Representation Matters - And there's Data to Prove it.

It must have been groundbreaking when little girls in Saudi Arabia saw themselves represented for the first time in the realm of international sports competition at the 2016 Olympic Games. Imagine seeing someone that looks just like you at the highest echelon of sport, with crowds cheering for you, and your lookalike is smiling wildly, bearing all your country's colours. Imagine all that excitement in the growing mind and heart of an 11-year old Saudi girl, watching this unfold for the very first time.

A few years later, this happened. 

2018

For a long time, representation was a squishy notion, lauded by social-justice advocates and decried by economists in favour of 'hard data'. Scores of new studies are demonstrating its importance and how effective a tool it can be in combatting sexism and racism and empowering young people to push past traditional and stereotypical boxes and into new roles. Although representation is slowly getting the recognition it deserves, it remains only barely included in broad social policy outside of gender quotas on boards or within political representation and in some areas of the military, depending on the country. 

Representation is the simple idea that when little boys and girls see themselves at different levels of society, in different roles and with different skillsets, it raises their awareness that they too can become President, a scientist, a lawyer, a software developer. This is especially true of youth, women and people from minority groups, who have historically been disadvantaged and blocked from entering into more prestigious fields.

The idea that we are influenced by what we see, even at a superfluous level, is no longer a mystery: we see around 4 000 ads per day, and these distort how we think of ourselves, affect our beauty standards, our sexual preferences, and shape our views on race, ethnicity and sex. Socially, we remain deeply influenced by signs and symbols, where our flags, national anthems, style of dress, our cars, our addresses and our credit cards are symbols of class and denote and promote adherence to different social groups with changing levels of power and prestige. Facebook and Instagram are perfecting the algorithms that have us acting against our best interests, all because of what we see and how this activates the varying impulses in our brains - something the sugar industry has been doing for decades.

That representation matters and can motivate behaviour, therefore, should not be a shock. A recent 2018 groundbreaking study by researchers at Stanford, Harvard and the US Census Bureau on class, race and mobility in the United States has shown that despite the finding that "black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighbourhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds," the few neighbourhoods (tragically, only about 1%) where lower-income black boys did do well, also held a high presence of black fathers in the community. This buoys parts of a 2015 study from Harvard that found that the 1990's Clinton initiative "Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing", which gave low-income families living in public housing vouchers to move to middle-income neighborhoods, resulted in children from those families growing up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers in public housing. Twenty years later, it mattered that low-income children were given the opportunity to see that life could be better, their aims could be higher - and the younger these children were moved, the higher they achieved. 

Women as Liars: Perpetuating the Myth of Female Deception

As Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton recently wrapped up another 11 hours at the House Select Committee for Benghazi, it has become difficult not to be skeptical of the underlying motives of Senate Republicans in their quest for what they have openly been calling their gotcha moment. After three years of unremitting questioning, what message are they really putting forth?

That message, developed since the 2012 attack in Libya, seems to be that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is lying, and inevitably the truth will out. Given enough time and enough harassment, another woman will be shown to be the untrustworthy liar that she is. Untrustworthy in her rank as one of the most powerful political figures in the world, untrustworthy in her ability to oversee difficult situations, untrustworthy in her ability to speak the truth to the American people, and untrustworthy in her ability to govern, given her candidacy in the upcoming election. The message, although cloaked in political subterfuge, is one that is all too familiar to women: women are liars that cannot be trusted.

While not all are subject to the same magnifying lens as Mrs. Clinton, we are aware of some pervasive beliefs about women as liars. Most prominently, perhaps, is the rape myth: that a large portion of women lie about sexual violence committed against them.

Women in the Workplace, the Gender Confidence Gap and #YesAllWomen

Last week, four important studies brought conclusions relating to women in the workplace. These were not about editors Jill Abramson unceremoniously fired from the NYTimes nor Natalie Nougayrède forced out of her position at Le Monde, although they provide a perfect backdrop. Two of the studies demonstrate how, at either end of the corporate ladder, women are subjected to gender-based inequalities and punishments, these then intersect with a prevalent and detrimental gender confidence gap, and, finally, come to rest in the US government's medical research agency's (NIH) decision to erase sex bias from their biomedical studies.

The first study, from the University of Victoria and the Canadian Intern Association shows that the majority of interns in Canada are young women, who are unpaid or are making less than the minimum wage. Around 300 000 young Canadians work unpaid, and the vast majority are women - 49% in the private sector and 25/26% between the public and not for profit sector. While the Conservative government has provided funding towards "high-demand" internships in the fields of sciences, maths and computers, it has given nothing to more 'traditionally female' fields of nutritional sciences, teaching or social work.

Street Harassment: Women and the Dangers of Public Spaces

Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? If we are dealt a set of experiences and characteristics shaped by our formative childhood years, are our adult choices not a series of actions pre-determined by those characteristics or influenced by them in some way?

