Women vs Feminism: do we all need liberating from the gender wars?

[Music] ideas and to this the first discussion of the morning and of the weekend women vs feminism do we all need liberating from the gender Wars my name's Sally Millard and I'll be chairing this first discussion I'm a member of the battle of ideas organizing committee and a founder of the Institute of ideas parents forum which is sponsoring this this particular session I'm really pleased and excited to be joined by such a fantastic panel of speakers that I have here with me today I think if you look at since I first proposed this session at that to the battle of ideas organizing committee and things have moved on considerably at that time the thing that was dominating the media was Trump and his hats now we don't really seem to see so much anymore but every single week every single day there seems to be some discussion whether that's the pay gap whether that's abortion girls education rape culture and of course now dominating the headlines we've had Harvey Weinstein and his misdemeanors shall we say and the me to response in many ways I feel like that this debate is both more timely and and more important and more necessary than it was even when I first conceived of it each of my panelists as I say will speak for five to six minutes and as I say if you've got any questions there will be plenty of time afterwards to ask them I'm going to introduce the panel in the order in which they will speak dr. Joanna Williams is going to be speaking first she has provided the inspiration for this session she's the author of women versus feminine do we all need liberating from the gender Wars and what a brilliant book it is so I do really recommend it to you if you haven't had a chance to read it yet as well as provoking debate on this discussion she's well known for provoking debate on education as the education editor for the online of magazines spiked so she'll be speaking first next I have Dame Helena Morrissey she's the head of personal investing legal in general Investment Management founder of the 30 percent Club and author of the forthcoming book a good time to be a girl don't lean in change the system and that is due out in February so make sure you keep a lookout for that following Helena Esther Kovacs will be speaking she's a political scientist from the de pest who writes and comments regularly on the use of gender in current political battles in Europe and her forthcoming book the future of the European Union feminist perspectives from east central europe will be available in November and then last but definitely not least professor Allison wolf professor the Baroness worth of Dulwich is a crossbench peer and author of the X X Factor how the rise of working women has created a far less equal world and that is a book that I I would also highly recommend it's really interesting read so without further ado Joanna in the light of the revelations we've been bombarded with over the course of the past couple of weeks we've had news stories detailing how to be a woman today is to face a daily barrage of sexual harassment and there's no sign at all of this ending we now have women who work in Parliament using a secret whatsapp group to line up male MPs who are and are quote very handsy or not safe in a taxi these these MPs are being lined up for public shaming a survey out earlier this week claimed that half of British women have been sexually harassed at work it seems as if feminism has never been more badly needed it seems as if to be a woman is to live through hell but drill down into these statistics and we discovered that more than a quarter of a respondents to the BBC survey said that the harassment they had suffered was in the form of inappropriate jokes or banter it seems to me that what we have is ever broader definitions of sexual harassment and at the same time more women interpreting experiences that might once have been seen as part and parcel of office life perhaps dare I say it even fun jokes banter and flirting people are now interpreting this as harassment now I want to make clear that my aim is not to trivialize sexual harassment or sexual assault in any way whatsoever serious offenses need to be dealt with severely preferably in courts of law rather than in the court of social media but when sexual harassment is defined so broadly as to encompass jokes and banter it begins to lose all meaning serious offenses are then trivialized sexual harassment ends up being nothing more than a catch-all term that allows every woman to be included in a victim narrative and that's what really intrigues me and that's in a way the focus of my book why is it that so many women are keen to be included in a narrative of victimhood and the message today does seem to be coming at us from every direction that women are victims if someone makes an inappropriate joke in Arya shop we tremble we faint at the merest whiff of sexism when we have the misfortune to meet someone lecherous we can't tell them where to go or give him a slap but we must take to social media to crime me too like children we need protecting from nasty men and bad words victim feminism clearly does not represent all women most of the women I know were actually far too busy to stress about man spreading let alone go and tweet about it but this dominant narrative that women are victims is rarely challenged or put into context when we look purely at statistics there's never been a better time to be female that girls do better at school than boys is common knowledge now whereas fifty-five percent of young women go to university only 43 percent of young men follow a similar route and that's quite a substantial difference but women's success doesn't end when they leave education more women are in work than ever before and are also taking more of four top jobs a majority of vets doctors and lawyers are now women women are also earning more the gender pay gap however it is measured is the smallest it's over being in their twenties women earn more than men and when we compare like-for-like pay the pay gap almost disappears entirely but Society these changes have happened so quickly that we've lost sight of the real barriers women wanst faced once based so in the 1970s fewer women worked and those that did were relegated to poorly paid and often insecure jobs and I think this is a really important point because I think sexual harassment was a real problem I think it still is a real problem for some people I think it really was a problem when women's low status in the labor market could be exploited by unscrupulous bosses safe in the knowledge that those wanting to keep their jobs had little option other than to put up with these unwanted advances but the more powerful women become in work the more women begin to dominate different employment sectors women are not in that insecure position anymore where these unscrupulous bosses can take advantage for the most part and it's thanks in large part to the efforts of a previous generation of feminist campaigners that young women today have a world full of opportunities available to them and we should be celebrating this and instead feminism my concern is that feminism tells young women now of new problems that they face such as man's spreading on public transport or mansplaining colleagues this is not to suggest that everything's wonderful for women today particularly when they become mothers I think women face new pressures in trying to combine work with being a kind of textbook perfect parent but the difficulties women still face are rarely the stuff of feminist campaigns and I think they're often better solved by men and women working together rather than in opposition to each other and a feminism that insists women are vulnerable and that men are toxic makes it less likely that men and women will come together to work to solve the problems that they face my concern is that victim feminism resuscitate some really antiquated practices that we would not want to go back to so over the past couple of weeks friends star David Schwimmer has been praised for offering a female film critic a chaperone when they went to off to discuss his film women students now were routinely advised not to leave nightclubs with strangers some reports suggest that men are nervous when interacting with women at work and fear that friendliness will be misinterpreted my concern is that the fear of sexual harassment far more than the reality is now holding women back and it's feminism today that's at the forefront of propagating these fears campaigners now call for new measures to protect women at work but for me the thought of spending the best part of each day somewhere where jokes are banned flirtation needs a special permission slip and banter is strictly forbidden frankly makes me lose to live the protections that victim feminism demands infantilize women and turn the clock back on hard-won freedoms the Liberty to risk unwanted sexual advances I think needs might inform once more because the alternative a world of chaperones curfews single sex workplaces of women being kept chaste until handed from father to husband is not that far behind us and it's not one I have any desire to return to and if we're to avoid confining young women nowadays to a self-imposed safe space we need to think more critically about the direction Perman ism is taking us in so that's easy one for me to follow because like Johanna I also see and obviously it's the title of my book that for many of us at least it's