well thank you very much Sara and to the
two previous speakers I’ve got a lot to
compete with now now I’m guessing that
most of you in this room have heard an
expression called mansplaining it’s when
a man lectures a woman at great lengths
and with great confidence about a
subject that she knows more about than
he does and it arose after an article
written by a distinguished act academic
historian called
Rebecca Solnit now Rebecca Solnit had
found herself at a party in Aspen and
they’re slightly patronizing slightly
older male host had asked her what her
recent book was about now she was only
halfway through the title which
mentioned Victorian photographer called
Eadweard Muybridge before he cut her off
and said that now I wonder if you’ve
read the very important book about
Edward my bridge that came out this year
and she was rather flummoxed by this
because she thought blimey I didn’t know
anyone else had written a book about
this rather arcane subject so while she
was wondering how to respond her friend
who was next to her said to him well
that’s her book he took no notice he
carried on lecturing her about this very
important book about Edward my bridge a
hundred beckus knowledge soulmates
friends had to say three or four times
that’s her book before it sunk into him
that he who hadn’t even read this very
important book but had only read a
review of it in the New York Times was
explaining to the author of this very
important book what it was apparently
about now this misunderstanding arose
because he couldn’t believe that a woman
I mean a woman after all could have been
the author of a terribly important book
and as she wrote in this article
afterwards it so confused the neat
categories into which his world had been
sorted now this is a problem that tends
to reflect afflict all professional
women I’m guessing I’ve certainly come
across it I’m sure quite a lot of you
have this sense of a man usually when
you meet him for the first time under
estimating your ability that his default
assumption is you’re not actually going
to be as good as in reality you are
now this is a classic conversation I
can’t tell you how many times certainly
when I was younger any way that I would
have this conversation I’m at a party I
meet a man he says what do you do and I
say I have to tell you first of all I’d
spent 20 years working for The Times as
a journalist and I was I’m not very seen
but I’m just turning I was assistant
editor and art said as a comment editor
political lead writer political
columnist and acting editor okay so what
you do I’m a journalist
freelance ah no starting at the bottom
okay no actually I’m a staff journalist
oh he says and who do you work for well
I work for The Times oh he says and what
did you do that and his voice rises in
pitch well with everything I tell him
and I think he thinks he’s being
flattering that I should be flattered
that he is impressed but actually I’m
insulted because what he’s saying is I
assumed you were going to be boring and
junior and now it turns out that you’re
not and I never used to have the
confidence to say anything to this
interlocutor until well I’ve you know it
doesn’t happen so much now because I’m
older but eventually I started saying
just a lot of interest would you start
the conversation in the same way if I’ve
been a man and he usually looked you
know a little bit shifty and said well
no I probably wouldn’t have done so by
no means all men are like this and in
fact I’m pretty sure that the men in
this room are meticulous in showing
equal respect to their male and female
colleagues and wouldn’t dream of
mansplaining to anybody so please don’t
take this personally a few guys that are
here but there are just so many studies
now that prove the existence of both
conscious and unconscious bias against
women of course against other minorities
or not that were minority but you know
against I think minorities too that I
really think it’s worth examining so
let’s start with a very quick experiment
hands up those of you who have read a
book written by a female author in the
last six months
great now hands down if you’re female
I salute you gentlemen because all the
statistics showed that women will read
roughly half and half books written by
men and women men will read roughly 80%
books written by men now Lisa Jardine
who is the great historian at Queen Mary
University she did a study she
interviewed a hundred academics writers
and critics so these are people really
at the top of their game and she wanted
to find out what sort of literary
fiction they read and she found exactly
those statistics and asked which novel
by a woman they had read recently a
majority of men couldn’t even answer now
Esquire magazine drew up a list of they
called it the 80 best books every man
should read which they then described as
the greatest works of literature ever
published out of those 80 guess how many
were written by man 79 and the one
female book a one the woman had a
gender-neutral first name so they
probably didn’t even realize she was a
woman and that is why of course female
authors like George Eliot and JK Rowling
have had to either change your disguise
their names to get man and boys to read
them so it’s not just that women’s
voices aren’t taken seriously enough
it’s that they’re often not even being
