In reviewing last year, I looked at a list of everything I had ‘delivered’: writing sent off for publication; teaching done; students submitted; talks given; … I find it helpful: it is too easy to remember the stuff I didn’t manage to do, of which there is always much, and focus on that. (For the first time I also had a heading for things I had intentionally stopped doing, which wasn’t a long list, but is something at which I intend to work harder.) One of the things that gave me most satisfaction to note was the public launch of Project 3:28, a small collective of people working towards gender justice in the church, who have come together to do some specific things.
It came out of Natalie Collins‘s collation of statistics on the gender of speakers on UK conference platforms in 2013, which I blogged about here; a group of us got together to talk about whether we could do anything; Project 3:28 is the result. We’re working on several strands, but the first one went live yesterday: gender statistics for UK conference platforms in 2o14, again compiled by Natalie. The headline number was encouraging: in 2013, of the 431 speakers at conferences we counted, 24% were female; in 2014, we counted 1081 speakers, and 34% were female. Natalie tweeted from the project account (@project328) through the morning, posting award certificates for the five conferences with the best gender balance and the five with the most improved gender balance.
We’ve not yet reviewed the reception as a team, but I think when we do we will be pleased. There was media coverage from Premier and Christian Today - hopefully the print sources will also notice us - and a fair amount of buzz on social media, most of it positive and encouraging. Of course there were a few negative lines, some of them rather silly. ‘Didn’t we know that already?’ some asked. No, we didn’t, not the precise numbers, or the year-on-year change, or the conferences that were doing better than most. ‘What a waste of money!’ opined several; I think it has cost us, between us, nearly £250 so far – a fair chunk of that the price of the meal where we first got together to plan, which was generously paid for by an all-male conference (via a speaker’s fee they gave to one of us…). Then we had the classic spurious alternative – ‘shouldn’t you be concentrating on … instead?’ Hey, we saw an issue that we thought we could do something about; that doesn’t mean we don’t care about other issues – and in every case I’ve so far seen mentioned, at least two of us have been actively & publicly involved in addressing the issue elsewhere (unlike, generally, the complainant). Finally – my favourite – ‘A much simpler way would have just to read [sic] any literature advertising the event and play spot the female photo & name’; What did you think our research method was? Stealth photography in green rooms? DNA testing of skin residues left on microphones? Compulsory urine samples as speakers left the platforms?!
One comment keeps coming back though: ‘don’t we want the best speakers?’ Yes. Yes we do; that’s most of the point. On the assumption (and it is an assumption, but it is one I believe to be well founded in Scripture) that God gives gifts to people regardless of gender, roughly half the ‘best’ speakers should be female, where ‘best’ = ‘most gifted’; if our platforms are 75% or 66% male, then we are not getting the ‘best’ speakers.
The problem is, though, that ‘best’ means more than ‘most gifted’; it means also ‘most experienced’, and so we get a vicious feedback loop: we want the same names and faces on every platform, because they have learnt through long experience how to do it well, and because they are famous names and so draw the (paying) crowds. I’ve organised conferences; I can write that list in the UK evangelical scene – and it is indeed 70% male. But I can write another list of speakers who are just as – or even more – gifted, in many cases who I would much rather hear, who are slightly rawer, for lack of experience, and much less famous – and that list is majority female.
We came together in the Project 3:28 collective knowing this; round the table when we first discussed ideas were some veterans of the UK conference scene: Wendy Beech-Ward, Paula Gooder, Krish Kandiah, Rachel Jordan, me, … This is why intentional action is needed. The conference circuit operates as its own breeding ground: you get brought in to assist at a side-show because someone has heard that you might have what it takes; succeeding there, you get more and more invites to bigger and bigger platforms. At every point on the way up, though, the process is gendered. Young men are more likely to be given a chance than young women, unless someone is very intentional about it. Women are more likely to doubt their own competence and say no; the hard yards on this road come when, if you have family, your children are young, and it is generally harder for a mother than a father to accept invitations to be away from home. These latter two comments reflect current sociological realities which are not the fault of conference organisers – but if we are serious about wanting the ‘best’ speakers, we need to be working at overcoming such social barriers in order to make sure that those with the most potential, male or female, are given the chance to gain experience and so to develop into the ministry for which God has gifted them.
This post originally appeared on Steve Holmes' blog, Shored Fragments, and we are grateful for his permission to reproduce it here on Fulcrum.
Steve Holmes is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Director of Operations,
School of Divinity, University of St Andrews
Editor, International Journal of Systematic Theology (www.ijst.org)
“I’ve organised conferences; I can write that list in the UK evangelical scene – and it is indeed 70% male. But I can write another list of speakers who are just as – or even more – gifted, in many cases who I would much rather hear, who are slightly rawer, for lack of experience, and much less famous – and that list is majority female.”
Since conferences are about ideas as well as persons, Steve’s comment hints that, for the time being, the proportion of women getting a hearing is an indicator (though not a measure) of our openness to fresh thought. Making room for more women’s voices is not a sufficient cause of renewal, but it seems to be an indispensible part* of it.
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* Strictly, an INUS cause: independent, non-redundant, unnecessary, sufficient.