never been a better time to be a girl we have made considerable progress I've been working right here in the city of London for exactly 30 years this month and I would characterize that set of experiences the first decade was one where there was a hostile environment to women where sexual harassment and sexual discrimination was very prevalent and no one really did anything about it the second decade I think it was a realization that even if you didn't believe that we should be equal opportunities employers then that that wasn't the right way to behave and that the law was protecting women more so I guess I'd characterize that as the decade where we were tolerated but there wasn't really a sense that we brought in a thing new to the table and then since the financial crisis that unleashed a different way of thinking about the issue certainly on the part of many men and I want to pick up on the point that Joanna's made because I think at that stage and again not overnight and not every man suddenly realize that you know having just one type of person running the show wasn't the best way of operating and it was a very risky environment and you did even if you weren't naturally a feminist as a man then you might start to welcome a diversity and inclusion and we saw a big wave of efforts some of which I've led myself so that was around the time that has set up the 30 percent Club which has really been about men and women working together to affect change I suddenly realized that in my own efforts before them which weren't terribly successful around promoting women in the workplace that actually women talking to women about women's issues was never going to get us very far but actually the stroke of luck and it was luck rather than being clearly really clearly thought through in my mind by involving the leaders of big British businesses at the time to not just support a campaign to get more women in the boardroom and in all leadership levels ultimately in their in their organizations but to actually drive the campaign to be the the members of the 30 percent club and so the members are the chairman of big businesses the top hundred the top 250 as well companies it now has broadened to public sector organizations as well but when we started 99 of those hundred chairmen were men we had to get them on board and it wasn't always easy there was some some other more very antagonistic certainly towards me but as they realize and as they saw this wave of change as they realized that actually this was part of having a modern business then they became some of the most avid supporters and have actually done something about it now like Joanna I share some concerns I don't want to give the impression that it's all solved and I think that we can look at something like the me to campaign and interpret it very in quite a number of different ways on one hand we can say after decades of very little even discussion very little exposure about what's clearly been a rife problem a corrupt sort of system in Hollywood and they're now much more aware of broader sectors suddenly through social media then the world has changed and we have a collective power we have a collective voice and that is to use Joanna's words something to celebrate we can change things together but also it shows us that campaign as many of you I'm sure are aware wasn't set out by you know white wealthy famous actresses in Hollywood but by a black activist tirana Burke Hugh had a little girl a 13 year old tell her about how she was sexually abused I'm in 1997 and about a decade later when she had the means set up her at the first me to campaign and tirana Burke is is black activist and in that community didn't get getting it didn't go viral it didn't get huge support and I think it's a really strong reminder to us that it's not just one group it's not just white middle-class women that we need to be looking out for but around around everybody and how we need to still do a lot of work to improve the sort of what subscribe the intersectionality point I also think that we can see that it would be very easy now and again sort of picking up on some points that Joanne is raised to go backwards to wallow affect frankly in what's really happened and we cannot change that we cannot change the past but we can influence the future I wanted to I feel it's a bit of a shame that we did not have a man up here with us and I wanted to sort of have a ghost voice really not really a dead voice I hasten to add but my my eldest son um has contributed to my book all my children have and he and I think really wonderfully summarized it was before the Harvey Weinstein as kind of broke but he suggested and he's at university still he is an educated man I know Allison will pick up on how our efforts around women may have an inner vertically left other groups behind but he said I feel girls of my generation tend to have one of two quite different positions about their futures most of the girls I know are confident and behave as if they don't see any barriers to what they hope to achieve in life and they have done as well academically if not better than their male peers and I also hope and think the men of my generation he's 25 years old have more enlightened views towards women in previous generation and that's recognised by these women and I don't I do think that most girls don't in any way feel that men prevent are preventing them from getting what they where they want to but there is another group with a victimhood complex who pushed that narrative these are women on the lookout for a fence and they wouldn't want to recognize a positive progress they are a small but vocal minority and the quieter group who are focused on their future on making the most of the opportunity ahead may get drowned out by the minority that I think is growing thank you if you have a Hungarian in the panel you can always trust the more pessimistic views will come so that's why I came first to say why British debates are relevant in Hungary if the daily May publishes an article that the British Medical Association issues an a booklet that expectant mothers shouldn't be called expectant mothers anymore but pregnant people you can be sure that one day later the all the Hungarian left right-wing press right oh look what the West has become if we deal with gender equality it this is a Trojan horse let's just not speak about violence against women it is we were just in a third or fourth step we arrived where this British are at the moment and we will have to speak like this or if the Guardian writes an article about the upcoming Swedish festival where only non men are allowed to participate then you can be sure that it is translated into Hungarian non-man so please know that you have a responsibility if you speak about body shaming and mass spreading and all these very important issues then it it will appear somehow in the name of progress in Hungary and then the right wing will argue that that's why we don't need to do anything against inequalities because it is a first step towards this in on the slippery slope when I hear such sentences like it has never been a better time for being a girl and now or women have more opportunities than ever partly I would agree partly no we also have to see where and in which sense so how many many MPs are in the Hungarian Parliament there is only 10% of all MPs who are women it is the lowest level on the EU and also the discourse about how women in public office reflect this number but also in countries where it's much better maybe sometimes we need to look behind those numb in Spain in one of the Pateros governments there were 16 ministers eight men eight women and eight men had 20 children the eight women five so and if it's Jesse of the respirator parity we have equality in the office then we would say okay we achieved equality but if if we see what is the price what kind of women can move forward then maybe we get a more nuanced picture so either these are women who postpone their childbearing or they just choose not to have children or they rely on domestic workers if that's if there's no infrastructure for care available or not enough so I think if the question is is there still a role for feminism today then I would definitely agree that there is and I would definitely agree that this victimhood narrative what you are criticising should we overcome but it this optimism of we have nothing nothing left to do or we just have to work together to find you the remaining inequalities it might not be enough in this time and for me the crucial word is care and how what we do with the fact that human existence has this aspect of life and economy and political life somehow excludes it or treat it as free and it's renews itself without doing anything so it's caring for children caring for sick caring for elderly I read regularly articles about even about Great Britain how this pressure on the is growing with that we live longer that we need care for longer and then the generation between 40 and 55 has to care not only for the children but for the elderly and so that's why I am really unhappy when for instance Hungarian feminists regularly write that a man should man men should finally come to the point that they change diapers and they should take their fair share in care responsibilities but it's not only about men being nice enough and changing their attitudes but it's also the way how we think about work and care and a relation in society and at the labor market so as long as the there is this idea about