IWD2022: the unbroken bias
Breaking the bias: only one third of local Councillors are female.
It's #InternationalWomensDay2022 and like most women in STEM and politics I've not have a moment to think what to say about it all day. This year the theme has been to #BreakThe Bias. This blog will be a story in two halves: breaking the bias, and the bias not breaking.
I have always considered myself as a woman who challenges the biases. I went into science (albeit Biology which has a higher proportion of women amongst the student cohort than physics or chemistry). I was elected as a local Councillor (only a third of UK Councillors are women). I have attained four higher education degrees (surely unsual whatever one’s sex) including a doctorate. It’s still the case that in most OECD countries more men have PhDs than women, though that may be changing with higher proportions of women amongst recent doctoral graduates. In my household, I’m the one who chooses the car and checks the tyres. I know the difference between a hacksaw and a coping saw, I fit my own lino, and I laid a solid wood floor once - that was hard work on the wrists (and no, I didn’t use a hacksaw or coping saw!). Before I had children, I was the main earner and I owned the home my husband moved into. I use my voice and I take up space. I always ask a question in meetings or present my view. I amplify what other women have said and challenge men who repeat my words to greater effect. I don’t wait to be asked, and I find another way if the first way is blocked.
I know many hugely talented, inspirational, dedicated and incredibly hard working women, and I celebrate them and their achievements. We work so hard, we achieve so much, all power to the women!
And yet the bias hasn’t broken at all.
During today I have caught glimpses of women bemoaning their organisation's IWD events being during the school run so they can't attend, and seen the odd organisation using misogynistic tropes about women as small and weak in their failed attempts to #BreakTheBias. There have been quite a lot of empty words and photographed pledges that we all know are rolled out one day a year while nothing changes for 365 days a year.
In my four years as a Councillor and on public boards, I have regularly been the only woman at the table and rarely seen 50% women or more on committees that aren't about children. Meetings are frequently set during school drop off or pick up times, and I have to work in the evening and weekends to get through my workload, and yet I’m expected to carry on with meetings in the evening too. It's still the case that in many instances women are seen as women first and experts, professionals, autonomous individuals second, if at all. Still women are explaining why they are not to blame when a man chooses to assault them - even the Leader of my Council issued victim blaming words in the aftermath of one of our city's recent tragedies, for which the priorities of party politics meant he was never held accountable. We continue to be the victims of male decision-making, sometimes to the cost of our lives. Power before women.
There is much more than a bias, there is a systemic obstruction. Many of them in fact. Maybe this year we can acknowledge that every woman is working twice as hard, often on less (and sometimes no) pay, to achieve what men less qualified than them are able to achieve. We shouldn't have to be superstars to get where we want to be in life. As I get older I feel the weight of the oppression more keenly than in my youth, when I still had so many years ahead to fight the fight and be a superstar. It was the ‘90s, we thought we’d won!
The pressure on women to break the bias is too much. The decision to stand down from Council in May was a much harder one for the guilty feeling that I was letting the side down. I worry for the new female candidates who have to take the baton I pass on, because it still isn’t fair and they are going to face many challenges that the male candidates won’t. There are two options ahead of us. 1) Women continue to have to be superstars, we step up to the plate, and we fight to our graves, one after the other, inching our way forward as a group. So it has been so far. Such fragile progress, so easily taken away. Or 2) men choose to relinquish their power and share it with us. THEY break the bias, because they are the ones who made it.
What will it be? #BreakTheBias