Why I am (still) a feminist.
Just after I first started writing this blog, I decided to confess something. I wrote a piece called “Why I am a feminist” and I was a bit nervous about what people would think. I wasn’t really nervous about coming out — the belief that half the human race is due the same respect and opportunity as the other is not very shameful. I was nervous that people would question why I had an opinion at all. As I said then:
I didn’t really think it was my place. I’m a white, straight, middle-class, university educated man with a full-time job. That means I’ve had essentially zero perspective on what it feels like to suffer personal discrimination. Feminism surely didn’t need me to jump on the bandwagon and offer my patronising sympathies?
Would anyone really care?
As it turned out my nervousness was misplaced. A surprisingly large number of people have been prepared to spend the seven minutes that Medium thinks it takes to fight through my lack of punctuation. A generous subset of them were kind enough to respond, to share, to ask questions, to challenge me on things I got wrong.
A year on I thought I’d revisit the topic. This is partly inspired by events and partly spurred by a fascinating week I spent in Bethnal Green with the wonderful people at Fearless Futures
So, what is new?
A lot of things have changed in the year since I last published. The man I (generously) described as “psychologically unstable, constitutionally bigoted and pathologically dishonest” has gone from being an intentionally shocking candidate for the world’s most powerful political office, to being the shockingly incompetent, shockingly destructive, shockingly shocking occupier of it. It was a crashing victory for small-minded, boorish misogynists everywhere.
Lots of things haven’t changed though. In the generational, or perhaps inter-generational, struggle for genuine gender equality it would be difficult to point to any signature, concrete achievements of the past twelve months. The UN’s official report on progress against Sustainable Development Goal 5 (“Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”) doesn’t make for very inspiring reading.
Unless you’ve had your noise-cancelling headphones on permanently for the last month you’ll have struggled to have missed one significant recent development. After decades of silence and intimidation, revelations have begun to emerge about the dark side of the entertainment industry — starting, but definitely not ending, with Harvey Weinstein. As revelations go it was about as surprising as turning up at the Vatican and finding out the Pope lives there. But that’s exactly the point. Absolutely nobody was really shocked but almost everybody had decided to accept it as the status quo. Admittedly some of that acceptance was achieved under significant duress but most of it was a shrug and a determined look the other way.
The attention paid to the Weinstein ‘allegations’ has led in multiple directions. Some of the reaction has been thoughtful and thought-provoking (such as Emma Thompson’s splendid piece for Newsnight). Some of the reaction has been confusingly retrograde, such as the Mail’s aggressive campaign (even by their standards) against anyone with the audacity to claim there are not chill with harassment (as exemplified by Peter Hitchens, or Rachel Johnson or Andrew Pierce). Finally there was the more bottom up #MeToo campaign (based on a decade of tireless work of Tarana Burke) in which women highlighted their own experience of harassment and injustice. As my ever-perceptive friend Ilana Lever said in response:
Well quite.
The unravel this has started is still playing out. The cynics might say this will last until the Pumpkin-in-Chief goes on his next liberal-baiting out. The more hopeful interpretation is that this proves to be a genuine turning point. Perhaps there is a momentum that can harnessed and used to finally lift the heads of those who are not direct victims from the warm and comfortable sand.
What have I been up to?
The second, more personal, reason for the revisit is the week I spent with Fearless Futures. As I also mentioned in the previous piece, I lead a small team at Accenture Strategy who have decided to do what we can to contribute to achieving gender equality. Fearless Futures running workshops for us has been a big part of that so far. I was offered the chance to spend some more quality time with them and try to really understand what I was doing. The course was pitched to me as an immersive experience that would “enrich your ability to make the difference you want to be in the world”. Who doesn’t want that?
That ambitious brief translated into three and half days spent in The Young Foundation in Bethnal Green in the company of 11 other participants, two facilitators and all the post-it notes ever manufactured. The workshop was based around the principle of design thinking. I had assumed “design thinking” was some corporate-jargon intended to negate actual thinking. It was gratifying to see it brought to life. For those who don’t get to wear jeans on a normal week day “design thinking” is buzzword-du-jour for non-creatives who want to be less hamstrung by making matching slides. It takes the simple idea that before you jump to a solution you need to deeply understand the problem. Because it would never catch on if it was left like that it has been codified into four stages:
- Discover (e.g. do some research)
- Define (e.g. have some insight)
- Develop (e.g. come up with some ideas)
- Deliver (e.g. make some prototypes)
Who was there?