the reliable employee or the ideal employee who has no care responsibilities who is available and that we may not discriminated against because they at any point they can get a child they already have a child they have a parent to care for it is simply it's not only about their you know being able to for time management and having a nice husband it it makes it also for men much more difficult to to take up more care so this is a I think the kind of feminism what we need thank you I would like to start by showing you the front page of last week's Financial Times and financial types is the newspaper of the global elite not just the the British elite with a global elite you know what is on every cent centrist and central bankers desk in the morning the Financial Times and a week ago the FT thought that the most important story in the world was Weinstein board members claim lawyers hindered sex inquiry now this was in a world where Spain was starting to break up where Mexico stations were in trouble where Trump was creating a revolution across Washington for good bad word wherever you stand where there had just been a major change in the nature of China possibility of genocide in Myanmar I mean you know you name it and for the FT Weinstein board members claim lawyers hindered sex inquiry was the most important story why and why the FT and not the other British papers that day because they didn't lead on that interestingly they led on motorway misery to end have the police lost the plot killer storm the I bless it said brexit talks will start in December and the Sun had a different sex story so why I mean what's the FT basically following the great Sun insight that if you'd run stories about sex scandals you get to run pictures of sexy girls well no it wasn't that had a really boring picture too but I think the important thing about that is it actually shows that there has been a major shift in power because when victims and their victimhood real or otherwise are all over the front page what that act of a very important paper what that actually says to you is that that group may consider themselves to be victims but they are now powerful truly powerful in a way that they have never been before because when people are powerless and they are badly treated and victimized it doesn't go on the front page of the most elite newspaper in a country so it seems to me that one of the things that's really sort of interesting as well as I grew during just distressing about the current term that gender relations have taken is that it is indeed a victimhood story but it's coming from people who actually are in fact far more powerful namely women and I would say here well-off women than they have ever been before and I don't want to go into the the Weinstein story in any particular detail I did actually google it again to see what some of the the complaints were and it was kind of some of them are kind of ridiculous I have to say but but the point is not whether there are some people who have been behaving very badly but why is this a global story and I would say it's a global story because women are more powerful some women are more powerful than they have ever been in history so do now had many corporations they are a very important high-income demographic in their own right they are a large majority of university students in just about every country in the Western world they're now a large majority of medical and legal students in our in our universities and yet they are defining themselves this group or some of this group are defining themselves as victims who must be given special treatment and I think that is at one level curious but at another level you could say that human beings always use the weapons that they have at their disposal to further their own ends and then it might be quite a good idea to take a slightly Marxist view of this whole affair I do agree that there are major problems for women but I think this this goes beyond being a sort of hash first-world problem I mean somebody does use Twitter this is such a twitter phenomenon which itself tells you something about the the class basis and um I kind of thought starting something which says hash not me was a bit pathetic but this is really an elite female winch and I think that we need to treat is an elite female winch and and really worry about the harm that it can do in that respect I've always thought it would be great to have Helen on my side if I wanted to run a campaign because she has done a fantastic job but I do have to say and she sort of already knows this that I don't think this is the biggest issue in the world and I don't think that just having more women on a board creates diversity because it depends where they come from to me the biggest problem in the world and that's why I'm actually both angry and distressed by the term that feminism has taken in the West is is not whether or not we have won and are winning the battle for women to have equal opportunities in the labour market but the fact that inequality among women is increasing faster than among men and it is doing so because the elite as I think many people in this room will be aware is pulling away it's not just the top 1% it's the top 15 to 20 percent which has done really much much better than everybody else and one of the ways in which this happens is because the elite has managed to preserve strong families and indeed to make them stronger than ever before because your average elite family now has to network to people to careers yes it's hard to do it but for example in the UK we now spend enormous ly much more on childcare than we did 20 years ago we've gone from being bottom of the OECD to being almost top but one of the things that's interesting is that we do it in a way that funnels the most money to professional and middle-class women in a way that suits their work patterns and seem to be unable or unwilling to even grapple with how that would be best used to make it possible for a very different group of women women who don't earn a lot women who are much more likely to become single mothers heads of single-parent families than graduate women are little earn or graduate men and what worries me very much about our our societies is that what I've in a couple of things everything called the super family is is now becoming so markedly different so we've got a huge proportion of women to whom quite reasonably a killer storm is more important than Harvey Weinstein board members and yet the most educated most networked most eloquent women of our time are far too often obsessed with I would say using their own victimhood for their own ends thank you thank you very much and I know some of the panelists already want to come back on other speakers so we're going to have a lively debate and but before I bring them in I just want to take a couple of points or questions from you first I think the problem with feminism that no one actually discusses that much is pop feminism it's called or sort of sort of companies like BuzzFeed and companies like hate profiting off feminism and I think that I think that a lot of people sadly don't blame this and instead just blame young women who are quite impressionable I think the problem is that these companies they sell these products to very young women and they've got thinking that's how they need to live and these these things perpetuate of course victimhood and when these perpetuate the whole concept of women being very weak and needy they sort of turn to these bigger sort of these bigger corporations because they think oh they're standing up for women they're gonna help us when they're hot and it's actually cringy watching a lot of these things because they do perpetuate the whole stereotype the women are extremely weak in need constant protection and coddling and again like I was saying I think in yeah year nine we were doing a sector on feminism for English and we were showing adverts and one of the adverts was a coca-cola outfit from the 1950s and it was a woman talking about how she was drinking coca-cola to get her slimmer for her husband and even though everyone saw that sexist that's appalling yes it is sexist but the point is that there's not a load of people sitting in an office thinking oh that's make the sexist advert against women their load of people sitting in office thinking let's profit off women and that's profit off impressionable human being thank you very much so all right first of let's say just think the whole gender issues a common-sense issue basically and all these men that feel like a scared to talk to women in offices stuff like that is just that's their problem and not society's I think if they're not comfortable think knowing what is right and what is wrong to say to them and then maybe they shouldn't be around women to have really come this far if we've got a bigger like Trump is one of the powerful people and most powerful people in the world have we really done much to balance things out the woman racket in the sex difference explain feminism's always been any character he's always been elitist deputies Wilson's craft upper-class didn't understand that all the laws to do with custody merging divorce were all set up to benefit the majority women didn't Apple to benefit her all the suffragettes they want to bring an educational qualification they didn't want most people to have the votes and they were upper class or middle class third wave feminism so-called that's the core of it into politics that dates back hundred years that's the