listened to or read in the first place
and how can you get your voice taken
seriously if it’s not even being heard I
don’t know whether those of you on
Twitter notice there’s a big fast the
Twittersphere got very excited and cross
a few months ago when a big data company
called listed ran an analysis of the ten
most influential political journalists
on Twitter during the general election
campaign every single one was a man now
the most powerful political journalist
in the country
Laura Coons Berg the BBC political
editor is female she didn’t even make
the top ten so this company decided to
delve a bit further to try and find out
what the problem was and they discovered
that male journalists were four to five
times more likely to be retweeted than
female ones
now of course retweets are everything
that’s that’s what gets you heard is you
know spreading what you say through
every
what he else his followers too and this
is true more generally there was an
analysis done by Harvard Business Review
which found that men are almost twice as
likely to follow another man on Twitter
than a woman even though women make up
55% of of Twitter users and they’re much
more likely to retweet a man than a
woman as well I’m sorry to say this is
not corrected by women following other
women because actually women also
disproportionately follow men but not
quite to the same degree now some of you
might be secretly thinking maybe this is
justified but maybe men and women you
know they’re writing different things
and saying different things and maybe
women just aren’t as good or as
interesting as men well it’s quite a
good way of checking this so a group of
researchers from Microsoft and IBM they
got together they conducted an
experiment in which they showed a series
of tweets to participants and they just
rotated the supposed gender of the
author and they asked how credible was
the information presented in these
tweets well guess what both men and
women found the tweets more credible
when they were supposedly written by man
than by a woman and this was even more
pronounced when the tweets were about
political topics and you got the same
problem in academia similar sub a
similar experiment was done where these
academics wrote an abstract of a
scientific article they showed it to
scientists and they rotated the gender
suppose it gender of the author and if
it was written by a man it was deemed to
be of higher scientific quality than if
it was written by a woman so it’s not
about innate difference in ability okay
and I sure you’ve all come across this
thing about blind auditioning for
symphony orchestras
yeah because symphony orchestras used to
be you know 98 percent male plus a
harpist and the men would say oh well of
course it’s absolutely no it’s entirely
done on merit it’s nothing to do with
discrimination it’s just frankly at the
highest echelon of instrumental playing
you know men are really rather better a
little better at it than women so they
introduced Blind Auditions
now behind a curtain so that the
auditioners couldn’t see who is playing
it didn’t want to start with because
they could hear from the footsteps
whether the folk player was wearing
heels or flats use so they said okay
we’ll do it barefoot and guess what they
started
I earn 5% more women than men entirely
on merit
I’m not saying women are actually better
at music men but we are at least as good
okay there is one other way of testing
whether women are innately worse at
their jobs for men or whether some of us
just assume that they are maybe even
subconsciously assume they are and this
one sounds really anecdotal but it
because it only concerns two people but
it’s actually incredibly scientific and
I’ll explain why okay
as it happens to Stanford professors
have quite recently transitioned from
one gender to the other in middle-age
one of them has gone from being a woman
to a man and the other has gone from
being a man to a woman the one who
changed from a woman to a man
immediately found he was listened to
more he was respected more and in fact
someone who was unaware that he had
changed gender was heard saying Ben
Berry’s gave a great seminar today but
then his works so much better than his
sisters this was the same person with
the same brain okay
giving exactly the same seminar but it
was seen to be so much better and he now
says I’ve had the thought a million
times
I’m just taking more seriously now I
mean while the one who changed from a
man to a woman guess what found exactly
the opposite suddenly she was being
taken less seriously she was being
talked over in meetings she was finding
it almost impossible to get money for
research and her salary started drifting
down from being above average to being
in the bottom 10% of professors so
enough whinging actually I’m not really
winning I’m just telling you what the
facts are but what’s more important is
what can we do about it because we can
change things and the most important
thing I think is to acknowledge that
this bias exists even in ourselves even
in women it exists but we can try to
correct for it to build a bridge between
our bias and what is actually the case
so if you’re on Twitter for instance you
have a look at who you’re following are
you following many more men than women
and if so ask yourself why maybe that
