What’s on your Christmas wish list? It’s not sexy but what I really, really, want this year is a little bit of context. Is that too much to ask?
I’ve thought about it longingly many times this year. I long for context when a war of words erupts about whether Julie Bishop is a feminist or whether it matters that Matthias Cormann disparages Bill Shorten as a girlie-man or when Christopher Pyne says women won’t earn high salaries as dentists or lawyers.
If we lived in a society in which men and women were equally utilised, equally paid, equally represented and neither was disproportionately saddled with poverty or violence, these things might not matter. But those things aren’t true, are they?
We know women earn less, they are less likely to reach senior leadership positions and they will retire with less. We know that a woman is killed almost every week by a male partner. We know that discrimination and sexual harassment are rife. We know that the vast majority of our workplaces do not have a strategy for tackling these issues. These are not simply my “opinions”; they are incontrovertible facts. And they are the context without which any conversation about men and women and gender equality will not be remotely useful.
Context is effectively the difference between making an ordered and logical argument addressing the situation as it stands and simply urging people to consider the “vibe”. Tempting as the latter is it won’t progress the conversation and it certainly won’t shift the dial.
This week I have found myself longing for context once again. In response to the Greens Senator Larissa Water’s suggestion that we embrace gender neutral toys, you could be forgiven for thinking she had proposed we give out nuclear weapons at Christmas. And announced that she would be misappropriating public funds to pay for it.
Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran a front page story depicting Waters as the woman who stole Christmas. Today The Australian has published a photograph of her young daughter dressed up as a princess at a birthday party. Aside from being highly objectionable (does any story warrant the publication of a four year old’s photograph without parental permission?), the response is telling.
Consider for a moment that Waters is not the Prime Minister, nor was she introducing a bill to Parliament. She is a senator so she certainly has some power and a platform but she’s hardly the most powerful woman in Canberra and she was lending her support to a cause, not committing funds to a policy.
So why was her suggestion, and her support for this cause, met with such outrage? Why is it so threatening?
There is no doubt that No Gender December is hardly a mainstream movement. But the issue that it seeks to tackle and highlight – about gender stereotypes – is hugely important. Banning certain toys in a bid to render stereotypes null and void seems extreme but the fact is stereotypes limit individuals, societies and economies. What we’re doing right now isn’t helping to bridge the gap between boys and girls, in many ways we’re going backwards, so is having a conversation about gender roles really so ridiculous?
The G20 recently resolved to boost women’s workforce participation as a key objective and whilst stereotypes alone do not hamper the extent to which women contribute to an economy, they do play a role. Stereotypes form the cultural context in which men and women live and work; they are the invisible constraints that men and women still have to fight against.
As the head of the IMF Christine Lagarde says if we are serious about unleashing women’s economic potential, we have to tackle the cultural side of the equation.
That is the context that is almost entirely absent from the commentary around Waters’ support for No Gender December. Having a conversation about gender and toys would be wholly unnecessary in a world which offered men and women equal opportunities. But this is not that world.
On a personal note though I am intrigued. Does anyone not want men and women to live lives that reflect their own choices as opposed to some societal expectations based on their gender? If so, is it really that scary to talk about the different assumptions and expectations that we might have about boys and girls or the way we pass them on to our children?
I have two daughters who are as girly as you can possibly imagine. Some of that, I am sure, is nature but, I am also sure, some of it is probably nurture. Does it worry me? No. Am I rallying against it? No. But it is something I think about. I do want their worlds to be a bit broader than dolls and babies and princesses. It’s why I choose other books and puzzle and toys to balance it out.
We create our kids’ worlds; not just with the toys we give them but with the way we talk to them, the way we treat them, the way we treat each other. Being mindful of those things and the impact they have is powerful, and that, in my view, is the purpose of No Gender December. To stop and think about the world we are creating for our kids. Is that really too much to ask?