Good intentions, but a fail on promoting Gender Equality

Good intentions, but a fail on promoting Gender Equality

The 2017 season of the BBC’s 100 Women series launched to much fanfare earlier this month, the fifth in this award- winning endeavor. But based on what I have seen so far, the series seems to have lost its way, and it now provides a bit of an object lesson in what not to do if you’re genuinely interested in promoting gender equality.

When it launched five years ago, the BBC’s 100 Women series set out to examine the role of women in the 21st century by showcasing three weeks of inspirational stories about influential and inspirational women and providing a prominent platform for stories that put women at the centre. So far, so good.

Like the Australian Celebrating Women Initiative launched by Dr. Kirstin Ferguson, the BBC 100 Women program acknowledged that women’s stories tend to feature less prominently, and to use the words of Dr. Ferguson, we needed to see “more celebration and less denigration of women”.

But according to the 2017 series press release, this year the BBC producers have decided to do something different. They are not only “shining a light on issues affecting women all over the world” they are “giving women a chance to make a change”. They have, thus, rebranded this season the “100 Women Challenge”.


The press release says they are asking women in this year’s season to create innovations to tackle the glass ceiling, female illiteracy, street harassment and sexism in sport. It tells us that women with specialist interest or experience will work together in four different cities to make an innovation that will aim to help women affected by these issues.

Hmmm, let’s unpack that. I know I should reserve judgment until I have actually seen the new series, but my gut instinct is to point out that the underlying premise of the Challenge is very problematic.

Why is it up to women and women alone to tackle these issues?

That was precisely the problem with violence against women for far too long. It was women’s services and only women’ services that recognized the problem and did something about it. Now, to quote Fiona McCormack who was speaking at the 2nd annual Our Watch Awards last year, we are seeing a community acting together to keep women and children safe. I will never forget the look of delight in Fiona’s eyes – this battle-hardened legend of the women’s sector — who was surrounded by others from all walks of life who have joined in the fight.

And that, quite frankly, is what it is going to take. A community response is the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, it’s two hundred plus recommendations and the millions of funding flowing from that — all with a view towards wholesale reform and prevention.

What’s more, the focus on women setting things straight turns back the clock on progress we’ve made in engaging men, in particular, in driving change. To quote the former Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, who created Male Champions of Change, “It all started with a simple insight: to make real progress on gender equality we need powerful, decent men to step up beside women. To rely on women alone to change the status quo is actually quite an illogical approach.”  A recent report published by the Diversity Council Australia highlighted that we will not make progress towards gender equality without men’s support, because men are part of the problem.

In an article just published in the Harvard Business Review looking at how to get men involved with gender parity initiatives, the authors wrote that diversity officers have struggled to engage men. Why? According to new research published in the journal Organization Science, it’s because the men lack what’s called psychological standing, the feeling that they have legitimacy to perform an action with respect to a cause or an issue.

Psychological standing is the extent to which someone feels they have “a place in conversations” about an issue or it is “their business” to participate. Cue the sounds of cheering as the BBC’s 100 Women Challenge scores a massive own goal, using the powerful platform of Britain’s national broadcaster to send a clear message to men: this isn’t your problem, tools down.

But wait, there’s more that caused me concern about the new series. To drum up interest, the BBC launched a social media campaign, sharing stories of female innovators tackling challenges and urging other to come forward with their ideas. The tagline reads: “feeling inspired…now we need your ideas”.

But to be blunt, based on the first two stories shared, I’m not “feeling inspired”. Both profile the extent to which women change their behaviour to cope with violence against women and harassment. Neither really looks at tackling the underlying drivers.

First we heard from Eileen Carey, a Silicon Valley CEO, who tells us that she ‘dyes her hair brown to be taken seriously at work” and this is her “secret to getting ahead”. She tells us that she would like to “draw as little attention to herself as possible, especially in any sort of sexual way”.

No BBC, I’m not feeling terribly inspired by a senior women in an industry that has well documented astronomical levels of sexual harassment feeling she has to change her own appearance to avoid harassment. I would prefer to hear about a big idea focused on changing the behaviour of the harassers, and the bystanders who enable and condone their behaviour.

At first, I thought this might a joke. Or a one off unfortunate lapse in judgement. But then came a profile of the inventors of Athena, who realized that the wrist is actually the worst place to wear a personal safety device. Instead, they designed a pendant.

The text leading into a video featuring the inventors of the Athena points out that 1 in 5 women in the US will be the victim of rape and  “big problems can have very simple solutions”. Really, is the “simple solution” to rape to arm women with a cleverly designed personal safety device with improved access. How about tackling the drivers of rape, which would render such devices redundant? Is that the best we can do: “celebrate” innovations in personal safety devices?

I didn’t sit down to write this column just to stoke outrage and have a whinge about the latest offering from the UK’s public broadcaster. And to be fair, It’s early days. Perhaps they’ll still right the ship after a very problematic start. I have drawn the BBC Challenge to our attention because it is  a cautionary tale pointing out a significant pot hole in the road to gender inequality that we must do our level best to avoid.

It would be all too easy to continue to leave women and women alone to shoulder the burden. We have made significant progress here in Australia in making gender inequality and violence against women a community issue with a community response. We must carry on down that path.

And it would be all too easy to, as Catherine Fox has written, to focus on ‘fixing women’ or adapting their behavior, rather than tackling the underlying structural inequality. Fox’s insight, that insisting women fix themselves won’t fix the system, should be central to our thinking as we go forward.

Gender inequality is a big problem. There’s no use pretending there are “surprisingly simple” solutions a minority of us (women) can tackle. It’s time for all of us to do the hard yards.

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