left backlash against the masters for not rising up us as the Russians did so feminine has always been elitist separatists and egalitarianism and the problem is if you look at the roots of what is at root do men and women and my interest is looking at the biological roots and the idea that women are disadvantaged is ludicrous women are privileged the disadvantaged group in all societies in all points this within the masterful lower status males this that's never gonna change I actually think it is a very big systemic issue it's already in the way we talk about it and we say it was with regard to your victimhood comment and many that's been made like we when a woman is attacked or harassed we say the woman was was attacked or harassed it's a very passive statement it's never the man attacked the woman never the man harassed the woman it's always the women was attacked so the question is and also like I think this is a very culture cultural in that different European countries different countries from across the world like where I come from or Japan we have a very different approach to gender dynamics and it's also generational as you mentioned so I guess the question is like how do we go about changing that passive statement of woman it was hot woman was harassed or a woman was Atok tour they were offended or whatever to the man was a attack the woman or that there was a or he made a bad comment or an inappropriate comment how do we go about changing the way we frame and we talk about the way this gender dynamic unravels in society comments and so I'm going to take and had to come back first but I did want to come back and agree with Allison on the fact that I don't think women on boards is the biggest issue either what I would like to think happened with that and it's part of this this bigger discussion is that we kind of opened the lid on one part of what is obviously a much broader issue yes about sort of the identity of people who are in leadership roles but more generally about how we get more ideas more leadership from other people it was a very cozy Club of people who all knew each other who were getting on boards and so forth then what we have now is not necessarily lots more women always coming on it's only going to be a few women anyway this is not going to be enough to affect that the hundreds of thousands millions of women that we really all care about but also people saying actually we don't have enough ethnicity on our walls we don't have enough socio-economic breadth we were out of touch as businesses and as as governments I think the point there was a point briefly and I know it'll be dangerous to get on to about Trump but actually I think that shows the need for new thinking and we've seen it in the political shocks we will continue to see that in you know with the whole Catalonia I think it's it's horrific what's happening there in terms of the pushback by what feels like a totalitarian regime you know like in terms of you can't speak up and I know this developments overnight on matter over the last 24 hours but the ideas we need we have a now transparency in our world leaders cannot just have the right to lead without earning the credibility and without engaging with people and like him or hate him Donald Trump engage with a certain group of Americans who did not feel that anyone had listened to them before and Hillary Clinton for a lot of people came across as very elitist so it isn't just as straightforward as saying one sexist one you know representing huge gender aleut forward I think we need to enter a more nuanced favor the pace of our discussion and the last point I'd like to say before handing over to others because I think several people have said how do we change the narrative how do we change the way we talk about these issues so it's not as you know victim or assault a you know that it's actually much more nuanced I think what we're trying to do now is take advantage but I think is a one-off never being seen before a chance that the Internet has given us for us to have a much less patriarchal much less hierarchical much less command and control system of power that is hugely impactful for all of us in this room whatever our gender whatever our status whatever our educational background it's not easy and there'll be huge you know dislocations and that's what I think this whole Harvey Weinstein example is is very you know both distressing and informative that it shows how when something really stands out as unacceptable then something can be done about it now it couldn't before so I I had that optimism I understand where Esther's coming from I'm not claiming it's also but we can all make a difference here I think the point that Esther was making and that Allison was making and has come out of the audience here that the experiences of different women are very different is a really important one so Esther was mentioning different countries different countries have been mentioned there as well I would add to that generation I think while 1992 was the other I went to university and that was the first year that more women the men went to university and every year since then that's also been the case but that means that women who were older than me did have genuinely did have a very different experience of the workplace and of higher education so I think there's geographical differences I think this generational differences and most important of all I think there are social class differences and I think it was Esther and Allison were making the point that for the middle class women who dominate the media narrative nowadays many of them are dependent upon Cleaners child carers people who are working in shops you know and it's it's women who are doing those jobs his experiences often don't get heard and my concern with feminism today is not only does it overlook social class as a difference but it actually even worse I think it often exploits the disadvantages which are faced by working-class women to reinforce the privileges of middle-class women and I think that's a completely despicable and outrageous thing to do so if you look particularly at discussion around the gender pay gap for example you have often a small elite group of women if you take for example the BBC presenters who were in the news not that long ago people who are earning already very very high salaries able to present themselves as victims on the assumption that all women together are a class with interests in common and actually that's just not true women have so many different experiences and yet we hear one voice dominating where one small group can present themselves as uniquely disadvantaged in a way that just doesn't stand up to reality [Music] very interested in this question of is the issue structural or is it cultural what's what's happening there because it's the cultural question that seems to dominate and but yes June to that is an on this also from me Central European perspective if we speak about inequality growing inequalities between women if we speak about the middle class women here relying on the work of less privileged women so there is also it also has this power dimension between core countries and semi-periphery and very very so there is a huge literature on the global care chains so how our countries in the in etcetera Europe are also sending countries and receiving country so we Ukrainians and Romanians come to us and care for our parents we go to Austria to Great Britain to care for your parents and do the do the domestic work there and 70 percent of those who are who do domestic work have children at home so they leave their own children to care and of course one can say obvious but the Philippines it's so good for the economy that all those women come to the developed West to care here and it's good for daily economy but it has a lot of costs also in emotional terms so that's why connecting to one of the questions I think was also about this pop feminism and also how companies exploit that it is now so fancy and apparently you can sell products with that and I'm always very cautious when feminists are posting in touching videos with empowering messages of companies how how it's important that we acknowledge women and one shoe company had a huge spot on on this and then we know that that company in the South Asia how they treat their female workers there so don't predominantly women work in those factories so it's a I think this global perspective help us to situate so my answer to your question is and which comes up all the time that it's a we need to see the structural and not the culture if we if you remain at this cultural level then we can just then we have this war between men and women then we say oh you should change the diapers you should stop harassing me and as if all these questions were not embedded in a bigger structure which create that room of maneuvering for the individuals in their lives in how they relate to labor market to care to each other people raised a huge number of interesting points but I'd I'll just sort of comment on a couple of them quickly the first is that following from what Esther saying about the marketing people will go where they think there is a market if there is a marketing opportunity they will take it and I think I don't know this counts as a structural thing or not most marketing departments are dominated by women their marketers first and when in second I would say and that is is a reality about particularly about our our societies because they are capitalist but it