the business you’re in is dominated by
men but nonetheless it’s worth examining
are you retweeting men more than women
or is it roughly equal and what about
the books and newspaper columnist
the bloggers that you read are you
according as much authority to two women
as two men and and if you’re a man and
you don’t think you’d enjoy for instance
reading fiction written by women I can
reassure you they’re not all Argus
augers there are people like Hilary
mantel and an AS Byatt out there who are
really fabulous novelists and when
you’re appointing people to jobs
it’s also worth examining how you go
about it a bunch of Harvard academics
were puzzled by the fact that they seem
to keep appointing men even though they
were convinced that they weren’t biased
themselves they didn’t want to be biased
so they brought in an Assessor to have a
look at their process what the Assessor
pointed out was when a really promising
young guy applied for a job and he met
only three out of the four criteria that
they had set down for the job they said
oh look he’s so good at those three will
forgive him it’s all right we’ll let him
take the job but when a woman met only
three out of the four criteria they
disqualified her because she didn’t meet
the fourth and that just changed the way
they appointed their staff I’m really
not too pessimistic actually because I’m
sure that the young are innately less
sexist than the older generation so I
really do think things will improve over
time and I also think that as as many
more women get appointed to really
senior jobs in this country which has
been happening brilliantly I think in
the last five years so you know you’ve
got Queen the Prime Minister the Home
Secretary the first secretary of
Scotland had a Supreme Court
commissioner of the Met Director of
Public Prosecutions
maybe our expectations of how capable
and authoritative women can be will
begin to adjust but in the meantime if
you find yourself listening to a woman
on the radio as I occasionally do and
find that the tambour of her voice is
getting in the way of you taking her
seriously then just give herself a
little slap on the hand and listen to
the contents of what she’s saying I mean
I do that a lot actually I’m ashamed to
say because we all have this bias just
as I you know I hate it when I I find
myself walking down the street and a
young black guys walking the other way
and I find myself clutching my handbag
and I think no don’t
we can’t entirely get rid of our biases
because they’re called subconscious for
a reason
we can at least correct for them and if
I sound didactic I’m sorry because I
hope I haven’t been women splaining to
you
[Applause]
two previous speakers I’ve got a lot to
compete with now now I’m guessing that
most of you in this room have heard an
expression called mansplaining it’s when
a man lectures a woman at great lengths
and with great confidence about a
subject that she knows more about than
he does and it arose after an article
written by a distinguished act academic
historian called
Rebecca Solnit now Rebecca Solnit had
found herself at a party in Aspen and
they’re slightly patronizing slightly
older male host had asked her what her
recent book was about now she was only
halfway through the title which
mentioned Victorian photographer called
Eadweard Muybridge before he cut her off
and said that now I wonder if you’ve
read the very important book about
Edward my bridge that came out this year
and she was rather flummoxed by this
because she thought blimey I didn’t know
anyone else had written a book about
this rather arcane subject so while she
was wondering how to respond her friend
who was next to her said to him well
that’s her book he took no notice he
carried on lecturing her about this very
important book about Edward my bridge a
hundred beckus knowledge soulmates
friends had to say three or four times
that’s her book before it sunk into him
that he who hadn’t even read this very
important book but had only read a
review of it in the New York Times was
explaining to the author of this very
important book what it was apparently
about now this misunderstanding arose
because he couldn’t believe that a woman
I mean a woman after all could have been
the author of a terribly important book
and as she wrote in this article
afterwards it so confused the neat
categories into which his world had been
sorted now this is a problem that tends
to reflect afflict all professional
women I’m guessing I’ve certainly come
across it I’m sure quite a lot of you
have this sense of a man usually when
you meet him for the first time under
estimating your ability that his default
assumption is you’re not actually going
to be as good as in reality you are
now this is a classic conversation I
can’t tell you how many times certainly
when I was younger any way that I would
have this conversation I’m at a party I
meet a man he says what do you do and I
say I have to tell you first of all I’d
spent 20 years working for The Times as
a journalist and I was I’m not very seen
but I’m just turning I was assistant
editor and art said as a comment editor
political lead writer political
columnist and acting editor okay so what
you do I’m a journalist
freelance ah no starting at the bottom
okay no actually I’m a staff journalist
oh he says and who do you work for well