There were 12 people on the course. They neatly broke into three groups:
- Inclusion and Diversity Professionals / HR people — people who do this for a job from a range of different companies
- Business Leaders — people who didn’t have a HR remit but run stuff
- Social Entrepreneurs — a couple of people setting up businesses broadly linked to improving inclusivity and opportunity (like this excellent idea from Abadesi Osunsade or this from Carl Martin)
As well as a range of professional perspectives, the group also had a relatively (but only relatively) broad spread of backgrounds and life experiences.
What was it like?
My initial response to this question was just to say, “it was pretty intense”. That isn’t very helpful as an explanation. The week unfolded as a series of exercises — some personal and some group-based — designed to elucidate on the nature of inclusion (and by extension what exclusion looks and feels like). Fearless Futures are a pretty academic bunch. They also really don’t like halves. I was initially frustrated that there wasn’t more didacticism happening and just lots of talking about feelings. I’m not great at feelings. However, it quickly became clear the exercises were designed to build trust in the group and get people to learn things as we went. I was taken aback by how quickly they achieved both.
I’ve never done therapy but I imagine it would be a bit like this. There was a lot of sitting in a circle. At one point I had to play Jenga whilst stuff got thrown at me. At least 2/3rds of the group cried at some point. Some of the group cried a lot. I wasn’t really prepared for that.
What did I learn?
I couldn’t possibly share everything but there are some things that have stuck with me:
Thing #1: Invisible privilege made visible
A lot of the first day was about getting people to notice the privileges they do and don’t have. We did a number of exercises that made these differences painfully obvious. It was a powerful way to make people conscious of the things they take for granted. The Michael Kimmel line about “privilege is invisible to those who have it” is oft repeated but it is also extraordinarily apt. As an example, we had an exercise where we had to pick a privilege we’d be happy to give up from a long-ish list. As a representation of the white, middle-class, male hegemony in the room I was asked to go first because I basically had all the privilege. I said I’d be happy to not see people who looked like me in the media. I don’t watch much TV and, if I had to pick a role model, it would be a half Kenyan, half American middle-aged man with a funny sounding name. Someone who isn’t from the hegemonic group spoke up to say that, when she was younger, she’d have given up almost anything (including her personal safety) just to be able to once see someone like her in a position of authority. It made me realise quite how profoundly ignorant I am of how it feels to inhabit a world other than my own. A world that is often located only meters from my front door.
Thing #2: “Isms”
As you can imagine we talked a lot about “-isms”. The message however was a pretty simple one: there is a difference between individual prejudice and an “ism”. That difference is power. To experience racism or sexism or any other “ism” the victim needs to be, by definition, dis-empowered. I wasn’t initially very convinced. It seems a little reductive. I think it is reductive if you use it to belittle the pernicious effect of prejudice. But it is meaningful when the weight of institutional, oppressive power that sits behind certain decisions is considered. It is that systemic power of one social group over another that leads to headline grabbing claims such as “All White People are Racist” (from recently fired L’Oréal model Munroe Bergdorf). Because people who write professionally are always more articulate than me, here is one from my #1 intellectual crush Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the always brilliant Toni Morrison saying that better than I could:
If you want to hear Chimamanda explain this in more detail then spend 20 glorious minutes watching this.
Thing #3: Systems vs. Individuals
This power dynamic led to a relatively lengthy examination of the social systems that work for (or in fact mainly against) inclusion. The systems Fearless Futures choose to examine were masculinity, white supremacy and capitalism. I can’t even nearly replay the whole debate here but suffice to say it went deep. The thing I took away was the importance of recognising the influences of social systems without using their existence as an excuse for inaction. Systems influence individual actions but are in turn merely the product of lots of individual actions.
Thing #4: Equality, Equity & Justice:
One small but powerful part of the discussion was about the difference between these three similar sounding concepts. It was mainly explained by this picture of people watching football.