goes back I supposed to most slightly taking negative but my constant plea that that we that we look at where people's individual interests are because they will always inevitably be the first thing though not necessarily the only thing and that that's the second point I want to make is about feminism being elitist and of course you're absolutely right in some sense it's always been elitist because the movements that have an impact on how we see the world and and indeed on the laws that we've passed are always led by a small group of people and they tend inevitably to be people who are educated who have the means who have the reach to have an impact nationally whatever their origins but I do actually think that feminism used to be less self-regarding and less elite focused than it has become i mean much much less and my personal number one heroine actually is Eleanor Rathbone who I suspect most people have know who here has ever heard of Eleanor Aspen was she I'm not surprised I hadn't heard of her a lot for a very long time but she was utterly extraordinary she was a pre-war she she created child benefit she actually banged away at the British establishment until they created child benefit and the important thing about child benefit was that this was a time when you've got money for each child and it went to the mother and that was absolutely critical for two things were critical first that she actually got this benefit days long before the whole welfare state swept out and secondly that she insisted at a period when most women did not work that it go to the mother that it was money for the mother and I think that she was a perfect example of a feminism in a world where I think the problems facing women were far greater and an overwhelming and of course they were bound up with more general poverty but I think the feminists of that very early generation were much much less concerned than later groups with their own self-interest and much more concerned with what were then genuinely huge gender linked inequalities in society so I think you're right feminism has always been to some extent elitist but I think it's become much much more so ok back over to you hello so Esther right you mentioned about hungry so it's just committing is there a difference of feminism in the West compared to other parts of the world because obviously in the West we have problems like man spurring and man spinning whereas somewhere like Saudi Arabia or any of this child marriages and like you get what I'm trying to say so should feminists we focus on men spreading the legs in the train more than you know twelve year olds getting married off into six year old people so do you think feminists should actually refocus on what's important rather than oh I can kind of make the shape of your genitals that's very interesting and you've all claps there it's not important that you know manspreading is not important so are these things just not it seems like the panel in a sense of just saying as a thicker problem that's why we worried about that you know isn't you know what's all the First's everyone's just got common sense anyway you know but so it's not just I mean I take the point about the financial times it's not just the big newspapers this is all over social media and the point about social media is that that's supposed to be us as Helena said that is supposed to be the people in a sense having having their say so I would really like to get a bit of a sense of what what you think about this question is it just delete or and does it matter hello yes I work in engineering software so that's engineering old industry software new industries so it's quite interesting dynamic going on in there at my company they have leaned in circles and I've always been interested to know why I work with a team of twenty guys writing software and there are no women they think they're quite dive I diverse because yes we have people from Romania Bob area India wherever anyway I mean I'm very interested to know I've always been interested why aren't women coming into the software side more so I go along to the lean in circles just to talk to people find out you know their real experiences why they think this isn't happening why there aren't more women in software and incidentally 20 or 30 years ago there were more I think it's gone down at least in the area I work on but what gets me is invariably we do have discussions about as it james dome or the google guy but a lot of the time they want to speak talk about unconscious bias which i feel quite uncomfortable with it and i try and push it but i seriously get pushback on why do you think it's not important anyway so that so I'm interested know what the panel thinks of that there's also an anecdote that was on the engineer this week there was a young woman who was an engineer doing outreach work I think it was for Brompton bicycles they got a bunch of young women along I guess they're about fourteen and it took ages to get them to ask questions and she was hoping they're going to ask questions like what's your job like how do you design this whatever and she was horrified and I was aura fide because what that she asked was how do you deal with all the bullying in the India innuendo etc etc they weren't interested in engineering and I just miss ties in against that social media thing I get I just like to know where these young women have got these things where that is the first question they ask in it you know you know in a particular profession about a perfect particular profession hey Diana Fleischman I'm just interested in in the influence of mate choice and status so overall women around the world they tend to choose men who are older them and they tend to choose men who are making more money than them and this has been found to be a force and inequality in France so that women tend to marry men who were wealthier and who are sought higher status is a major issue and because if two people are trying to decide who's going to stay home and take care of the kids then the person who makes more money it's gonna necessarily try and stay at work and the woman makes less money and who's necessarily younger is going to potentially stay at home and one problem I think is that feminism has been speaking to women the language of status and women are less status driven than men are when they are left to their own choices they tend to prefer to stay home with their family more than men do and so one thing that I think feminism hasn't really thought about is increasing the status of stay-at-home dads or telling women if you want to have a job if you want be out in the workforce and if you want to be high status yourself you should choose a man who's happy to be a stay-at-home dad why haven't we decided to say men who are stay-at-home dads you have the status of CEOs and you are real heroes in our societies I think the interesting thing about you know sought to talk about feminism being quite elitist what interests me is actually when you look at this clear-cut case of actually victims like actual victims from a particular group I'm talking about though particularly if you look and say rather than where you've got like obviously like a huge number of girls who'd be the Buse and I'll in ability to actually tackle that and so much of it was so much of the debates around it surrounds dutchy trying to silence people because it's not just about feminism it's about the whole sort of progressive stack that you've got going on at the moment so who you are what's happened to you so even when you've got a clear-cut case of a victim at you when I thought you had to go out of my way to try and find out some of the facts of the cases of of what's actually happened in those things because it's not being reported in the same way that something like manspreading is or whatever because it's uncomfortable and another thing is when you're talking about silencing actually I think feel like a lot more women have been silenced over an issue like that it's like no you well you can't talk about it because it's too many different things going on there so yeah I do think he's elitist and I do think he's interests and say which voices get heard and which voices are actually allowed to speak and on which issues thanks to two quick points in the spirit of self disclosure I should probably say that I've been the chief executive of charity British pregnancy advisory service that provides abortion services for 13 years and I've got a board which is predominantly female I've got a senior management team that's predominantly female and I have to say my experience of working with both the board members and the senior management team who've changed over the time that I've been there is that they're progressiveness and their response to issues because had nothing to do with their journey and everything to do with their values and their attitudes and their beliefs and the guys that we've had in those positions actually being as progressive as the women and as Pro women's rights and as pro-choice and sometimes even I hesitate to say this but even sometimes a little bit easier to get on some of the edgy issues because they've had to kind of struggle with getting to the point they're not just thinking about themselves they've had to think about what a what's important about say being pro-choice from a political point of view not just about what might happen if they got pregnant so there's a thing there that I just wonder how you think about but what I really wanted to pick up on