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The visibility and equality of women were front and centre this week. Feminism, as a word, can stir negative emotions in many, despite the vast percentage of people championing its cause of equality of the sexes. Our Presidential candidates were grilled on it over the weekend. They spoke of initiatives to promote women in the workplace and to increase female participation in politics. And with little over a week to the election, you can read Ciara Leahy’s interviews with all six of the Presidential candidates on pages 12-14.
On Friday last I spoke at the Washington Ireland Programme responding to the students’ paper on the Future of Rural Communities. The students were charged with writing papers that supported their Visions for Ireland 2040 and equality was a strong theme. They want to see equality in action as opposed to just on paper in all aspects of life; political, social, educational and legal. They also challenged themselves to stay bold, quoting: “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is himself an alumnus of this programme.
When the Taoiseach announced his cabinet in 2017, he was criticised for the low percentage of female appointments, claiming at the time that he would include more women if there were more in the Dáil. Women made no strides in last week’s re-shuffle, but a Government spokesperson said that a significant change with more gender balance would most likely take place when the Taoiseach “re-shuffles the cabinet properly”. Frances Fitzgerald was quoted saying that she is now focussing her attention on getting more women into politics to secure a 50:50 gender balance in the next cabinet.
Over the weekend, there was quite the twitter-gate over a photo celebrating the launch of the VistaMilk Research Centre. Research carried out there aims to enhance dairy sustainability by addressing challenges right along the supply chain, from the soil through to the human gut. All very positive, yes. The issue had nothing to do with the programme, it was down to that fact that there was a lack of diversity in the pictures. This caused a backlash of tweets calling out the centre as being unsupportive of women, although those in the picture were the appropriate choice on this occasion.
The furore was arguably unwarranted, considering that 40% of the leaders of the nine targeted projects are women and the initiative has an even greater female representation on the scientific and industry advisory boards. That said, actually seeing these women is really important in terms of showing role models to encourage more women into STEM. However, what it did do was raise awareness that in the agriculture sector, there is often not a huge amount of gender diversity at senior level, on panels and in launch photographs. Tokenism is not the aim, the appropriate people need to make up the panels, attend the launches, get elected and get promoted for the betterment of the industry and the country. There is a rising tide in support of better gender diversity which is a positive development and for young girls to see agriculture as an attractive career option, they need to see other women front and centre. However, everyone who wants to be in the picture needs to put their name in the hat.
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