I liked this. I think it powerfully and simply demonstrates the necessity for affirmative action. Other people hate it. A deeply thoughtful colleague of mine responded to this image by asking:
I’m not sure how to accurately translate the [fence] metaphor — why can’t:
— You build yourself a box to see the pitch?
— Stand on someone’s shoulders?
— Not want to watch the football at all?
— Go around the fence and watch from the other side?
— Jump up and down incessantly to watch the football?
— Find a TV which is showing the football?
The current metaphor, as it stands, suggests we all want to watch the football, and this fence is the only thing stopping us…. [I]t suggests we must stand on boxes. This then negates any clever ideas about how we could get away from this. Who’s responsible for the boxes — do we make them ourselves? Do we get given them just because we’re short? Or is this something that we’re expected to ask for?
You might accuse her of slightly overcooking the metaphor but the point is a good one. All these questions demonstrate that imposing top-down simplification on something so complex is not the answer. But asking, or provoking, the questions might be a good start to finding an answer.
Thing #4: Mindsets
Finally, we spent a lot of time discussing what Fearless Futures call “mindsets”. The idea is that to champion inclusivity you have to actively take on certain mindsets. To be honest some of this was a little bit cringe for me but fundamentally I found it useful. The six mindsets they described are Courage, Noticing Discomfort, Compassion, Gratitude, Accountability, and Self-Reflection. I found the idea of consciously adopting the personal courage to take an unpopular position particularly helpful.
But what does it all mean?
First and foremost, I came away more convinced than ever that doing something is important. However, I was also struck by how much more there is to do; a feeling only reinforced by the news cycle. If I had to pick just three things from this long list I would choose to:
- Actively engage those who don’t want to listen: This is something everyone can do. It is important because the naysayers are just wrong. Just because they aren’t the subject, or the direct perpetrators, of any oppression doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It is not that hard to be smart enough to recognise the difference. There is a particular emphasis on those of us not personally afflicted by some of the more obvious injustices to speak up. Firstly, we aren’t having to deal with the distraction that Toni Morrison so compellingly describes above. Second, for reasons that continue to baffle me, the white, middle class men who wield pretty much all the authority prefer the opinions of other middle class, white men. If you are one of these, then it’s your role to speak up. Be an active ally for others whose opinions are more readily dismissed or disregarded. This doesn’t mean going on a mailing list. This means doing something.
- Care about the intersections: I’ve been quite dismissive of intersectionality (Kimberle Cranshaw’s theory of overlapping oppression) in the past. I thought it was people trying to sound clever at the expense of getting things done. I didn’t quite subscribe to Mark Lilla’s much referenced position that ‘Identity Liberalism’ was the root cause of all the world’s ills but I had some sympathy for it. There are big holes in the argument that liberalism has obsessively divided groups into constituencies of one, whereas its political opponents have cleverly focused ‘important’ stuff. I mean, if weaponising the fear and loathing of a white minority who feels their unearned supremacy is under threat isn’t “identity politics”, I’m not sure what is. But I was, nevertheless, uncomfortable with what I felt was the atomising of identity. This was wrong. Just because I am thinking mostly about patriarchal power structures doesn’t give me the right to ignore other prejudice that people face. I would challenge everyone to think hard about considering the widest possible view. Nobody has the right to discount or defer someone else’s liberation.
- Think big picture: Making things better at work is important, but it isn’t really enough. Partly through choices, and partly thorough an accident of birth, I have a platform to effect change on a more macro scale and feel I need to think about how to use it better.
And, Finally…
To end on a more positive note, we shouldn’t forget that there is plenty of reason to be optimistic. The week I spent with Fearless Futures was heavy but it was also uplifting. It changed my mind on some things and opened my eyes to others. It forced me to engage deeply and critically assess things I held to be axiomatic. It reminded me why it matters to continue to care about injustice and to continue trying to do something about it. It gave me a new, and better set of tools to deal with it. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
What’s more, as Yoda/Barack Obama recently reminded us, there has never been a better time to be alive. If you could choose any moment in human history to be born, this would be the logical one to choose. That should be inspiration enough to keep trying to make things better.
Trump is temporary but hope springs eternal.