was the point that Allison was making about the the the the difference in the kind of different level of issues that get raised because this is really hard to cope with as an employer even because what happens I think is that and politically you know there are certain things that are susceptible to a social solution like wages and working conditions and childcare and stuff and then sometimes still a bit old-fashioned because I think that there are certain things which we can say a part of the systemic thing but I kind of think they're only susceptible to a personal response and I kind of wonder sometimes that thinking that somebody has to do something almost makes us more passive so I'm thinking that when I was 17 and got much a Saturday job as a waitress and the boss came up behind me when I was doing the washing out and put his hands on my breasts all I could do was turn around and thump him because actually there wasn't anybody that you could appeal to so I kind of think that sort of what we did so you know a guy who's manspreading put your legs together please so I can sit down do you know what I mean and there's a certain kind of thing that we don't do that anymore we tweet about and so I just I just wonder whether that loss of perspective and that's something that you have to deal with on an individual level because politics can't is an outcome of what you're saying that everything gets made political so we lose the distinction I don't know it's question yes this is this is a question as well it's not something that I have any authority or nor anything but I was quite I'm quite surprised that no one's mentioned about what goes on in schools these days and how young girls are kind of led to think it's okay to send their photo naked which ends up all over the internet etc etc the rap culture which is you know which is quite relative in you I mean all these things didn't really go on when I was a kid at least I wasn't aware of them and of course all the very violent sex that is on the internet that informs young people and is that a backlash I mean it's a question is it a backlash against because some women the latest women have gained so much power so is that a male backlash I don't know I mean it's just a question I was wondering if any of the panelists would describe themselves as feminists I'm a young millennial woman and I'm finding it increasingly hard to describe myself as a feminist so I'd be really interested in to like to know what you guys have to say about that and quickly I was recently having a conversation with a male colleague and we were talking about this this trend that we seem to be seeing recently more in London than anywhere else in the UK about banning adverts and last week I don't know if anyone else saw it but an advert of Guy Lineker had been banned on the underground because he was topless and I showed it to my now colleague and he was like oh that's absurd that's ridiculous and we had a giggle about it and I said it's almost as absurd as that time where they banned a woman in a bikini from the underground and he said oh no no no that's completely fair enough and I was shocked and I lit an angry and I'm quite disgusted and I was wondering if the panelists thought this was maybe a new type of sexist that we're seeing it's being paraded about and it's been camouflaged as progressive but it is ultimately sexist because he saw me as different to him because I'm a woman and I therefore I'm apparently weaker I can't handle it so I was wondering if the panelists maybe thought there's a new form of of sexism a new breed yeah you brought up the issue of the inequality between mothers and fathers in the labor force and what was wondering is so from an economic standpoint how could the inequality of mothers in high paying jobs be reduced without slowing economic productivity just a couple of those and on the unconscious bias issue because I think this is becoming a much bigger feature of workplaces nowadays my problem with unconscious think the concept of unconscious bias is it suggests that when you advertise position in a tech company you have hundreds of women applying and then the people who are sitting on the interview panel have this unconscious bias and so deliberately reject or not deliberately but unconsciously reject all of these women actually if you have look at the figures it is the case that fewer women are applying in the first place and obviously you can't be unconsciously biased about people who don't apply in the first place what concerns me is the point that you raised which is absolutely spot-on about the numbers of women in some science and tech industries actually going down and my real fear is that some of the lessons of feminism become self-fulfilling prophecy so when girls from their earliest days in school see that they are the target of special campaigns to get them into science subjects because it's so difficult there will be so many barriers for you you need to have these special classes and we commend to you and help you actually the message that they get is working in tech or working in science is something really difficult and there are going to be so many obstacles and I think if they take that lesson onboard then they do think well that's obviously not somewhere that's going to be welcoming for me so I think the feminism couldn't score a serious own-goal that regard I always wanted to come back on this issue about you know is it just down to the individual woman to slap the man across the face or two to kind of work out our own solutions to these problems because I think there's a bit of a halfway house on that one particularly thinking about the issue of child care and nursery provision I think you know you can see how we could have more state support we could have campaigns for cheaper charter and that's definitely something called support I think Chuck has far too expensive in this country but whilst at the same time we have a culture that tells us that you know whatever happens to the child in the first year of her life will determine their entire future and if you're a good mother you don't let your child walk home from school alone you must be there filling every hour of every day of your child's day with kind of meaningful and constructive activities then it doesn't really matter how many nurseries we have or how many after-school clubs we have how expensive or cheap they are if that cultural pressure is on you to do something else to be with your child then that makes it harder I think for women to leave their children in nurseries and to go to work finally very quick point on the sexting thing I mean I think that's a really interesting issue and we could almost have another session to explore that but just very quick comment my concern with the sexting is that girls dolls and boys are engaging in sending texts rather than having proper relationships proper human interaction with each other so that's in their bedroom on their own with the mobile phone rather than talking to the boy next door in real life and it actually makes more barriers between the sexes rather than helping people grow up alongside each other and learn that boys and girls are actually not anything special I'd like to pick up first of all on the stay-at-home dad point because I think that's a really interesting one and my husband as stay-at-home father and has been since we had our fourth child he was a financial journalist before and he wanted to stay at home and spend more time with our children we now have nine children that is the and Talia Shire just emphasized that I'm gonna be a granny in two months time which is slightly don't across but anyways but he has also contributed he does he's a very private person didn't want to kind of share his story too much but he has contributed to whatever in in the book and he's taught about the status issue and how difficult it is he thinks generously he says it's not just for dads but as you stay at her mom's as well that often you know put a lot of pressure to work whereas actually obviously bringing up the next generation couldn't be there can be any more important job than that and I think the logical extension and it perhaps reflects and brings together a number of things we've talked about we've talked about sort of the women issue being from the perspective of the women all the time or all that being our danger is own that we we looking at it rather selfishly it's all about us and understandably but actually we need to look upon it as though from the point of view of our male friends family colleagues as well I think at work I see a lot of men quite frustrated that they feel part of the problem when they're sent off on unconscious bias training whereas they they actually want to be part of the solution so I think it's part of a broader I I think one of the things about all of this has got a widen it not just to be feminism for feminism's sake but actually about what kind of society do we want to live in what kind of society can we live in with changes and perhaps more men to have more choice not to feel compelled to be the kind of alpha male that many of them don't want to be my my husband assures me there are lots of other interesting points are the only one other one I was going to sort of try to pick up on and I don't think we can legislate how people think and well I know we can't legislate happy people think we can legislate how they might behave I all sort of put barriers behind that and that can change the way they think over time but I do