The problems arise when actions affects other people - and societal norms demand laws and social conduct that respects and protects the safety, both physical and mental, of each of its citizens. So although we may have impulses, desires and thoughts that would lead us to act in aggressive manners, for the social cohesion and growth, we cannot allow those actions to run amuck. Except, it seems, when it comes to violence against women. Half of Canadian women will report being physically or sexually abused after the age of 16. On average, every six days a woman is murdered by her partner. Yearly, 40 000 arrests are made due to domestic violence, about 12% of all violent crime - but since only 22% of incidents are reported - the cases of abuse are much higher.

The Way the Internet Looks at Women

Women's representation in the media goes beyond what we see on television or in magazines and billboards. It is in our every day use of that media, and specifically, the internet. Indeed, it is in these seemingly innocuous daily uses that we become immune to the ways these images influence our perception of a woman's value, position and role.

Check out some of these images when googling terms like 'woman' (all white and highly sexualized poses), or 'working woman' (mainly white and behind a computer, with some frustrated and anxious looks thrown in for good measure), or 'young girls' (again, mainly white, and frighteningly sexualized).

Can she have it all? Who knows!!

Getty Images, the largest online stockpile of useable photos (all those pictures you see on websites), has teamed up with LeanIn.org to change the way women are portrayed on the internet. Do you remember women laughing alone with salad? Or women sitting rather uncomfortably with computers? Or feminism according to Stock photography?

Dispelling the Notion that Women and Men Can't be Friends

Women and men can't be friends. And, women and women can't be friends.  The different sexes can't intermix beyond their biological impulses, and women can't get passed the cattiness and the competition - they can't be real friends - not like men can. After all, its probably a man who will get in the way. This is rubbish, and an archaic view of female and male gender roles that inhibits the entire expression of self and possibility of friendly relations between the sexes. Indeed, patriarchal structures are alive and thriving in beliefs and statements such as these. It reduces women and men to animals, with no interest in anything more than playing out normalized and expected gender roles.

Second Generation Gender Bias

I’ve written before that public spaces can sometimes imitate soft war zones for women. Men belong in these places while women are visiting, often without permission. Cat-calling, space-taking... women are made to feel like outsiders in a space that should be their own. We use these spaces to get to work, to do our daily outings, we use them for protest, to express ourselves but also for leisure and family time. If one sex feels pushed out of these spaces, their access to these different aspects of life also suffers. We saw in the Arab uprisings, how women were an important part of the protests, and how this pointed to a gendered reclaiming of public spaces as an important component of the female emancipation process. 

Second generation gender bias is the official term for this feeling. That feeling that as women, we don’t quite belong in certain places or in certain roles. Public transport and public spaces more broadly, but boardrooms and positions of power more significantly. 

Presumed Consent is Killing Equality

IN Swaziland, teenage girls are taught about sexually transmitted diseases, condoms and HIV testing information handed out at will as they learn that sex is dangerous and mostly for men.  In India, The Justice Verma Committee’s recommendation on recognizing marital rape as an offence under criminal law was hastily swept aside by the Standing Committee on Home, on the basis that 'marriage presumes consent.' And a few weeks ago, in the HBO series Girls, Adam raped his girlfriend Natalia onscreen. Or did he? It was, according to Slate, at the very least, “uncomfortable.”  Or maybe it was a violation and “something she didn’t like?" 

All three of these situations highlight an unspoken topic in the fight against rape and sexual abuse: the presumed notion of consent.

The Elections and the Problem with the Female Vote

The election cycle in the US has been replete with one-dimensional messages about the women's vote being a deciding factor in the outcome. Obligatory pandering has included Mitt Romney's binders and President Obama's overflow of pro-women's rights ads, with polls analyzing the norms of what the swinging women's vote will mean for both candidates: if only women voted, President Obama would win by a landslide.

In the United States, voting blocks are the norm. Compartmentalized into even more specific groupings than society already creates and assigned characteristics from which they cannot subtract themselves, these interest groups churn out statistics and variations in polls that the media enthusiastically reports on, fitting people into digestible boxes. And yet, as has become clear through a closer examination of cross-cutting segments of these voting blocks, too many issues are at play to keep such a generalized partitioning of social groups.

Saudi Arabia has Two Female Athletes Competing at the Olympics

This year marks the first year that all of the more than 200 countries represented at the Olympics have a female athlete as part of their delegation. Specifically, this year, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Brunei all included women in the London Games.

Saudi Arabia sent 2 (judo (who may be forced to compete without her headscarf - this is a move away from recent positive developments accommodating the wearing of religious clothing and thus improving the inclusion of all women in sport, although safety is a concern. ) and an 800 metre runner)
Brunei sent 1 (400m hurdler)
Qatar sent 3 (swimmer, sprinter and flag bearer)