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While researching our recent IATEFL talk there was one idea I kept encountering that struck me as worth examining in more detail. It was:
‘Quotas are wrong — we should get the best people.’
On the face of it this seems entirely fair and reasonable. You may well agree — after all, in an ELTchat on the topic of sexism in ELT almost all the participants, male and female agreed. Other comments included the following:
Quotas are sexist!!
Quotas are never a good idea. Merit more important
You’re kidding right? So you would be prepared to sacrifice good speakers to fulfil quota?
If we had quotas there would be more men in the industry
In fact only one commentator seemed to disagree saying “quotas are not sexist, they enforce equality” but this was the minority view. Quotas, it seems are not a popular solution. We should get the best people. That’s the only fair thing to do.
The best
You know what’s weird though? Again and again the “best” people just happen to be men. When we looked at conference plenary speakers we found, despite the 60/40 (as high as 80/20 in places like Brazil) female/male split, in 2014, 141 plenary spots went to men and 96 women. this year seems similar.
What is surprising is that this fact rarely leads to reflection among those who defend the “get the best” position. ‘Aren’t you just a tad curious?’ I always wonder ‘why 60% of the profession is seemingly unable to produce its share of decent speakers?’ Is it that you think it doesn’t matter why? Or is it just a freaky coincidence?
There is another problem with the “merit” argument as noted in this article:
Some argue that setting a quota for women in leading academic positions such as professorships will result in mediocre female candidates being promoted. But there is a gap in reasoning here. Women and men are equally talented, so if men occupy a large majority of high-level posts, there must be an awful lot of mediocrity among their number. Is mediocrity more acceptable in men?
This argument surely holds for ELT which has a higher than 50% pool of female talent to draw from.
Talentless?
While carrying out the research we decided to directly ask conference organisers why women appeared so infrequently as plenary speakers. One reply we heard was that the pool of female speakers is very small. Our survey results would seem to back that up to some extent. When we asked people to name “big names” we got 161 men mentioned by name while only 89 women were mentioned. Women are less visible it seems.
An article about female comedy talent makes a similar point:
Although comedy producers admit as much in private, the standard cop-out is that there isn’t a big enough pool of female talent in the stand-up world to draw on.
The author goes on to say that 19% of the stand-ups in the UK are women and yet “few [panel] shows reflect this figure”. The same is true of ELT. At IATEFL 2014, 60% of all talks were by women. So there clearly are plenty of willing and able female speakers out there.
Token
Some women have told me they want to speak, but they don’t want to be a token female speaker. No one wants to feel they won the ‘special’ prize. That being said, how else do we move forward? We can’t increase the number of women in the industry as it’s already female dominated. So how will anything change without tokenism or positive discrimination? It’s probably better than doing nothing at all. A couple of anecdotes to illustrate this:
- A conference organiser told me “we have to get a woman — we’re scared of what Tessa will say if we don’t”.
- A female plenary speaker recently told me the only reason she had been invited was because a conference organiser told her “we need a woman”.
You might call these token women, but in both cases, without them, there would have been no women.
Systematic difference
But this isn’t just about a few plenary speakers, there is a deeper issue here. It’s the same issue that means male nurses on average earn more than female nurses. Why most secondary school head teachers are male despite most teachers being female. Why 12 of TEFLology podcast‘s guests have been men but only 7 women have been women. Why, of the several ELT podcasts out there, are almost all of them hosted by men? It’s not a conscious decision to exclude women, but the results are telling.
Recently ETP celebrated their 100 edition. The cover had four invited authors on, all of whom were men. When Nicola tweeted about this some suggested it was unfair to focus on the cover alone so I went away and to satisfy my curiosity counted the number of articles in ETP, MET, and ELTJ. I didn’t approach this in the most scientific way but just grabbed some old copies from the staffroom and counted. The numbers told the same story, 8-3, 7-3, 9-5, 13-4, 11-6 and on and on. There were editions of these magazines with more women authors than men but not usually and often the gap was very large. Now of course there isn’t a conspiracy of editors stopping women from getting published. But, in a female dominated industry, isn’t this a bit odd?
Teresa Bestwick writes of a recent conference in Spain:
This year, 67% of speakers are male. Whilst on the face of it this could easily look like discrimination, of all the proposals received, 60% were from men so in fact the programme reflects this fairly.
It may indeed reflect proposals but why are women sending in fewer proposals?
Fewer hosts, fewer guests, fewer articles, fewer proposals and fewer plenary speakers. No one is intentionally seeking this outcome but all the same, this is the outcome. Is there a confidence gap at work here as some have suggested?
going up?