think we need to recognize the fact this is a hearts and minds issue I have personally last point okay so and get back on the stages I personally wrestled with you know am I wrong to focus on a part where I know more about which is around you know women in leadership positions in business and so forth and I spoke a little while ago at something which was entitled what would you do to change the world for women and they had people who were talking about the situation in India were leading on paying equality and were leading on what's happening in Saudi Arabians so forth and actually I came to conclusion that again it's like a patchwork quilt where we won't continue to make progress in Western societies unless we and as we you know set the standard but we mustn't forget at the position that we're in and how we might be able to help in other areas as well so I just wanted to say first the question of whether we need other type of feminism and other dealing with other problems than made spreading and these issues especially in our country so what I would bring in a concept of Aleksander chaos with a Bulgarian a theoretician who coined the term self colonization meaning that our region didn't need to be colonized the elite did it for themselves in these cultural terms that this narrative about ourselves that we are backward we need to catch up with the developed West we are we already progressive enough in our values and culture and this is a bit behind all this think how how we import things from the developed West and including the language and the problems which are not necessarily rooted or it's not what the Hungarian women would say in the first 20 or 100 places what are their problems in life so one example to bring in is this the prostitution sex work debate and Hungary is one of the major sending countries in human trafficking towards Germany Switzerland Netherlands and there are very poor regions in Hungary where very poor women don't have an other choice to provide for their children and then in this context where women are trafficked or women are extremely poor speaking about and then we are importing now this narrative of the whole problem with prostitution that it's stigmatized and we should speak about it as a free choice and that would solve the problem of the prostitutes in anger and it is so outrageous that you know it changes the focus of completely of the debate and of the policy recommendations and all those things so if I am asked if I'm a FEMINIST then I would say definitely yes but I have to add many things yes but I'm not this type that type that I'm in the air you know defining it in a negative terms that please don't mistake me for this type of feminism so I think it is very difficult to articulate the real issues of real women and consider also this class perspectives what we have already brought up and in a country where the huge problems are with access to contraception with with this oldest discourse about you should have children you are a woman so that's your main task but once the child is there then you you just don't get the support from state from communities from employer so of course if there is a big question who should regulate on that and I really don't think it's enough to persuade men that they take their fair share as what I already mentioned that families often do not have the choice if the only secure work a job in the family is the job of the man then it's not only about how how we who will change the diapers if the that is constraint I don't describe myself as a feminist anymore and the reason I don't is because we spend we because we're human we're constantly sending out signals to people about the sort of person that we are you can't avoid it there's nothing you can do about it but these days to say voluntarily I am a feminist as one of the sort of self descriptors that you choose is to also identify with a certain set of values and priorities which are not mine and so I don't anymore and this house it comes back to one of the first comments I mean one of the things that really de-stresses me about British feminism is not just that it hasn't been concerned with child marriage in in South Asia it hasn't been concerned with forced marriage in the United Kingdom and I think that is something that both voluntary self-described feminists should be ashamed of but also all the rest of us should be ashamed of it too that it should have become much more of an issue and should be much more of an issue than than it is and people just don't want to go there and that is shameful um the second thing is on the the question of why are there now so many fewer people in pure women in in software because actually as you said what is so curious is that in the early days there were masses there was this amazing woman Steve Smith who basically made a fortune using part-time women who often had maths degrees and and who were fantastic programmers and I've had this conversation with a number of people because it is a real mystery and I think part of it I mean Julia right I mean that that the supposed remedy probably makes it worse but I do also think it's to do with with with the different structures of most men and women's lives because I've really thought about this and you kind of have to stay up-to-date in software you can't take a few years out very easily and come back very easily I don't think and what you can see with with women is that they quite sensibly tend to move towards professional jobs which have a certain security attached to them and which also have some potential of part-time work now that's not universal I mean the city is a nightmare for it you can't just say well you know good just don't just but it is very striking and and I think that it's I don't think the main problem is the the unconscious bias of the software industry I really don't I think the problem is that women now have many more opportunities and because although some of them may be quite clear they're going to work full time all their lives and never stop many of them do think in terms of taking breaks and when you're thinking that way there are many other occupations which are friendlier and I can see see this myself I mean why did I become an academic well in part because although you work all the time you actually have remarkable freedom about when and where you work so you can basically not have to be somewhere from 8 till 6 and not move so there are I think structural differences and that brings me to the sort of the third thing about why so few of us choose to or find husbands fathers asses in women for our children who want to be the main stay-at-home person and and I do think about this really hard actually when I was writing this book because there's been far less movement towards it then than one would have thought possible and I think it is because although some people are fortunate enough like Helen and like my friend another Helen who's in the book you you marry somebody and it turns out that actually that works out it doesn't make sense for primate females to look for mates who are actually less talented less energetic less committed just lazier than they are themselves and I actually came to the conclusion this was part of the problem there doesn't mean we couldn't make it much easier for men to be the one who just ones who decide to take a break but I think that that it's it I always used to think that would be what would happen and it didn't and so I started to wonder about it and finally yes you're absolutely right there's so much that you just cannot fix your political activity I mean you just can't and you come back to the into the values of the society and that's a whole other whole other discussion I'm actually quoting a couple of other people I spoke to about this I mean who said you know but they were sure there were lots of people who had been happy to live awesome and they weren't doing that not very long for final points and questions from you then I'll bring my panel in for their final remarks one of the things that often brings the elitism of feminism into sharp relief for me is when you get headlines about offensive items of clothing such as pink t-shirts that say daddy's little girl or princessy shoes and I I would have thought that logically the strongest way to protest those is to simply not buy them and yet there's often calls from feminists to just ban those items and my impression is that often the items are on sale in places I asked during Tesco's and the women calling to ban them I think my perception is that they're those aren't the places that they shop they're more likely to shop at John Lewis and Bowden so it sort of feels like they don't trust other women working-class women women from low-income families to make their own decisions and to make their own choices and it worries me that that's a sense of paternalism that's becoming more and more deeply ingrained within modern feminism hi sorry first of all my understand evil a feminist is is somebody who believes that women are equal to men so on that basis I find it strange that you wouldn't identify perhaps as a feminist I mean I'm a primary school teacher and what my friend here who's also promised what we see is issues of gender stereotyping little seeds that effete which ties into what you just said but I recently did a PSHE lesson on gender stereotyping and the first thing I did was I put girl on one side of the board and boy and the other and I asked their pupils to say what words came into their head and obviously with