Just call me token woman
The pleasures, pains and paradoxes of being a public female.
Note: I am necessarily going to speak in generalisations about gender here. I know they are generalisations, and the danger of generalisations, but for this piece I am convinced that despite this there are some trends it is good for us all to pay attention to.
My friend
has just published a piece simply called “Women”. I’d talked to him about it, and encouraged it, and it features me. I was glad to see it (you should read it), but I was also halfway through writing this piece about a similar theme and part of me thought: balls. There it is again. A man with a readier opinion, just putting it out there, as I wrestle and draft and worry about upsetting people1. (I have told him this. This is why friendship is magic). This essay is my attempt to lay out some of the stickiness of being a public female in the world of ideas. It is driven by my desire to dodge the various temptations I find: 1) to be avoidant and withdraw 2) to act deferential and/or imitative of men or 3) to move from discomfort to disdain and be plain old angry with them (or you, if you’re a man reading this. Please keep going). None of these approaches seem especially good for my soul, or good for the public conversation.I took part in a panel event recently. Afterwards, I couldn’t sleep for going over what I should and shouldn’t have said. I felt fearful and exposed. I puzzled afterwards what it was about this event in particular that was messing with me, given I generally like public speaking. I concluded that it was being the only woman amongst four men and a set up that felt historically male coded. This realisation provoked a queasy mix of embarrassment and irritation that I, a capable and intelligent forty year old mother of two should be having this reaction. Speaking to my female friends in similar fields afterwards it is clear it is an incredibly common one. Most of them said they never accept these kinds of invitations precisely because it leaves them feeling this kind of ick. Jonathan sums up the problem well:
But here’s the challenge as I’ve experienced it. When I ask some women: You complain about men talking, but why don’t you show up and speak up more often? Their answer is usually something like: “Well, where do I start? Your context, your premises, and your expectations all militate against it. I don’t recognise myself in the context of your arena and don’t want to speak from a place of exile.”
That is what it felt like. Speaking from the edges into a place I was not at all sure wanted to hear my voice. Braced against disdain and dismissal and so preemptively annoyed.
After that event, in the pub, I got into a familiar conversation with the organisers and other panellists. Who, by the way, I like and respect very much, who I know are aware of this issue and keen to find a better way. “So many women just don’t want to take part”, they said, or “I don’t want to invite them just because they are a woman. That seems worse”.
My honest reaction is there are capable women for almost any event, if you take the time to look. They are also not wrong that women are more likely to say no. I used to work in BBC TV and Radio, and persuading highly qualified female guests they were equipped to come on discussion programmes was a regular part of the job. They were as smart and informed as the men, but lacked the self-belief and were less willing to touch any topic even slightly outside their expertise. Or, bluntly, less willing to bullshit.
This was fifteen years ago and the problem persists. Men pitch themselves to me to come on The Sacred all the time. I cannot remember a single woman doing this. I have done a lot of public speaking this year, and I have been the only woman on every single panel. Sharing a stage with three or four men is so common that I’ve only just clocked this fact.
I am aware I am often asked to do things that I am not quite the right person for because I am female and have a bit of public profile. Or maybe I fear I’ve been asked just because I’m a woman. How would I know? It’s not like we can be honest about these things. If I can’t suggest another, better woman (who will often say no), I try and say yes, because how else will this change? Lots of event organisers are really trying. As I am towards the top of the scale, public-speaking confidence wise, saying yes is something I can do. Being the token woman has felt like the best of a bad job, the only way to navigate a problem which is part history, part habit and part a difference (on average) in preference and temperament amongst the sexes.
Partly in response to Jonathan, I want to unpack what the effects of being (or at least feeling like) the token woman are. It won’t be true for all women, of course, but my hunch is there are a lot of us.
“Male-coded” set ups.
You can hear what I mean by “male coded” when Jonathan channels women responding to his prompt to “just speak up”: “Your context, your premises, and your expectations all militate against it”.
Becasue I am interested in God, I often get asked to be part of formats that are basically debates between two tribes: Religion vs Atheism. The approach is informed by philosophy and apologetics, drawing heavily on science. The trouble is, I think these approaches are a distraction. A side quest, a diverting puzzle, like sudoku, but not that helpful for making the biggest decision about whether there is Love beyond us. I am married to a philosopher, and have done some “apologetics training” in my time, so I am familiar with the ground. I can, and I have, played that game, gone toe to toe on the the ontological argument and what the fine tuning of the universe might tell us. I no longer have any appetite for it, because it is just bullshitting, cosplaying an Oxbridge debating society male in order to fit in. In order (at least this is what one of the voices in my head claims) to be taken seriously.