In the business world there is often reference to a glass ceiling. In female dominated fields like teaching researchers talk about the glass escalator. Men choosing careers in female dominated professions will find it easier to rise to the top. A Slate article notes:
In a series of interviews with male nurses and librarians, men reported feeling like they had been “fast-tracked” into leadership roles. Men also reported feeling that they were perceived as more competent, that people were more forgiving of their mistakes …
What was a little disheartening when researching this was seeing other, male dominated fields trying to think of ways to increase female participation. How would they feel, I wondered, knowing that even when women are in the majority the problem persists.
Conclusion
This is, of course, not a problem isolated to ELT. The same thing can be seen in education more generally, in film and TV, panel shows, newspaper bylines and in politics. Women are 50% of the population but only one third of MPs are female. Men headline festivals way more often than women. We can also note that, in general, women speak less than men even when they outnumber men. Men also interrupt more.
No one is to blame for the current situation. What we need to ask is whether or not we’re happy with things as they are and whether or not we want to do something about it?
Nb: this article was edited to change the line ‘Why most head teachers are male‘ to ‘Why most secondary school head teachers are male‘ See comments for more discussion.
Patrick Andrews (@patrickelt) said:
Interesting and important. I wonder whether a lot of the disparity comes from factors like informal contacts – people with power tend to make contacts with people who seem to be like themselves.
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teachingbattleground said:
Actually 65% of headteachers are women.
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russmayne said:
Hi Andrew,
thanks for the correction. I’ll edit that in the article. Still 65% is less than the 74% of teachers who are women.
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Henno Kotzé (@HennoK) said:
An interesting and thought provoking article. I wonder what the situation is here in Australia…
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Anthony Ash said:
First of all – great post! As always, engaging to read and thought-provoking.
There’s a couple of numbers in here, such as “141 plenary spots went to men and 96 women” which show there aren’t equal numbers between men and women but could we consider them heading in the right direction? I imagine much more will need to be done to get them there but do these figures already show the direction of movement is the right one?
141 + 96 = 237. So, if half of the 237 plenary places avaialble went equally to men and women, then they would get 118.5 slots each. So far men have overshot the mark by 22.5 and women down by 22.5. It’s not quite 50/50 but it isn’t such a huge leap to make it happen, I’d say.
Exciting stuff and food for thought – thank you again for this post! 🙂
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nicolaprentis2012 said:
I guess we would need more data to show direction. I am counting conference spots over on http://www.simpleenglishuk.wordpress.com so we might be able to see that in time.
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Russ said:
That’s the issue. We’re battling to reach 50/50 in an industry where around 60 of the available people are female.
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Anthony Ash said:
I had a chat with some female conference attendees at a major conference in South America in 2015 and they had a comment which really surprised me: they simply preferred listening to a man speak in a presentation than a woman. They couldn’t really explain to me why. As much as it surprised me, I respect their comment nonetheless. Do you think we might be barking up the wrong tree, trying to get the male organizers of conferences to include more women, when we might want to be preaching to the choir i.e. the attendees?
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russ said:
I’ve heard the same thing. The interesting thing is surely ‘why’? Isn’t it? Is it because men are just biologically more interesting than women (a tough theory to defend) or could it be something else? Internalised misogyny? When a woman says, for example ‘he hits me because he loves me’ do we ‘respect their opinion.’ Or do we question it? I think whatever the reason we should listen.
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Anthony Ash said:
I agree – we have to ask “why”, hence why I asked them why? Like I said, they couldn’t really explain, but I think there might be a link with social imprinting. I don’t think it’s anything biological. I think the pressures and structures in society have led to people making such statement as “it’s more interesting to listen to a male speaker…” However, in my experience, if you say to a woman it’s society which is making her say that, they can become even more offended. What do you think?
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russ said:
Hi!
You’re right. But it’s not just women, everyone likes to think they make principalled decisions, and so telling them ‘you only said that because…’ Probably won’t go down well. I set up a Twitter poll but it didn’t get many responses and some people I know would say ‘I’d prefer to see a man’ have voted for ‘both’ so maybe the social desirability bias is in effect.
Another possibility is that women are in general worse speakers but not because of some biological reason. Nicola once suggested to me that M/F have different presentational styles, with women often being quite apologetic. Features which are considered attractive to a good speaker perhaps don’t correlate with features considered attractive to being female.
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T. Veigga said:
And let’s go further, where are women of color? What about trans women? Women with disabilities? Where are they?
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russ said:
Sure. But that has to be someone else’s fight. 😉
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