boys strong sporty with girls sassy makeup glitter princess and then we went on to look at the clerk shoes that came over in the summer the girls range that was 30 bate and the boy slay that was leader and my class of children are hugely wide and varied in ethnicity in religion and in class and they were all enraged including the boys and I'm not really sure what my point is other than whether this is elitism and feminism then perhaps what we need to be thinking about is how we address these things from a very young age I science teacher ants in secondary and also stem representative in response to the well many points that have been made I think you're absolutely 100% right I put so much effort into trying to get young ladies to come to stem club but quite frankly they just aren't interested and I think I don't the data in front of me but it's less than 0.2 percent increase over the last 20 years in uptake of young ladies wanting to pursue stem provided a sort of you know facilities for them now I think part of the reason is that everyone wants to be popular successful have recognition and a male who is popular successful and is recognized for that is successful in the workplace you know successful with women has a nice car job etc like that and I think with the girls why would they want to pursue science unless they're genuinely interested yes I have some lette young ladies they are very interested in science that's what they want to do so of course they come along to stem club of course they do but the others they want to be popular they want to be recognized by their peers and unfortunately with this sort of curse that is social media and likes and that kind of thing their quickest route to that recognition is through focusing on makeup so that is naturally the route that they go down on another point I'm sorry can I take ten seconds I would just say that yeah is it not recognition that we have come so far that and I can and make a statement in the workplace or something like that without thinking whether that's appropriate for women or men I concern myself with if I'm going to offend someone how can we roll that success out to the rest of the world because without world war 1 Spanish Influenza and World War 2 wiping out a third of the male population to give women the ability although you know okay how are we going to do that for the rest of the world as everyone would have noticed there's been an upsurge in identity politics and in reaction to that there's been a lot of people who've criticized that trend saying it's a form of victimhood Olympics so to speak so on that note I'd like to ask the panel what they are thinking is in respects with feminism to do with the idea of universalism against identity politics to this primary school teacher who is who like gender stereotyping it's weird but with gender stereotyping it seems like now being a girl being interested in typically girly stuff like makeup and stuff it's now a bad thing like you can't like if you're a girl your interest in the makeup like I'm interested in makeup and like clothes but I'm also interested in coding and like and like signs and stuff but like why can't I do both and why is that a bad thing and so it's almost like girls no longer like it's like your mate it's telling girls that you cannot be interested in makeup and interested in science and it's weird that like that's a problem and like now you're it's almost as if people are making it a problem to be interested in makeup and girls of which is weird I'm going to bring my speakers back in in reverse order if that's okay to start with you so just to sum up then if you can do the fine art well I can't respond to all the very interesting points that were made so I'm going to come back to shoes pink and blue shoes I think the pink and blue thing drives me nuts but I have to say I think it is a creation of the marketers have realized that we're rich enough that we can probably afford to buy one of each in most cases because it's much much worse than it used to be and it's much worse than rich of the country but it does come back to the final point about you know why do we feel that in order to be equal in the workplace in order to have equality in schools we have to wipe out all gender difference I think that's a completely useless thing to try and do you can't do it and maybe if we stop trying to wipe it out and stop trying to judge our success in life by how many girls become bricklayers we might actually oddly enough make more progress to societies that are better for everybody I mean I would answer only two points or try to be my ideas one is I'm bit always nervous when we speak about STEM jobs and how we attract women to STEM jobs and that if we have a bigger share then it will be a more equal word that because then we combat it stereotypes but I'm really not again I'm a FEMINIST but not that type of feminist who wants to educate people on how to make their choices of course I know the choices are embedded and so on but I'm also more interested in creating rooms where no matter what they choose as a profession they are not disadvantaged in life or they are not versa fate so even those jobs should exactly be paid those who which are performed predominantly by women and then if they are also the say have the same value then my men might go so there then it then it would be a bit more free and not you know being obsessed with stereotypes that's how I see and then the last question or the on universalism and identity politics I agree also on the fact that this operation Olympics is not the way forward and my main point on that is that it brings down structural problems to the individual level so if all this narrative about check your privileges and me as a white feminist but ok I missed Europeans so I have a good idea I'm a woman and from Easter Europe so I have already two points which qualified me to speak about certain issues I mean it's really very strange thing but I think also with this that I wouldn't blame those people alone defending this type of activism I think we also have to see how how this type of activism is embedded in this economic trend which encourages individual solutions and D politicizes issues and works against universal narrative so that's where we have two so first I wanted to say I think has been a really great conversation and to thank the audience for all the points that you have raised I think it's shown the way out where we've made progress while we've made progress the approach isn't quite working and that we need to reassess I'm 51 years old and to succeed in my career I really have had to play by the rules whereas now I feel really confident that my daughters I have six daughters three sons neither will have to be the same as their brothers to be as good as their brothers and they will be able to help along with you to reinvent the rules I would like to pick up on the point in foreclosing that I mean that we should be less judgmental of each other I think diversity ultimately is less about squeezing us all into well obviously it's completely not about making us all the same it's about valuing our differences and I think living and letting live being more open to other ideas which is all about the battle ideas is it is the only way really that we can come up with solutions to the many problems that we have so thank you just very quickly I wanted to come back on the point here about the definition of feminism because I have lost track of a number of times I've been told over the past three years I need to get a dictionary and look up the meaning of feminism because doesn't it just mean men and women are equal and so or a belief that men and women can be equal and therefore of course I am a feminist and I wish that was the case I wish that was what feminism meant nowadays but it doesn't and I would come back to you the person who made the point over here he was asking the question would we on the panel describe ourselves as a feminist and isn't it the case that feminism nowadays can actually be quite sexist I would completely agree with that I think some of the biggest examples of misogyny see nowadays ironically come from feminism the argument that women are you know need looking after me protecting me putting on a pedestal we need adverts taking away from us we need song lyrics band we need a social media to be monitored and restricted for our benefit I think this presentation of women is these kind of vulnerable little flowers is really nauseating and does not do women any favors whatsoever the only thing I think you know is equally as bad to come back to the question on identity politics is when you then get the response that oh actually it's so much worse for men as well and you get this competing narrative oh no we have it was so no we have it was and that does no one any favors whatsoever so no I wouldn't call myself a feminist nowadays [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: worldwrite

Views: 27,694

Keywords: WORLDwrite, WOLRDbytes, Battle of Ideas, politics, feminism, gender, women, identity politics, sexual harassment, gender pay gap, sexism, misogyny, class, elitism, Eszter Kovats, Helena Morissey, Joanna Williams, Professor Alison Wolf, Sally Millard, manspreading, mansplaining, cat-calling, rape culture, equality, women's liberation, The XX Factor, A Good Time To Be A Girl, Women vs Feminism, education, campus, university, office, workplace

Id: XESxW2FC8ag

Length: 84min 30sec (5070 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2017