Wail of the month
This month’s rant of the month is more a Wail of the Month. I don’t know about you but I am feeling absolute despair when I look at the state of the world - in general and through the lens of gender equality, which is the one I see most often and clearly through.
It feels like every day there is something that should absolutely not be happening to be absorbed. Girls in Afghanistan not permitted to go to school and women required to cover their faces in public, while being advised it is better if they don’t leave their homes at all. Half of the women in the US about to lose the right to make decisions about what is the right thing to do for themselves and their own bodies. UK MPs watching porn in Parliament and facing rape and sexual assault allegations. And, despite all the words written and spoken by so many of us, women still a tiny pimple on the face of leadership holding less than 10% of positions at the top wherever you look in business and society. When it comes to gender equality we are, simply, failing. And failing to a disastrous degree.
It’s easy to scroll through all this stuff and not really engage with the enormity of it amidst all the things we all have coming at us in our lives. But let’s stop for a minute and not allow ourselves to just be numb to this. This isn’t a piece of sensational fiction or a Netflix series. This is real, these things are happening. You or the women or girls you love may still have control of your/their clothes, bodies and lives, but many don’t. And no women anywhere, in any country or business, are adequately represented in the places where the decisions are made. Which is, of course, the source of the whole problem - and the answer to it.
I for one am feeling pretty pointless at the moment. I spend a huge part of my life talking about gender equality and Consulting with and training organizations and individuals on how to address the issues and drive progress. I get a lot of great feedback from people about my book, my speeches, my workshops and strategic interventions. And it feels good to know that I am making a difference for some. I know there are a lot of other gender equality champions out there working really hard, making a difference and getting really great feedback too. But we need to face reality - it isn’t enough. This world is not listening to, respecting and representing women - to a point that we can no longer numbly accept as ‘just the way things are’.
What do we do? I don’t know the answer, but I know it needs to be much, much more than we are doing. I know we need men to stop being passive about all this and thinking you don’t need personally to take action because you’re not one of the ‘few bad men’ - we don’t need you to be background allies, we need you to be full on feMANists and fight for what’s right against what’s wrong. And I know we need women to stop accepting that the world is run and decisions are made without us having our full say - we have enormous power and we’re not using it: it’s time we did.
As for me, I am personally looking for a way that I can have a significantly bigger impact and contribute to driving some truly meaningful gender equality progress. Please get in touch if you have an idea of how I can.