I’m not interested in this approach because it is so narrowly left-hemispheric, so premised on a thin, arid vision of human knowing (I nearly wrote epistemology here, again because I think you will take me more seriously if I use Greek words). I have grown in confidence that these disembodied, abstract approaches are not the only, or even the best way of deciding how to live. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it has often been feminist theology and feminist philosophy making this case.
There are of course woman who value the kind of approaches you get in classic debate (male-coded, not just male), but there is also a reason you’d struggle to find a female Christian and a female atheist tonking it out. They would probably get too curious about each other and end up friends. As I’ve written elsewhere, McGilchrist’s Hemisphere Hypothesis has given me a theoretical underpinning for what women, artists and those not educated into imbecility by a certain kind of western vision have always known. The tools of science and analytic philosohy are noble and useful but they refuse to stay in their lane. They have a bad habit of land-grabbing, squeezing out all the other ways of knowing, all the other disciplines. In the nineteenth century when trying to collectively name the emerging fields of those studying the material world, the brand of “nature poker”, “natural philosopher” and “nature peeper” were rejected in favour of “scientist”, from the simple root “knowing” in Latin, so the problem was baked in2.
I have come to believe that some questions will not open up for you if you approach them with the hammer and chisel of your intellectual might. Science and philosophy are simply not fitted for them. They require us to lay down the anxious human craving to tame and control, to nail them into the system in which we sit, like Descartes, the emperor of our tiny skull sized kingdoms. Only those sufficiently aware of their powerlessness, who offer not power but a cry for help, a poem or a prayer can be welcomed inside these questions and find therein a different kingdom, a different world3. They are existential, relational questions, and these kind of questions are vulnerable. We don’t get to stay safe in our systems if we want to actually connect. I have often thought it might be why those on the margins of power are drawn to religion, not because they are credulous, but because they already know their need and interdependence, have not built an identity on independent status and control. They have less they need to lay down.
I have worked hard to shake off the conditioning of my culture that says my intuitive, relational and embodied ways of knowing aren’t the “right kind of smart”. Mainly now, I’m happy to be the one who brings a poem, who cries when discussing the “problem of pain“ because it seems an obscenity to do otherwise. I have learned to ignore the YouTube commentators bitching about the over emotional woman, this stupid, tearful hand-wavy bint. Bless their fearful hearts, I think, I hope they get to really live, really feel what it is to be alive, at some point. Maybe through the love of a good woman. On my best days this is my response. Not all days.
Ratios and ambient misogyny
What threw me at the event I couldn’t sleep after was going last after four men had marshalled their arguments. I had my opening statement prepared and it was a poem, but how could I bring it, now, as the only woman, and just reinforce all the stereotypes? How could I make it look like women are not just disinclined but incapable of this kind of debate, prove the meme that we can’t think in abstract terms because we’re too distracted by our feelings and our messy bleeding bodies? I wish I didn’t know about the multi-million-listener channels premised on exactly this but I do. Virulent and violent misogyny is, it seems, staging a comeback. Ben Sixsmith at
is just one of the conservative men helpfully sounding the alarm about it. Honestly, now almost all events are available online, I think that particular segment of the YouTube audience is part of what women are preemptively braced against. Once someone threatened to rape me to death and masturbate over my corpse for an innocuous opinion on current affairs. That stuff tends to linger.So what do we do? It’s the question both I and Jonathan are wrestling with. Anger is easy. Too many huddles of women discussing this stuff end with “f*ck those guys” energy. I know and love too many men in this field to think it’s their fault as individuals. My discomfort at being different is, in some ways, not their problem.
I like men. I really like smart, curious men. I think philosophers and scientists and apologists (male and female) should get to engage in the way they want to engage. The point of the hemisphere hypothesis is not to set up a false binary, to say right hemispheric ways of knowing are always better (though they are, in theory, able to give us a more accurate picture of the world) but redress the balance from centuries of being told they are lesser. Even though the desire to take revenge when he have felt disparaged goes deep in all of us (no, you’re the loser!), I can hear how childish that inner voice is. She needs a hug. It is not wise for her to be in charge.
We need both hemispheric approaches, and they work best together. Just like men and women. My hunch that men on average prefer left hemispheric approaches, and women right isn’t a claim that one should dominate4. Nor that public events, or panels, always need both. People who like philosophical problems should be allowed to talk about them, in public. It may not be helpful to have someone showing up and dismissing their questions and trying to read a poem instead. Maybe that is just bad manners, or worse, arrogance. Am I the Arsehole, or AITA, as they’d say on Reddit?
As I was trying to sort through all these clotted and confused responses, I read this piece which had the sublime subtitle: Are men something more than emotionally malfunctioning women? It is by a funny, self-aware man, saying very gently and kindly: let men be men. Not in a scary alt-right, masculinity = violence way. More because, to answer the subtitle, men are not just emotionally malfunctioning women.
