If I was still a magazine editor I’d have advised myself to save this rant for International Women’s Day. But this is my Substack and I’ve been stewing on this for a while and felt too impatient to wait for a timely hook.
It’s this: Women, we can’t just keep talking to each other about our issues.
I was hit with a profound sense of ennui about the whole thing when I was on yet another panel of all women. It was for a podcast and it was a discussion about how women are not as good as men at asking for what they want in their careers.
I’m not in any way trying to disparage this conversation, or its intention. And indeed its intended audience is other women. It is true that women, on the whole, are not as good as men at sticking their hand up for what they want. So it was a valid conversation to have. I very much enjoyed being part of it and there was even a moment when psychologist Dr Yasmine Saad freaked me right out with an observation about me and my relationship with my dad that was just too on the money.
I’m always very happy to participate in these events. But as I sat there, I realised I’d ticked off pretty much everything on my women’s panel bingo card. We discussed women and our imposter syndromes, why we’re not as good as men at asking for what we want at work, how it tends to be women who take on everything, caring for younger and older family members, and put ourselves last and how we need to get better at showing up for ourselves and of course, how women need to be supportive of other women because we’re all in this together and we can’t really rely as much on the men to put the ladder down behind them.
Ladies, I’m a little over it. The ‘women need to support women!’ chant, and being on panels with only other women debating about how women can have more success. And networking events where women only ever meet other women. I understand why they exist. I’m just not that convinced anymore that it’s doing us the favours we think.
We can’t keep having the same conversations in the same, siloed spaces with the people who already know all this stuff - ie women. The more we section ourselves off in these ways, the more we are part of driving the idea that women thriving is something only women need to be concerned about.
For the last International Women’s Day, I was invited to speak at a women-only event for a talent agency. I really like the people involved so if nothing else I was just looking forward to spending a few hours having a nice time with them. On the panel we discussed careers, juggling with parenthood, all the usual stuff. It was nice. The agency is run by a man who jokingly lamented to me that he was ‘banned’ from the gathering because it was International Women’s Day. And I laughed and said, ‘quite right’. Because this was Women’s Day.
But during our chat in that all-female room, it occurred to me that I’ve been making the same points on all of these feminist-slanted topics since I became editor of Glamour in 2000. That’s decades of having the same conversations where very little has changed.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to stop muttering and hand wringing to each other in our little echo chambers? Maybe it’s time to stop ‘banning’ - even in jest - the men from the rooms and start making them talk to us - with us - about this stuff in earnest?
In the same week, I was invited to sit on another panel about women and ageism. (Yeah, it seems I agree to do a lot of panels. I genuinely enjoy them, because I always meet interesting people. I sincerely like networking, which is the secret of getting anything out of networking. I’ll write about that soon, actually.) It was really fun because it was mostly women in my age bracket sharing darkly funny stories about the shitty things people have said to us simply because we are no longer 25. (I’ll write about that soon, too. It is funny. A bit depressing but also funny.)
But that wasn’t the best part for me. The best part was that, for the first time I’ve ever noticed, the audience included men. It was remarkable. My first instinct, upon seeing some men, was guilt. I assumed they’d been dragged there, under protest, by partners. Or maybe they simply realised too late it wasn’t the room where they were televising the match. But shame on me for thinking of men so reductively, because they really engaged and asked brilliant questions about how they could be part of the solutions for women. One man asked, ‘My mum is in her 60s and she’s convinced she’s on the job scrap heap. How can I help her regain her confidence?’ Another guy said, ‘I know I don’t employ enough women but they don’t apply. How can I get them to apply?’
This is allyship. These are enlightened men who like women and want us to include them in the conversation.
The latter question sparked some great back and forth and one panellist actually gave him the name of a networking group to infiltrate and get that message about. And I say ‘infiltrate’ because guess what? The networking group was for women to connect with women. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and I know that plenty of women get a lot of out of those kinds of events. They’ve sprung up over the years borne from a need to give aspiring entrepreneurs access to other female entrepreneurs. ‘You can’t be what you can’t see’ and all that. But it’s also true that right here we had an example of how closing those gender ranks could be shutting down tangible opportunities.
I also think that sectioning ourselves off like this, over and over again, is actually letting men right off the hook. If we proudly exclude them from our conversations about women and equality, they get to carry on pretending to believe that issues such as salary, and parental juggling are women-only problems and entirely up to us to sort.
Think about it. What men - particularly high profile men - do you hear talking about pay equality? Or childcare issues? If I’m wrong I would be delighted for you to correct me. Where are the male equivalents of Anna Whitehouse, aka Mother Pukka, banging the drum for flexibility for working parents? I’ll wait. It gets so much worse when the problems deemed to be only women’s include male violence. When was the last time you saw a man use his platform to speak out on this issue? Or reproductive rights? All my American friends raging against the regressive steps on abortion law are women. None of these issues carry implications for women alone.
