The all-male-panel is so ubiquitous it has its own tumbler account, it’s own meme image, and a movement asking men to take the pledge that they won’t participate on an all male panel.
Which is all good and let’s hope it has some effect, but what about the all female audience?
The Centre for Advancing Journalism ran a series of workshops at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne last week. The theme was New News, various panels explored different aspects of the changes and challenges in media over the coming years. There was an all male panel in the conference, but there was an all female one too, so I guess that balances it out. Except that the audience in at the all female panel was almost entirely made up of women. That wasn’t the case at the all male panel.
The all female panel was discussing how the media reports on violence against women. It was chaired by Margaret Simmons, the Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, the panel participants were Ellen Whinnett the National Political Editor for the Herald Sun, Vanessa Born the Media Projects Manager at Domestic Violence Victoria, and me.
I don’t have an exact count, but I think there were about 200 people in the audience, I counted 6 men.
Why? The panel wasn’t discussing secret women’s business; we were there as professionals to address an issues that is present almost every day in media. Reporting on male violence against women is not the sole purview of female journalists, it is something all crime reporters and their editors have to deal with, and this is certainly not a field only inhabited only by women.
This is not an unusual occurrence though. I’ve lost count of the number of public forums I’ve attended that addressed the topic of male violence against women and they have all, without exception, even when the gender balance on the panel was equal, had a female dominated audience.
Violence, the reporting of it, the actions required to address it and the way we frame public debate about it are not a women’s issue. Men need to be part of the leadership that changes male attitudes.
If you’ve not yet seen Jackson Katz’ excellent TED talk on this issue, it’s well worth taking 17 minutes to listen to it, but in case you haven’t got the time right now, here’s a couple of quotes that sum up the point perfectly:
I’m going to share with you a paradigm-shifting perspective on the issues of gender violence – sexual assault, domestic violence, relationship abuse, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children. That whole range of issues that I’ll refer to in shorthand as “gender violence issues,” they’ve been seen as women’s issues that some good men help out with, but I have a problem with that frame and I don’t accept it. I don’t see these as women’s issues that some good men help out with. In fact, I’m going to argue that these are men’s issues, first and foremost.
The first is that it gives men an excuse not to pay attention. Right? A lot of men hear the term “women’s issues” and we tend to tune it out, and we think, “Hey, I’m a guy. That’s for the girls,” or “That’s for the women.” And a lot of men literally don’t get beyond the first sentence as a result. It’s almost like a chip in our brain is activated, and the neural pathways take our attention in a different direction when we hear the term “women’s issues.” This is also true, by the way, of the word “gender,” because a lot of people hear the word “gender” and they think it means “women.” So they think that gender issues is synonymous with women’s issues. There’s some confusion about the term gender.
By the way, we owe it to women. There’s no question about it. But we also owe it to our sons. We also owe it to young men who are growing up all over the world in situations where they didn’t make the choice to be a man in a culture that tells them that manhood is a certain way. They didn’t make the choice. We that have a choice have an opportunity and a responsibility to them as well.
Almost all violence against women and men is perpetrated by men, they are the ones who need to understand and address the causes in themselves, in their families, in their friends and sports cultures and organisations. Why do men still think of it as something only women need to discuss and fix?
We have organisations dedicated to this idea now, like White Ribbon and Male Champions of Change, those organisations have had thousands of men sign up to their pledges and their events, but where are all those men when someone convenes a panel to discuss violence against women?
They’re somewhere else I guess, thinking that this panel isn’t relevant to them.
Maybe they feel that they wouldn’t be welcome, that they would be held to account for the actions of the men who are violent. Maybe the idea that women who object to violence against women are all feminists (defined as some woman who’s going to yell at me) and the very presence of a man would be an offence.
If that’s the case, they’re wrong. Women don’t need men to take over the fight against male violence, but we do need men to be an equal part of it. We absolutely need them to stop dismissing it as a women’s issue.
I honestly don’t know the reason that is so difficult to achieve, but I do know that men are still not turning up to public events that discuss an issue that very much affects them. And they need to.
Perhaps we need another pledge from men: not only will I not participate in all male panels, I will not stay away from all female ones. Now wouldn’t that be a paradigm shifter?