I was talking this all over with
, who has ended up the token woman at a bunch of stuff too. She said “I think the solution is to just not have a token woman. To let them get on with it”. It was refreshingly radical. It made me realise I could just say no. Give up being token woman? Stand back and let the March of the Manels pass me by without getting my knickers in a twist5? The idea was tantalisingI will now, for some topics. Too often though, the subjects that end up in Manel category are the ones associated with power, with big decisions about how we structure society. They also, as Jonathan says
often seem to believe their conversations apply to the world as a whole, rather than a fairly limited perspective on it.
Being a firm but kind reminder that this is not the case might be some of my calling. The absence of women and more right-hemispheric voices for these high stakes questions has consequences. Ditto, the question of many of the panels I’m invited onto: God. These approaches leave too many thinking Christianity is not for them because they can’t figure out the physics of the resurrection. I’m not prepared to cede that ground.
I think event organisers need to become more aware of how many world-of-ideas events are premised on a historically male-coded approach, in which the odds are stacked in favour of what Lamorna Ash calls “quick tongued boarding school boys”. If they are serious about creating space for more women’s voices, the container itself will have to change. In some circumstances, a commitment to an equal split will make it a lot easier for women to say yes.
Alongside that, I have become more relaxed about a need for lots of alternative events, going at the same questions in different way. Part of it is women owning their agency and hosting them. There would be some men who want to speak at and go to poetry-led ones, and women who really do want to speak about or listen to the fine tuning question. Probably we are all both in different seasons of our lives. Women are not just irrational men, and men are not just emotionally malfunctioning women, and of course all these binaries and categories are beginning to fall apart in my hands. There are some on-average, population level differences that it seems pointless to ignore, but also, we are human, trying and failing to love each other, to find our way. To survive this.
My discomfort lifted when I got here. I reminded myself of the premise driving so much of my work but which is still so hard to internalise: difference is not a threat. It is almost always a gift. When we (alright, I) can take a breath and resist the too-well-trodden path from discomfort to disdain, anxiety to anger, something beautiful can happen. So I guess until we figure this out I’ll keep being the token woman. Showing up with my poems and my tears and letting it be awkward. Maybe finding the fine-tuning argument more interesting than I expected. I’m open for bookings.
I know this is partial. Jonathan wrestle and drafts and worries too. Most of the men I know do.
"We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings at York, Oxford, and Cambridge, in the last three summers. There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe them selves with reference to their pursuits. Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbid den them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician ; savans was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist — but this was not generally palatable ; others attempted to translate the term by which the members of similar associations in Germany have described themselves, but it was not found easy to discover an English equivalent for natur-forscher.The process of examination which it implies might suggest such undignified compounds as nature-poker *, or nature-peeper, for these naturae curiosi ; but these were indignantly rejected.' (Whewell 1834, p.59-60)
This is a essentially the argument both Pascal (early scientific and mathematical polymath) and Kierkegaard made, if you need to quote an intellectual male to undergird my claim. Its ok, sometimes do too.
I am not going to get into how much of this is conditioning/formation and how much biological, but it seems obvious to me it is both.
A Manel is an all male panel
I can certainly relate to this, as, I'm sure, can many women. This dynamic happens not just on public stages but in private gatherings as well. One thing I am learning to do is to just let myself, and my responses, be very feminine and womanly when they want to be. Not in a deliberately challenging way—through they might provide some challenge—but in a way that grounds and illuminates everything else. The intuition that we as women seem to have more access to and that allows us to read a room and sense the way energy is flowing can, I think, give us an advantage when we allow ourselves to fully inhabit it.
There have been times when I have listened to men hotly debating a topic and taking it all in, letting it percolate—I am reminded of Mary "pondering all these things in her heart"—and when I am finally able to speak, I'm able to offer a reflection that helps to crystallize an idea the men have been wrestling toward, or helps everyone to realize an idea or possibility that has been hidden beneath the surface. When this happens, I find that the men can be quite magnetized toward what I am saying and grateful for what I've offered.
Of course, most of the time I don't do this, and sometimes it comes across quite awkwardly. I think it's better when my focus is more on being a vessel for some kind of truth to come through rather than feeling that I need to be heard and to get my point across. But I do think there is sometimes an alchemy to be found in, as you said, letting men be men but also allowing myself as a woman to be a woman in a conversation.
I was at a church study day last week about AI and faith. Discussion was vigorous. A participant commented
"This is all head stuff, where is the heart?" The men in the group had nothing to say in response. I have been thinking about this all week so your insightful essay hits the spot. Thank you.