said that they tried to find a female breast cancer expertise but hadn't been able to find one. And I just sort of thought, well, just not really trying very hard, are you? That's a little bit embarrassing. The situation that we have in the media is that for every five experts, only one will be a woman. Which again, doesn't reflect either the number of women in the country or the number of female experts in the country. Anyway, this is Sir Anthony Selden. He took part in a debate on teenage girls and their contraception. He's headmaster of Wellington College. Nick. No, he isn't a noted expert on teenage girls and the contraception, but the Today program felt that he was good enough to have on there. As opposed to a woman who had, I don't know, had her period or had a need for contraception or any other thing that might sort of be relevant to this debate. As opposed to just being a headmaster of a school that I think only went co ed a few years ago. Anyway, anyway, sorry, he just gets me a bit cross. The women's room is having an impact. Now you can. We have been noticing an increase in women experts, women's voices in the media and we've now got over 3,000 experts. And you know, I would really recommend that you guys, women, I'm afraid, only go and have a look and see if you want to sign up. Because the way we've tried to do it is a selection of experience and expertise. So you don't necessarily have to have huge qualifications and a PhD and all that kind of thing. It's about recognizing that actually sometimes a woman's voice, just because she's a woman actually is quite helpful in the debate and she might have experienced things that the media want to talk about. So do go and take a look and sign up if you feel you can. But I have to say I say that thinking that probably a lot of you won't because women do have this big problem with believing that their voices deserve to be heard. So I'm just going to show you this. So this is a tweet that I got sent when I was holding a discussion on the women's room Twitter account about women and expertise and the trouble that women have declaring themselves experts. And as you can see, this woman said, I have a PhD in clinical psychology and 10 years, 10 years postdoc experience, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert. And I just sort of think that if you look at that and you compare that with this and you see a little bit of a problem. And I suppose the problem really is that if women don't feel confident enough in themselves to speak up, to stand for Parliament, to consider themselves experts with opinions worth listening to, how are we ever going to get to a stage where we have a media that is representing 100% of the public rather than a really small sector of the public, really, realistically? I mean, they're not, to be fair, they're not even representing all men, but they're not representing any women at all, pretty much. There's actually quite a simple way to deal with this. We deal with women's lack of self confidence. And this is a growing body of research which I find really, really interesting. And it's called role model research. And probably, as the name suggests, the idea is that you provide women with role models. And this picture is. I think it's a great picture. It was done by someone, can't remember, she's an artist and it's actually Emmeline Pankhurst's face and she's made up of pictures of inspirational women from around the world and through history. So, yeah, there are a lot of women that the bank of England, for example, could have chosen to go on a banknote. Anyway, so I'm just going to tell you a bit about some of these studies because I think they really demonstrate the huge impact that role models really can have on women. And it's not just about making women feel better, it's actually changing the way that they operate in the world and the achievements that they can achieve. So I'm going to start off with mass tests and there are two tests here. One of them is demonstrating the existence of something called stereotype threat, and the other one is showing alleviating that threat. So the first test basically was just. They had two groups, mixed gender groups, and one group got this math test and it said that it basically reminded people of their gender. So it said that your gender will have an impact on the way you. On how you do in this test. And the other one was exactly the same test, but it just didn't say that. And in the first test, the women did really badly. And in the second test they did really well. So that's one test just showing her just reminding women of their gender, which reminds them, oh, I'm really bad at maths. Actually has an impact on how they do in a test, which I find quite frightening. But in a way it's also quite good because it's. That shows you that there are things that you can do. So the other test, which is a happier test really, they were looking at what would happen if, you know, in what way would it affect women's performance in a maths test, depending on who gave them the maths test. So there are three groups. The first group had a man giving the test. The second group had a woman giving the test who was presented, she was meant to act like she was a bit dippy and not really very good at maths and didn't really know what she was doing. And the third test was presented by a woman who was meant to look like she really knew what she was doing. She was good at math, she was very competent. You probably guess what happened in the group where the man was giving the test, women did okay, not that well in the group with the women, with the woman who was meant to be looked like she was really bad at math, the women did really, really badly. But in the group where the woman was giving the test who was presented as really good at maths, the women not only did really well, they also actually outperformed the men in their group, which is something they hadn't done in the previous two groups. And I should just mention that the men were the same all the way through. So again, showing you that something as small as who gives you the test and what your impression is of them can completely change the way you perform in a maths test, which is of course really important for women who want to progress in academia, for example. So then the second arena that they've done some tests is in political office. And this has been shown having a female mp. She doesn't actually