Erasure of Women from Public/Cultural life:

Surely the real issue is not why there are not equal numbers of male and female artists/scientists/theatre directors selected for cultural events, awards, etc.

Surely the real issue is why there are not equal numbers of male and female artists/scientists/theatre directors, full stop.

Shortlists for cultural events, awards, etc will usually (and should) reflect who is at the top of their profession. The imbalance in the shortlists just reflects the imbalance in the profession itself.

If there are fewer women at the top of that profession, we should not adjust the shortlists, we should try to help more women get to the top of that profession. (Assuming of course that they want to. But I bet lots of them do).

I think its a good article. Very true.

A valid point well made.

Thanks for posting blackcurrants.

What crap.
She is the embodiment of right-on/ethnic/disenfranchised/fringe arts/self absorbed misery.

Oooh, go Bidisha!

The thing is that if you are running an event you need to be pretty clear about the importance of equal representation, otherwise it just won't happen. If you expect it to happen because there are lots of women writers (or whatever category), it pretty much won't. That's why female-only shortlists are really important, to help redress the political balance; that's why positive discrimination is needed, because otherwise it won't mend itself. People argue that positive discrimination is also unfair; but actually it's just one sort of attempt to level the playing field.

I'm one of a group of people who run a comics convention in Oxford, and even though women are and have historically always been well-represented on our committee, we always have to be careful to consider whether we've got a balance of women speakers as well as men, because otherwise even though we're aware of the issue, we're likely to end up looking at the line-up saying 'damn, how did that happen? only 2 women!' or whatever. (We also aim and mostly succeed in including GLBT speakers and concerns; but we're not very good at ensuring that our speakers and indeed audiences aren't mostly white middle-class people.)

The related archive article at the bottom is "Katie Price - a life in pictures"

Good article, quite depressing realisation though as it isn't something I thought was commonplace anymore but actually, it's all around me.

i reckon more women wre asked but they were at home looking after thebabies where they should be

Just goes to show how complicit I've become, when I read that and think to myself: scenario x showcases 12 men and four women, that's not bad. Urgh, can you imagine if men were consistently under-represented like this?