I don't know how she does it

The Liberal-Democratic party is to put a proposal to its conference next month that MPs be allowed to job-share in a bid to entice more women into Parliament. The Lib-Dems have only 12% of their Parliamentary Party female, compared with around 20% for the House as a whole. The other parties have also long acknowleged this as a problem, and Prime Minister David Cameron (Conservative have around 17%) emphasised his concern yesterday on his trip to India.The peculiar tensions between work and home that are raised by a career in politics was aired in the last episode of the second series of Danish TV drama Borgen, and for careers more generally by the feature film I don't know how she does it.

Class this week looked at the issue of sexual harassment, through a viewing of clips from 1994 film Disclosure and Jo Brewis 1998 article on the issue of "recombinant packing" that its eroticisation of sexual harassment propagates, despite the veracity of some of its narrative. The issues of women harassing males came to light again last year as Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks. The background here is that with the American workforce becoming majority female (51%) for the first time, and the number of women in management jobs having doubled between 1983 and 2002, the number of harassment and discrimination suits filed by men has also shot up. Does power indeed corrupt? If you have do you inevitably abuse it? A more non-eroticised look at male harassing behaviour, its normalisation and the difficulties surrounding its reception and interpretation can be found in the first 1.30 minutes of Girls. A more humorous look, that nevertheless has a serious undertone, at female harassing behaviour, which is ironically perhaps a better representation of the discomforted male reaction than that in Disclosure, appears in Horrible Bosses.

One of the elements of the argument in Disclosure is that organizational cultures can facilitate sexist behaviour without necessarily having the explicit intention of doing so. In other words, sexism can become taken for granted as normal, part of having a sense of humour etc. The website Everyday Sexism invites readers contributions of examples (mostly tweeted) and makes interesting food for thought. More elaborate, the controversial Unilad site, aimed at future opinion-formers, knowledge disseminators and shapers of practice, claims to be humorous and ironic, but critics have accused its defenders of being disingenuous, arguing that there is nothing beyond its banner disclaimer that encourages such a reading. Even Facebook has been accused of condoning violent attitudes, and even violence, towards women. Is this just over-zealous political correctness by people who have no sense of humour, or something more serious that really threatens equality in the 21st century workplace?

Feminicide, the brass ceiling and stereotypes in film

Word of the week from the Guardian is feminicide, coined in 2006 to indicate crimes where women were murdered simply because they were women. It's in the news because an Italian priest,  Father Piero Corsi, sent on gardening leave in December for controversial remarks about it, has returned to his post. He suggested that women increasingly share the blame for domestic and sexual violence. They exacerbate household tensions with "children left to themselves, dirty houses, cold dishes, fast food and filthy clothes". Women dress to ".. provoke the worst instincts, which end in violence or sexual abuse. They should search their consciences and ask: did we bring this on ourselves?"

Titling his post "Women and femminicidio – healthy self-criticism" did however draw attention to the problem. In Italy, one woman is murdered by a male for the crime of being female - usually for refusing sex, or for not refusing it to someone other than the killer, every three days. Around 30% of Italian women have experienced "serious domestic violence", and 3% of Italians think DV is justifiable in all circumstances. This is the worst in Europe, but the problem is global. And attitudes from the home permeate the workplace, although mainstream management texts wouldn't give you that impression.

Last week we looked at a different aspect of women and violence, the issue of women in combat roles, which was timely given the decision of the Pentagon to allow women through the "brass ceiling" onto the front line, experience of which will allow them ultimately to progress to higher command. Women have, however, been in harm's way for a number of years, working alongside infantry in ancillary roles but often called upon to fight in defence of their positions. This week, a Fox News poll came out decidedly in favour of the decision. Could it happen in Britain? Well as we review the issues, lest we think the US military is suddnely becoming gender progressive, Joe Glenton reminds us that it still has yet to prosecute many army rapists (see blog entry from 31st October 2012).

And as some cherished stereotypes are dashed, a light-hearted look at ten classic male stereotypes in film.

Gender and Political Power in Fiction and Fact

Those of you who know my predilection for all things Danish have probably been waiting for the inevitable blog entry on Borgen, the hit TV series based around a fictional female Prime Minister of Denmark. The opportunity has arisen to unite fiction and fact, however, as last night STV aired much of its Scotland Tonight programme on gender and politics which featured Scottish Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon interviewing the wonderful Sidse Babette Knudsen, who plays the Danish Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg in the series, for a good 10 minutes. She has been commended by one critic for her "special ability to capture the modern woman's uncertainty and strength."

 You can check out the latest episode and some clips from
Borgen  on the BBC Four website - sadly for copyright reasons the programmes

are not available on catch-up.

Thank heaven for Tivo and Sky+. 

 

In case you haven't been paying attention to European politics since 2011, Denmark does indeed in reality have a female Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who like her fictional counterpart was unexpectedly thrust into the role as P.M., the leader of a centrist party governing with a weak parliamentary majority. She has also had to make some uncomfortable decisions relating to her family life - the family’s accountant told authorities during a tax audit that her husband is gay, which she was forced to go public to deny. And you thought Arthur Andersen was bad.

Thorning-Schmidt's cabinet includes several women - Annette Lilja Vilhelmsen, Vice-Prime Minister and Minister for Business and Growth; Christine Antorini, Minister for Children and Education; Anne Kristine Axelsson, State Secretary of The Ministry of Justice; Ida Auken, Minister of the Environment; Pia Olsen Dyhr, Minister of  Foreign Trade and Investments; Mette Frederiksen, Minister of Employment;  Mette Gjerskov, Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries; Karen Angelo Hækkerup, Minister of Social Affairs and Integration; and Astrid Krag, Minister of Health and Prevention. For an up-to-date view of women in power globally, stay alert with the Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership.