even need to be mp, just being up for parliament increases has been shown to increase volunteerism amongst women, voter turnout amongst women. There's one test which I think is very interesting from the us which showed that just having a female candidate for Senate increased women's ability to name any senator. It wasn't necessarily a woman any senator by 30%. And again, like with the maths test, this took them over the ability of men to name any senator. And then the final one, which I think is quite interesting, was in speech giving and they took these women who were giving speeches and they, some of them, they just let them give their speeches and the other ones, they, before they gave the speech, they showed them a picture of an inspirational woman. And the women they chose were Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton, I think. And again, the impact that it had on the women's speeches was obviously they gave better speeches. So they gave better speeches and they gave longer speeches. And this was judged both by the women giving the speeches and the audience. I'll leave it to you to decide whether I was looking at pictures of Germaine Greer before I started this anyway, role models and why do they matter or just role models do matter. Sorry. And I hope you'll agree with me, I think they do. But back to banknotes and back to the original question, I guess, which is why banknotes? And I suppose the answer to that is that there's no particular reason. My banknotes, I just had all these tests in my head. I knew about the importance of role models. I knew about the importance of female representation, not only for female confidence, but also for just general gender equality and the ability of women to have a voice and to make a difference and for politicians to listen to us. And I just thought this is rubbish. You know, this is a decision that doesn't need to be made. It's completely inconceivable that we can't find one woman out of six. So I'm not going to put up with it. I'm going to say no and I'm going to take them on. And I'm also at the same time going to start up a debate about why this matters and the symbolism surrounding it. So as some of you may know, I won that fight. And that is the new 10 pound note that will be coming in in 2017, probably with Jane Austen, who by. Thank you. Who by happy coincidence, is one of my favorite authors. So that's nice. Anyway, so that was really fantastic. But for me, I think that the most. One of the best things about it really was that it looked not just at, let's get Jane Austen on a banknote and that will be the end. It looked at the selection procedure and the bank of England has agreed to review their selection procedure. And that means that they are looking not just at the. The symptoms, which I guess is not having a woman on banknotes, but they're also looking at the causes, which is how we got into the situation in the first place, which is that they had a discriminatory procedure. And just to take you back again to the whole idea of violence against women versus representation for me, I don't want to be too simplistic about it because obviously violence against women is a really complex area. But for me, the fact that we have cuts, the fact that women are undervalued, the fact that we continue to have this global epidemic speaking, speaks strongly to an idea that there is a cause behind it. And for me, the idea of women not being valued and not being represented is going to be part of that cause. So for me, feminism really needs to not just be on the front line, it also needs to be on the back line and looking at logistics and looking at processes and looking at why it is that we continue to have these decisions being made which either leave women vulnerable to abusive husbands, for example, or partners or abuse in general. But Anyway, for example, 180 women every single day. So add that up, we have 365 days a year, 180 women every single day last year got turned away from refuges as a result of government cuts. So anyway, it's important to look at symptoms and causes, basically is my point there. And some of you may also know, or you will know after my introduction, that there was a bit of an unpleasant coda to this win. And I'm just going to give you a little bit of a taster of what it was like for me in the weeks following this victory. I should stress this isn't actually my address, thankfully, but obviously they thought it was. I think that gives you an idea. Yeah. So basically this is what I was faced with after having convinced the bank of England after three really long and arduous months to put a woman on banknotes. And I suppose obviously I was really surprised. I think a lot of people were really surprised that something is seemingly innocuous and quite modest campaign, really. I mean, I wasn't storming parliament and dragging all the men out there and putting women in their place. I was just asking for a woman, a picture of a woman to be on a banknote. But just asking for something as small as that brought this into my life and it was a really horrific experience. I was terrified, really. I didn't really sleep, I couldn't eat. I lost about half a stone in about two days. Don't think it's very healthy because I guess of all the stress and the adrenaline running through my body the whole time, I was on a complete hyper vigilance, high alert the whole time. And I think a lot of people think that because you can't see these people and they could be anywhere and they're not necessarily near you, that. That's not scary. But actually it's a lot more scary because as one of my tweeters told me, just think it could be someone you know or someone else said after I got doorstep by the Evening Standard. Enjoying having reporters at your door. Imagine if one of them was a rapist disguised as a journalist. And, you know, you just have this level of, you don't know who it is. It could be anyone, and they could be anywhere, and they're trying to find your address and they're tweeting at you relentlessly with rape threats and graphic images and addresses that. Sorry. Have been found attributed to you. And the police, in fact, told me that I should expect them eventually to find my address. So it was really terrifying. But I think it also tells us a few really important lessons, and I just want to run through them quickly. And I'm aware I'm slightly taking slightly longer than I intended to, so