Look, I get it. It’s nice to have some designated space to spend time with just women. I can see the appeal of a female-only members club, in eliminating the chances of being harassed by drunk pervs. And I get that while men-only clubs exist, it feels like levelling the playing field to introduce the same for women.
Personally I’m a big fan of women. I’m sure that most of you are like me in feeling that the female friendships and connections in your life are the magic tonic. When I’m down and in need of a kind - but also honest - pep talk, it’s my women friends I turn to and who have my back. They know who they are and I really hope they feel how much I love showing up for them too.
But if we keep just talking to women, whether at our members’ clubs, or in the work kitchen, or on our panels or in our supportive but women-only whatsapps, these conversations are destined to remain the same.
I also fear that our feminist stridency in recent times is having some awful, albeit unintended, consequences.
In Caitlin Moran’s book What About Men?, she makes a point that has really stuck with me. Women in their 40s and 50s understand the context of feminism’s current wave. We grew up with mothers and grandmothers who were stifled by shamelessly overt sexism. My grandmother, a single parent, was denied credit to buy furniture because she had no husband to be her guarantor. My mother urged me to study to have the career she was denied: at 15, poverty forced her into leaving school for work, and the only option presented to her was a secretarial course. My great aunt was shamed into hiding with her ‘illegitimate’ pregnancy and then forced to give up her son for adoption.
We know why our mothers urged us to press for more. In recent times, the guttural cries of ‘Me Too’ and ‘Believe Women!’ were part of an urgently needed course correction. It explains the influx of books in the last few years about things like ‘Great women of history’ to the T-shirts for toddler girls that say ‘Girls can do anything!’ or just good ol’ ‘Girl Power!’
Caitlin’s book argues that an accidental result of all this cheerleading for women is that a whole generation of boys have now only ever heard the message that women are wonderful and invincible and always in the right and men are over-privileged, toxic and violent. This is why the likes of Andrew Tate have been able to sweep in with an alternative narrative, telling young, directionless young men and boys, in the midst of a 21st century identity crisis, that their problems are the fault of over-entitled feminists. His solution is to try to shove us back to running between the kitchen and the bedroom and he’s riled up a lot of impressionable young future men into agreeing. We won’t convince them to have a rethink by shutting the door to our secret girls’ room and moaning amongst ourselves about misogyny.
Is it possible that we bear some responsibility here? I’m sure as a women’s magazine editor I have played my part. In the well-intentioned desire to empower young women, have we forgotten that men need to be part of the conversation?
‘Women need to support other women’. Yes, yes, this we know and my god, we do support each other. But when does this bigging up of women become something that teeters from being empowering and supportive into something that’s dangerously patronising? We should not still be marvelling at the amount of women MPs in parliament as Vogue did recently. It’s really not much progress to speak of if we’re still regarding female MPs as unicorns. Frankly I’m sick of T-shirts that say ‘girls can do anything’. We wouldn’t have to keep saying it if was a given. In fact, the only steps towards ‘equality’ in the T shirt space, seems to be that now you buy ones that say things like ‘Boys can wear pink too.’ The T shirt would not need to protest this if everyone truly was cool with boys showing their feminine side. So it seems we’re all still stuck, in 2024, in sexist, stereotyping narratives.
So what do I think we should do? Lol, I don’t know. But can we at least start talking about it? To move onto a new phase where we stop talking to only other women about women? Maybe invite some successful men to networking conversations, along with the successful, inspiring and empowered women. And don’t vilify anyone who has the guts to include men in women’s conversations. That does tend to be a kneejerk response doesn’t it: ‘Oh, so for Women’s Day we’ve asked a man to speak on the panel… *slow hand clap*/*social media outcry*.’
I for one want to know what men are thinking about salary equality, or being a dad who would also like to squeeze seeing the nativity play in between meetings. No it’s notallmen who say gross things about women, when they think we’re out of earshot, but what are you guys saying to the ones who do?
If we can start pointedly bringing more men into these conversations, perhaps we can actually reach a point where everyone realises these issues - work, ambition, success, family - are not gendered issues at all. They’re just human ones.
What do you think?
I love this! I’m in finance, so I work with mostly men. I’m happy to see them being engaged dads and also supportive of equality in the workplace. I also value my spaces for women, I went to all a women’s college, which I absolutely loved, but we have to involve men in the conversation, too. In my opinion, that’s how we get real, lasting change.
Great topic for conversation Jo. I could say quite a lot about it! But in short, I’m proud to work for an employer who is addressing exactly this. The Women’s Network isn’t just for women. They host events where men speak on panels as allies and come along as attendees They are sponsors and active participants. Menopause at Work sessions aren’t just hosted by women, for women. I’ve seen the room full of men; some of them asking questions about how they can support the women in their teams going through menopause. None of them are making feeble jokes about being ‘banned’ because it’s ‘just for women.’ To me, it feels genuine and authentic. I wonder how many other companies have this approach.