I work for The Times oh he says and what
did you do that and his voice rises in
pitch well with everything I tell him
and I think he thinks he’s being
flattering that I should be flattered
that he is impressed but actually I’m
insulted because what he’s saying is I
assumed you were going to be boring and
junior and now it turns out that you’re
not and I never used to have the
confidence to say anything to this
interlocutor until well I’ve you know it
doesn’t happen so much now because I’m
older but eventually I started saying
just a lot of interest would you start
the conversation in the same way if I’ve
been a man and he usually looked you
know a little bit shifty and said well
no I probably wouldn’t have done so by
no means all men are like this and in
fact I’m pretty sure that the men in
this room are meticulous in showing
equal respect to their male and female
colleagues and wouldn’t dream of
mansplaining to anybody so please don’t
take this personally a few guys that are
here but there are just so many studies
now that prove the existence of both
conscious and unconscious bias against
women of course against other minorities
or not that were minority but you know
against I think minorities too that I
really think it’s worth examining so
let’s start with a very quick experiment
hands up those of you who have read a
book written by a female author in the
last six months
great now hands down if you’re female
I salute you gentlemen because all the
statistics showed that women will read
roughly half and half books written by
men and women men will read roughly 80%
books written by men now Lisa Jardine
who is the great historian at Queen Mary
University she did a study she
interviewed a hundred academics writers
and critics so these are people really
at the top of their game and she wanted
to find out what sort of literary
fiction they read and she found exactly
those statistics and asked which novel
by a woman they had read recently a
majority of men couldn’t even answer now
Esquire magazine drew up a list of they
called it the 80 best books every man
should read which they then described as
the greatest works of literature ever
published out of those 80 guess how many
were written by man 79 and the one
female book a one the woman had a
gender-neutral first name so they
probably didn’t even realize she was a
woman and that is why of course female
authors like George Eliot and JK Rowling
have had to either change your disguise
their names to get man and boys to read
them so it’s not just that women’s
voices aren’t taken seriously enough
it’s that they’re often not even being
listened to or read in the first place
and how can you get your voice taken
seriously if it’s not even being heard I
don’t know whether those of you on
Twitter notice there’s a big fast the
Twittersphere got very excited and cross
a few months ago when a big data company
called listed ran an analysis of the ten
most influential political journalists
on Twitter during the general election
campaign every single one was a man now
the most powerful political journalist
in the country
Laura Coons Berg the BBC political
editor is female she didn’t even make
the top ten so this company decided to
delve a bit further to try and find out
what the problem was and they discovered
that male journalists were four to five
times more likely to be retweeted than
female ones
now of course retweets are everything
that’s that’s what gets you heard is you
know spreading what you say through
every
what he else his followers too and this
is true more generally there was an
analysis done by Harvard Business Review
which found that men are almost twice as
likely to follow another man on Twitter
than a woman even though women make up
55% of of Twitter users and they’re much
more likely to retweet a man than a
woman as well I’m sorry to say this is
not corrected by women following other
women because actually women also
disproportionately follow men but not
quite to the same degree now some of you
might be secretly thinking maybe this is
justified but maybe men and women you
know they’re writing different things
and saying different things and maybe
women just aren’t as good or as
interesting as men well it’s quite a
good way of checking this so a group of
researchers from Microsoft and IBM they
got together they conducted an
experiment in which they showed a series
of tweets to participants and they just
rotated the supposed gender of the
author and they asked how credible was
the information presented in these
tweets well guess what both men and
women found the tweets more credible
when they were supposedly written by man
than by a woman and this was even more
pronounced when the tweets were about
political topics and you got the same
problem in academia similar sub a
similar experiment was done where these
academics wrote an abstract of a
scientific article they showed it to
scientists and they rotated the gender
suppose it gender of the author and if
it was written by a man it was deemed to
be of higher scientific quality than if
it was written by a woman so it’s not
about innate difference in ability okay
and I sure you’ve all come across this
thing about blind auditioning for
symphony orchestras
yeah because symphony orchestras used to
be you know 98 percent male plus a