I'm sorry, but there will be time for questions, hopefully afterwards. And the first one is a response I think a lot of people have to this kind of abuse, which is a little line called don't feed the trolls. I have a real problem with that line because I think that, for a start, it looks at a perhaps older, more innocent time of the Internet, where trolls. A troll is more like someone who's like a little bit of an annoying mosquito. They're just trying to get your attention and they're saying something a little bit, you know, out there, and. And they just think they're really exciting and they're breaking boundaries by something you're not really meant to say. This was different. This was not trying to get a reaction from me. Or rather it was. But the reaction wasn't a vocal reaction. It was for me to shut up and to go away. And I always think that was. There was perhaps one of the most honest tweeters who said to me, shut your whore mouth or I'll choke it with my dick. And that is very clearly what was going on here, is that they were trying to make me shut up. So don't feed the trolls not only doesn't represent what this actually is, which is violent hate speech and abuse, it's also misinterpreting what they're trying to do. If I were to shut up and not draw attention to it and not try and get people to stop it, A. I'm just accepting that, you know, men are just like that and we just have to live with it, which I think is insulting to men and wrong and Second of all, it's, it's not dealing with the problem. And finally, I suppose it's not really thinking about what it's like as a person who is receiving this. It's just thinking about the abusers. It's thinking about how do I change my behaviour so that I don't achieve that, don't result in this happening to me. Well, obviously the best way to change my behavior would be not to be a feminist, not to try and change the status quo, just to keep shutting down and probably stay in the kitchen making sandwiches all day. That's really how I avoid this kind of behavior. Although even then I don't. Because as most feminists know, and most people should know, you're most likely to get raped in your own home by someone you know, probably your partner. So even then you're not safe. But I suppose I would probably be safe from this kind of abuse. And obviously I'm not prepared to do that. So that's why I throw don't feed the trolls out the window. The second thing that people talk about is freedom of speech. And I can see that at a surface level it does seem like I must be some evil, rabid, anti freedom of speech type person because I think this kind of thing is unacceptable. But like most liberal concepts, freedom of speech doesn't really work in a world where we don't have equality and where some voices matter more than others and, and where some people are prepared to use violence to get their voice across. The concept of freedom of speech that we have at the moment in this country is freedom of speech for the person who is prepared to shout the loudest, or freedom of speech for the most powerful at the expense of the powerless. I cannot begin to tell you how many women got in touch with me to say that something similar had happened to them. They had stopped campaigning, they had shut up. I had women get in touch with me saying, I want to speak up about this, but I'm scared to because I've seen what's happened to you and you know, and I think about myself and I am. I'm more timid in what I say. I think much more carefully about what I'll put out there. When I think about a campaign that I might want to take on, I think, do I really want to do it? Is it that important? Because I'm really not ready to go through this again. And what that is all about is women's freedom of speech, women's freedom of speech, women's freedom of movement being curtailed by the idea that this comes under freedom of speech. So what I really hope that we're going to get out of this is a slightly more complex and nuanced idea of what freedom of speech actually constitutes. Because at the moment, I don't think this is it. I don't recognize this as freedom of speech. And finally, just to come back again, I guess again to the theme of my talk, which is about women in the public space, this is pretty much. I mean, it was quite extreme, but I don't know any woman who has been in the public sphere. And I'm not just talking about feminists. I'm talking about women who write about PlayStation, women who write about religion, women who write about anything they are guaranteed to receive violence, abusive language, sexual threats just for being in the public sphere. So what does that mean? The way I look at it, it means that these men. This is my pet theory, so it could be wrong, but I've thought about it a lot, as you might expect me to have done. My pet theory is that these are men who've grown up seeing what I was just talking to you about, about men running parliament, men running companies, men running the judiciary, men being in the media. And fair enough, they grow up thinking, well, I look like that I'm going to inherit the world. I'm going to be running it. I'm going to be the one who people are listening to. And so when they see a woman taking that place, in a way, I think they experience a certain cognitive dissonance and they think, well, hang on, I'm sitting here in my pants watching the tv, eating a pizza, and she's on the TV and people are listening to her, what's going on there? And so they think, this cannot be allowed to happen. I must shut her up with threats of violence. And obviously that's really sad. And I suppose that again brings me back to why I think it's so important that we keep pushing for women in the public sphere because we can't keep bringing up, A, women who think that their voices don't matter, and B, men who think that women's voices don't matter and that women who use their voices and women who try to encourage other women to use their voices deserve to be shut up with violent and sexual threats. And I guess I'm going to leave that with you just to think about. And I hope that thinking about it will help you, will lead you to ways of thinking how you can contribute to getting more women in the public sphere. Because apart from anything else, it's quite lonely in the public sphere as a woman, and we'd quite like to spread the abuse about a bit just in the short term. So. Yes, sign up to the women's room. Okay, thank you.