Making Room at the Table

Serene Touma
Jul 20, 2017 · 5 min read

A little while ago, I read a tweet that I later realised served as a second aha moment for the conversation around gender equality. (Lean In was my first.)

My response was quick and visceral:

According to Nicole Gallucci from Mashable:

[Michelle Obama] then went on to chat about gender equality in the industry and the immense capabilities of women, saying, “That’s where I look to the fellas at the room and say ‘Are you ready? Are you ready to share that seat at the table? Make room.’

Make room.

The implication is right there — give up some of your space, which you didn’t necessarily earn, to “make room” for women at the table.

My initial gut reaction upon reading this is “why would they? Why would you give up your privilege, your seat at that table, unless you were getting something in exchange?”

Unfortunately, it is hard for me to accept that humans are that benevolent. Economic theory just doesn’t support the altruistic — ‘for the greater good’ — point of view.

The undercurrents of this narrative are dangerous. Self-proclaimed Men’s Rights Movement groups are waving their fists in the air, demanding their rights “back” — using nostalgia as a powerful propaganda tool. Defensive and threatened by a shift in power, they sincerely believe they have become marginalised, and are being discriminated against, believing the “excessive emancipation of women” to be detrimental to their existence.

Scarier still are organisations such as MGTOW Men Going Their Own Way. With a snazzy website, a solid content strategy, and strong copywriting and gimmicks, this movement uses the following analogy to describe itself:

If MGTOW is fire, then perhaps feminism is gasoline.

Scary indeed.

And you know what that’s one step away from?

Blessed be the Fruit.

Still from Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

In a recent interview in Forbes, Werk’s female cofounders said:

By providing women with flexible work that keeps them in the workforce and advances them to positions of leadership over time, we will have more and more women reaching the top.

…and fewer and fewer men getting there? I read between the lines.

I find myself disagreeing over and over; not because I don’t think the founders are smart, driven women with a will to improve gender equality in the workplace, but because they are going about it the wrong way, focusing only on making things more flexible and accommodating for women.

We often disregard men’s desires to be a father first and career man second, and have instead spent years agonising about how women can “have it all”. (Pass the bucket.) The exclusion of men in this approach is alienating — and counterproductive. We need to change the parenting narrative to be inclusive of all genders, and shift the responsibility to sit equally between both parents.

Ever since I picked up and pored over Lean In what feels like all those years ago, I’ve repositioned the way I think about gender equality, and what’s required to get there in practice, not just in theory. (It’s an important read, so read it if you haven’t, regardless of your gender.) I knew from then that the goal couldn’t simply be to empower women. To achieve equality, you have to empower both men and women, and build an environment that makes it just as acceptable for a woman to be CEO as it is for a man to take 6 weeks off for paternity leave. An environment that says “hey, you don’t have to be the bread winner if you don’t want to — you won’t be judged or deemed less of a man” equally as much as it says “you want to excel at your career? Good for you! You don’t have to feel guilty about your ambition!”

And then I read the Handmaid’s Tale, and a chill went straight through my spine. It felt so real, and the dystopian future it imagines wasn’t that unfamiliar. In fact, it was entirely plausible.

For years, rather millennia, we’ve accepted the natural order of things… Man brings home the bacon, Woman cares for the children, and more perplexingly, Woman also cares for the home.

I am willing to listen to arguments for why women are better ‘natural’ caretakers of babies (especially those that require a boob to feed on), but why doing laundry or the dishes is a woman’s job is really beyond me. I am yet to be enlightened.

What is most disconcerting to me in this whole argument, is that men and women continue to exist as one species, requiring one another at the most basic levels to propagate that species, but we don’t behave that way. We behave as if we are against each other, rather than with each other. We behave like it’s a competition of who is better, but we are fundamentally the same.

We look at dogs, and can barely discern which is male or female. While both are required to mate, conceive and procreate, they also play catch just as well as each other. Even we humans, who love a good session of gender discrimination, don’t really notice the difference.

Woof!

We have such a long way to go.

So where do we go from here? I don’t have all the answers, but I do know one thing. We need to stop positioning the narrative, and outcome, as a sacrifice for men, and a gain for women. We need reframe the conversation — away from either good for man, or good for woman, to good for all.

Fixing this is going to need a win-win or nothing at all.

)

Serene Touma

Written by

Thinker and writer / podcast junkie / avid reader / amateur chef and even more amateur baker / @medicusai

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