harpist and the men would say oh well of
course it’s absolutely no it’s entirely
done on merit it’s nothing to do with
discrimination it’s just frankly at the
highest echelon of instrumental playing
you know men are really rather better a
little better at it than women so they
introduced Blind Auditions
now behind a curtain so that the
auditioners couldn’t see who is playing
it didn’t want to start with because
they could hear from the footsteps
whether the folk player was wearing
heels or flats use so they said okay
we’ll do it barefoot and guess what they
started
I earn 5% more women than men entirely
on merit
I’m not saying women are actually better
at music men but we are at least as good
okay there is one other way of testing
whether women are innately worse at
their jobs for men or whether some of us
just assume that they are maybe even
subconsciously assume they are and this
one sounds really anecdotal but it
because it only concerns two people but
it’s actually incredibly scientific and
I’ll explain why okay
as it happens to Stanford professors
have quite recently transitioned from
one gender to the other in middle-age
one of them has gone from being a woman
to a man and the other has gone from
being a man to a woman the one who
changed from a woman to a man
immediately found he was listened to
more he was respected more and in fact
someone who was unaware that he had
changed gender was heard saying Ben
Berry’s gave a great seminar today but
then his works so much better than his
sisters this was the same person with
the same brain okay
giving exactly the same seminar but it
was seen to be so much better and he now
says I’ve had the thought a million
times
I’m just taking more seriously now I
mean while the one who changed from a
man to a woman guess what found exactly
the opposite suddenly she was being
taken less seriously she was being
talked over in meetings she was finding
it almost impossible to get money for
research and her salary started drifting
down from being above average to being
in the bottom 10% of professors so
enough whinging actually I’m not really
winning I’m just telling you what the
facts are but what’s more important is
what can we do about it because we can
change things and the most important
thing I think is to acknowledge that
this bias exists even in ourselves even
in women it exists but we can try to
correct for it to build a bridge between
our bias and what is actually the case
so if you’re on Twitter for instance you
have a look at who you’re following are
you following many more men than women
and if so ask yourself why maybe that
the business you’re in is dominated by
men but nonetheless it’s worth examining
are you retweeting men more than women
or is it roughly equal and what about
the books and newspaper columnist
the bloggers that you read are you
according as much authority to two women
as two men and and if you’re a man and
you don’t think you’d enjoy for instance
reading fiction written by women I can
reassure you they’re not all Argus
augers there are people like Hilary
mantel and an AS Byatt out there who are
really fabulous novelists and when
you’re appointing people to jobs
it’s also worth examining how you go
about it a bunch of Harvard academics
were puzzled by the fact that they seem
to keep appointing men even though they
were convinced that they weren’t biased
themselves they didn’t want to be biased
so they brought in an Assessor to have a
look at their process what the Assessor
pointed out was when a really promising
young guy applied for a job and he met
only three out of the four criteria that
they had set down for the job they said
oh look he’s so good at those three will
forgive him it’s all right we’ll let him
take the job but when a woman met only
three out of the four criteria they
disqualified her because she didn’t meet
the fourth and that just changed the way
they appointed their staff I’m really
not too pessimistic actually because I’m
sure that the young are innately less
sexist than the older generation so I
really do think things will improve over
time and I also think that as as many
more women get appointed to really
senior jobs in this country which has
been happening brilliantly I think in
the last five years so you know you’ve
got Queen the Prime Minister the Home
Secretary the first secretary of
Scotland had a Supreme Court
commissioner of the Met Director of
Public Prosecutions
maybe our expectations of how capable
and authoritative women can be will
begin to adjust but in the meantime if
you find yourself listening to a woman
on the radio as I occasionally do and
find that the tambour of her voice is
getting in the way of you taking her
seriously then just give herself a
little slap on the hand and listen to
the contents of what she’s saying I mean
I do that a lot actually I’m ashamed to
say because we all have this bias just
as I you know I hate it when I I find
myself walking down the street and a
young black guys walking the other way
and I find myself clutching my handbag
and I think no don’t
we can’t entirely get rid of our biases
because they’re called subconscious for
a reason
we can at least correct for them and if
I sound didactic I’m sorry because I
hope I haven’t been women splaining to
you
[Applause]
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