Looking at solutions
BASEM UK finally understood that it has made a tiny mistake.
Let’s just ignore the bit about personal attacks, in order to focus on the astonishing fact that they apparently had no idea they should have women on a panel discussing a plan to destroy women’s sports. How did they manage that I wonder? Wouldn’t you think it was obvious? I would…but then I’m a woman. This could indicate why it’s a good idea to include women, or it could indicate that women should always be shut out. Difficult call.
You don’t have to be a woman to find that obvious! I’m not a woman, but for me it’s obvious. Given the topic I’d expect it to be the other way round: maybe three real women, including the chair, plus one trans-“woman” and one man.
A few years ago Aix-Marseille University had an item in the newspaper illustrated with a photograph of 12 men, important policy makers, sitting around a table. They were discussing something or other of great importance — maybe not the need to exclude women from any decision making, but who knows? Someone pinned the cutting to our notice board, with the handwritten question: “Where are all the women?”. Later on someone else added “Making dinner for their husbands.” Probably true! (The research unit to which I belonged is fairly unusual in this respect: of the three Directors it has had since its creation about 30 years ago, the first and third have been women, both of them real women with children.)
In 2005 I went to a Congress of the Pan-American Association of Biochemical Societies in Argentina. One of the invited speakers was the then President of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She started her talk by noting that the following year the Society would be celebrating its 90th anniversary, and she showed pictures of the first three presidents, followed by pictures of the last three. I noticed immediately, as I was doubtless intended to do, that the first three were all men and the last three were all women. She then drew the up-beat conclusion that we had advanced enough in 90 years for it to have become normal and acceptable to have a woman at the head of a large organization. I didn’t say so to her, but I drew a different conclusion: that in 1906 being president was an honour that ambitious men would aspire to as a stepping stone to other honours, but in 2005 it had become a chore with little honour attached, certainly not a stepping stone to a Nobel Prize. In 1906 the president had to be a distinguished man; in 2005 any woman would do.