Primates in Pinstripes

This month's Wired magazine contains an interesting and fulsome article on the results of recent and ongoing experiments into the effects of testosterone and cortisol on competitive behaviour.John Coates, a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge, has taken behavioural finance in a new direction, as a former Wall street trader turned neuroscientist. A chance meeting led to an invitation to the animal behaviour lab at Manhattan's Rockefeller University, and Coates began helping out with experiments there. His own research in the City of London recently won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Book Prize for The Hour Between Dog and Wolf. To cut a long story short it's true that women outperform men in the long-term in the financial markets - to find out why, read the article. There are also a couple more pieces relating to Coates from last year - the Guardian article also discusses the gendered nature of the US Government Report on the Financial Crisis of 2008. The Huffington Post article ends with a video clip of a Wall street trader who lost his job, couldn't tell his wife, and tried to fill the gap by robbing 10 banks until he was caught. Funnily enough, he uses exactly the same reasoning as Tom Wilkinson's character in The Full Monty. I hope all this coverage doesn't deter his research subjects from collaborating in the future.


Wired Article              

Businessweek Article

Guardian Article

Huffington Post

Wellcome Book Prize

Women in Hollywood still only shine in front of the camera

Jodie Foster may have recently won a lifetime Golden Globe for her acting and directing, but opportunities for women behind the camera remain rare in Tinseltown compared with the norms for Indie films. As the New York Post puts it..

"Between 2002 and 2012, nearly a quarter of the directors at [the] Sundance [Film Festival] were women, compared with 4.4 percent for the top 100 box office films in the same period. Including cinematographers, editors, producers and writers, women accounted for 29.8 percent of the American films at Sundance, which has become synonymous with indie film. Films directed by women were also more likely to have women in other key roles behind the camera. And breaking it down further, documentaries were rife with female talent – 34.5 percent were directed by women, compared with 16.9 percent for feature films"

Here's the full article from The Mary Sue.

Thanks to my frozen McCorrespondent North of the Border for this one.

Judy Chicago - Feminist Art Icon in the UK

Back in the 1990s I arrived early for a conference at UCLA. With an afternoon to kill before the head action, I stumbled out of the Holiday Inn on Wilshire and into the Armand Hammer Museum, where they were hosting the legendary feminist installation, Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, about which I knew nothing. I didn't even know enough to be ashamed of knowing nothing. But I was blown away. Forget the negative criticism it received from some critics, which along with a good deal of patriarchal defensiveness (it's not really art just craft etc) meant that it was only shown a handful of times - barely into double figures - between 1979 and 2007, when it finally found a permanent home. It kick-in-the-gut affected me, despite its lavishness, its kitsch, its didacticism, its weight, its moralization, its clichés,  its new-ageism, its self-conscious research apparatus. It read history through the body rather than the (patri)archive. It worked. I bought the book. I worked it into my classes. I went to her shop in Belen, New Mexico and bought the video. Her assistant even showed me into part of her house - she said Judy would probably have invited me in had she been there. I won't reproduce what the article - which is substantial -  says about her work, and The Dinner Party especially, which if you don't know you must check out, and really, get on a plane to Brooklyn and see, it's so visceral. But do try and see the small parts of her very considerable oeuvre that are being shown in London and Liverpool over the next couple of months. You won't regret it. Not many artists set out to make history and succeed.

Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/nov/04/judy-chicago-art-feminism-britain

Dinner Party Site:

http://throughtheflower.org/page.php?p=10&n=2

Thanks (or is it a hat-tip? what's the difference between that and a shout-out?) to Lynne Baxter for alerting me to this.

The New Suffragettes: Should feminism be back on the agenda?

While some women may feel that feminism has become a dirty word, the organization UK Feminista has taken to the streets to demonstrate against the erosion of the hard won rights that have been won since "first-wave" feminism first gained ground over a hundred years ago. Helen Pankhurst, granddaughter of the legendary Emmeline Pankhurst, led the demonstration to Parliament. The demo is covered here by The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/10/24/suffragettes-storm-parliament-feminism_n_2008361.html

UK Feminista calls itself "a  movement of ordinary men and women campaigning for gender equality". Find out more here:

http://ukfeminista.org.uk/

And in case you don't know who Emmeline Pankhurst was, read here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/pankhurst_emmeline.shtml

The history of the original Suffragettes is summarised briefly here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/53819.stm

and here:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/suffragettes.htm

A fuller accoount can be found here:

http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_cjbooks.htm

While the Suffragettes campaigned long and hard, especially under Pankhurst's leadership after 1903, but before the First World War they had little success. However, Pankhurst herself along with many other women in factories and fields campaigned for the war effort and it was perhaps this that swung political opinion in their favour. Pankhurst is sometimes remembered for chaining herself to the railings of Downing Street, Buckingham Palace or to a statue in the lobby of the House of Commons (to prevent being hauled off by police before she finished speaking) but although these events happened and chaining was a Suffragette tactic she did not use it herself. She was, however, imprisoned for demonstrating - which deeply affected her. She is also less often mistaken for the tragic Suffragette who threw herself under the King's Horse at the Derby in 1913, but that was Emily Davison. She died shortly after women received equal voting rights with men, in 1928.