Equality on the frontline | Mary Ann Sieghart, Minna Salami and Maya Oppenheim

what or who are men defending women from and the answer of course is other men [Music] should we abandon the idea that women should be defended by men Marianne would you lead us off sure well I'd like to start from the premise that in all but one respect women are absolutely equal to men women are just as intelligent as men if you look at the IQ

distribution women's and men's IQs are identical except at the very far ends of the bell curve and if you look at academic achievement actually girls and young women outperform boys and young men at every stage of the educational process from kindergarten right through to PhD so intellectually we are absolutely men's equals were just as competent as men in fact lots of studies show that women are

more competent than men in certain regards houses sold by women tend to raise more by female estate agents tend to go for higher prices and those sold by male estate agents female sergeants are slightly more successful at saving lives than male surgeons so in lots of respects women are certainly is good and in some sense is better they also actually make marginally better leaders than men

so one interesting academic study asked subordinates to rate their bosses and people who worked for female bosses rated them much higher than people who worked for male bosses though the male bosses rated themselves more highly than the female bosses and in studies of types of leadership transformational leadership is seen to be the most successful transformational leadership is leadership in which you engage your employees you are

more democratic less sort of top-down and hierarchical you inspire them you listen to them and women on the whole meta studies show make better transformational leaders than men but I did say in one all but one respect and that respect is physical size and strength and we're never going to change the fact that on average men are just bigger and stronger than women men can rape

women men can kill women men can beat up women in any hand-to-hand combat is very likely that the man will win and I know personally I feel much safer walking home from the tube with my husband at night than I do walking on my own and I'm very happy for him to defend me in those circumstances I just you know feel much more protected and much

more safe where my husband is there with me as I would probably with almost any man I feel much less vulnerable to attack and we're never going to be able to change that but beyond that I want to recast the notion of men defending women from a sort of rather old-fashioned chivalric patriarchal notion to a much more modern one men as allies of women now in

the book I've recently written The Authority Gap I talk about all sorts of behavior that happens routinely to women however senior they are in work contexts and also in Social context which is women being underestimated being patronized being interrupted and talked over having their ideas ignored in favor of men's having their expertise challenged and having their Authority resisted and this is a sort of behavior that

I would really like to change it's only going to happen if men change their behavior and Men start acting as allies to women and in that sense I would love men to defend us and Beyond just the authority Gap behavior when it comes to the gender pay Gap and much worse thing such as sexual harassment violence against women um you know calling names uh sort of

sexist behavior on the street public offenses I would like other men to say to men who display this sort of sex system misogynist Behavior this is no longer acceptable in other words to defend us against continuing sexism in society and my view is that if you it's very similar to racism so if you look back 10 or 20 years it was quite common though horrible in

a group of white people for a white person to make a casually racist joke that is no longer common because the other white people will say oh I'm you know I'm not putting up with that that is no longer acceptable you can't do that anymore and so I would like in groups of men if they see any sort of sexist or misogynist behavior taking place that

they call it out and that's a sort of Defense that I would like to see from men for me as a woman that they start saying to other men this is as unacceptable as racism and then the old-fashioned sexist dinosaurs will feel just as marginalized as racists do today thanks very much indeed Marianne a very clear exposition of that opening position could we turn to you

you know and this question of should we abandon the idea that women should be defeated a certain defeated undefeated defended defended by men of course Hasty recovery uh women should defeat men maybe um should women be defended by men so two things that I want to say about that the first is I think the question is very revealing of how we think about um men defending

women especially in terms of War um so embedded into the question is the idea that men actually go to war in order to defend women and the follow-up question from that is what or who are men defending women from and the answer of course is other men and if that is true that men are defending women from other men then it is also true that women

live in patriarchal societies um which of course then means that yes on some level women do need to be um defended from the Societies in which we live but the question I think is also and importantly especially telling of how we continue to erase women from history because women are not actually defended by men even in war situations so women suffer disproportionately from war um Wars

exacerbate inequality both during the war and after the war they increase rape obviously sex trafficking domestic violence so what exactly is it that women are being defended from at the end of the day and secondly the Erasure of women from history and from our current narratives happens um when we frame the question in this way because women actually defend themselves um women have always done that

women have always fought in Wars so even in in Ukraine today about I don't think there's an accurate estimate yet because the war is still ongoing but about 30 000 of the soldiers in Ukraine were women um these are tens of thousands of people who are in combat um so who these women are defending their country you know they're not it's not men who are defending

women um I Googled the word soldier in preparation for this discussion and I had to scroll through countless Pages before a single image of a female Soldier came up um so you know we're completely erasing the fact that women are in combat and have been for very long um King Charles the first he actually had to create a law that said that women were not allowed

to dress as men because so many women were dressing as men in order to go into into combat um in the UK it's not until 2015 that David Cameron during David Cameron's role that women were allowed to enter combative roles in the UK Army so women have been banned from defending themselves but that doesn't mean that they they haven't done so um so ultimately and and

I also want to add you know of course uh you know women have not only defended themselves in combat in armies if you look at black women's history you have slave revolts that took place throughout the the centuries these are ways of women engaging in in fighting so yeah uh men don't defend women um they defend the idea of the male hero who defends women you

know Mina thanks very much indeed and let me turn now to address this question of should we abandon the idea that women should be defended by men to my oppenheim Maya hello everyone so yeah should we abandon the idea that women should be defended by men I mean yeah I find that a paternalistic condescending view to take you know it costs women as de facto children

as second-class Citizens but saying that you know if another human being sees another human being you know being attacked or in any way harm I do think they should stand up for them but I'm going to look at this question in relation to war because that seems to be you know the main Crux of the debate so the notion that men you know the majority of

people that make up military positions are men you know it is women that are more likely to stay home in situations of conflict the notion that that is the case because men are out defending women yeah I don't agree with that that feels very erroneous I would say is because you've got dependence in society that we've got children you know babies and children who without someone

to look after them will die the best person to stay home to look after them the person that you know is gonna their presence will result in the child having you know least trauma will be the parent often the mother is closer to the child so it makes sense for the mother to stay home we still live in a society where the burden of unpaid labor

Falls heavily on women women are far more likely to take on the Lion's Share of child care to look after elderly sick relatives I think that you know I'm against forcing conscription on women given we live in a grossly unequal Society it will just deepen an entrench already existing equal inequality you know women are subjected to grave human rights abuses around the world women already disproportionately

suffer during war there are so many you know facts I can tell you to back this up but yeah I think that you know as you've said Global gender-based violence increases also women and girls are overrepresented in populations that are displaced by War women often you know women are physically more vulnerable in the sense that you know women get pregnant women are reliant on contraception abortions

these things do not stop in a conflict Zone also the fact that you know 70 of um of those that die in Modern War are civilians many of these are women and children so yeah my conclusion would be if we lived in a gender equal Society well I think there would be less Wars but if we did live in a gender equal Society I would believe

in conscription for men and for women but given we don't then conscription for both will just deepen pre-existing inequalities to continue watching this video click the link in the top left or in the description below or visit iai.tv for more debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas