There are few women featured in our histories of science, economics, literature, politics, or indeed any other field of global development. The icons that dominate discoveries and world-changing events are almost invariably male.
For a long while, the assumption – mistaken, prejudiced and frankly just a bit silly – was that women were absent from these narratives because they don’t have the capability for greatness. The accusation still put to women today when they argue with compelling evidence that women are just as smart, capable, inventive and influential as men is: if this were the case, why are women so absent from such histories?
The answers are straightforward: for centuries women weren’t given opportunities or recognition for their work. And the fact of being female was enough to have even the highest calibre of work disparaged. Author George Eliot published under a male pen name to be taken seriously. Today, JK Rowling uses a gender-neutral name for the same reason.
Until recently, women were married young and child-rearing occupied the bulk of their lives. Their capabilities were not given space to be nurtured. In the arts, raw talent needed training, exposure and patronage. Women were routinely denied this. In science, women were excluded because of the need to voyage abroad or to have peer discussion through men-only societies.
Even when women did excel, they have been forgotten or erased. Fatima Mernissi’s book The Forgotten Queens of Islam asks why so few female state leaders exist in the annals of Muslim history and concludes it’s because female leaders don’t fit happily with the narrative that greatness is male.
This week, I was honoured to be placed on the BBC’s list of 100 women, which aims to feature women making an impact around the globe. The media is a field dominated by male voices and the BBC 100 Women is designed to bring the debate about the challenges facing women to the forefront, at the same time as establishing female voices as mainstream.
Female experts are severely lacking in the public domain. There is still the argument that if women were really good enough, then they would be called up. But that’s not how influence works: those who fit the ideal of expertise are called up, and that face today is still male.
Lists of women leaders, entrepreneurs and authors are increasingly common, but we need them to normalise the face of the expert as independent of being male or female.
This is not discriminating in favour of women and excluding talented men. It is righting a historic one-sidedness that has seen women excluded from public influence, through short-term activity designed to normalise women’s expertise in the public domain.
Once we find it completely normal that women are just as capable, competent and expert, then such lists will disappear. Until then, we need them to put right the imbalance suffered over millennia.
That hasn’t been just a loss for women, but for society as a whole, missing out on half of our population’s talent and innovation. If we’d had all those solutions, just think how much further we’d have progressed.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www. spirit21.co.uk
