Where are the Women?

Many may argue that the appointment of Christine Lagarde to head the IMF is a triumph for women’s equality.  And although we are yet to see what will substantively change with a woman in charge, the debate on how women can compete with men and how they make a difference has flourished.  Time Magazine even published an article entitled “Why Women are Better at Everything. “ This is all very exciting and surely a provocative piece to stir the debate.

But when it comes to high-level events, where important African movers and shakers share platforms with their international counterparts, the lack of female representation is evident. Although women often represent 30%-50% of the participants or attendees, there are still few women on the panels or female keynote speakers. An example is the Commonwealth Business Council's Africa Business Forum (held last week in London), that brought together investors, regulators and prominent African leaders.  During a two day event, no women were seen in any of their panels -although the Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General, Ms. Mmasekgoa Masire-Mwamba, did moderate a session.

Another recent example is the Friends of Europe Africa Summit held in Brussels only a few days ago. This event brought together African and European figures, some of them female, but again, no women on the speakers’ list. This omission was recognized by the organizers during the session, but that does not change the blatant lack of female representation.  Last month at the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, there was only one woman among the six co-chairs - an APP member, Linah Mohohlo. Some people at this week’s AU Summit had no idea there was a Pre-Summit on Gender and Development taking place as well. The list of events goes on…

This lack of representation certainly is not due to a lack of amazing, competent, articulate or accomplished women out there, including African women. This inadequacy is due to an inability to break the status quo, which is predominantly male; a failure to connect the dots, and fairly feature women and their accomplishments; and ultimately a weak effort to represent reality, which of course involves women in a broader sense. 

This reminded us of a recent post in Good Magazine that argued that “white men should refuse to be on panels of all white men”.  We would argue that this idea could and should go even further: men should also refuse to sit on all-male panels.

After all, Africa’s women are key to the continent’s development and their voice should be more present at all events. Perhaps the outcome of these events may have been different had there been more women on stage.