Dismantle the manel

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A fintech summit is set to take place in the capital later this week, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry. Last week, the organisers put out a poster of the “key speakers”. There were eight of them, all of them men.

Ironically, the poster was titled ‘Financial Inclusion 2.0’. While women have been beneficiaries of the government’s financial inclusion initiatives, such as the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana and Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, and are known to invest the extra money they receive in their children’s health, nutrition, and education, they still remain largely absent on fora where they are discussed and their voice matters.

When U.S. President Donald Trump hosted a bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in May, economist Gita Gopinath, previously the number 2 official at the IMF, posted a picture (above) and captioned it, “A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.”

An all-male panel or manel is exactly what it sounds like: a group of men assembled to speak about everything from scientific achievements and geopolitical crises, to the art of writing films and the growth of the restaurant industry. Sometimes, they even have gyaan to offer on women’s rights. (I wish this was a fact I had learned from The Onion, but in 2017, for instance, U.S. President Donald Trump chose two male millionaires to advise him on women’s workplace issues.) All the organisers of these events conveniently forget the female experts or perhaps assume that they are too busy balancing work and housework to attend dull conferences.

Last week, a “manel” of a much larger size was seen gathering in Karnataka, at the State Legislature’s monsoon session, no less. The session began with “not even a symbolic representation of women,” wrote Bageshree S ., The Hindu’s Karnataka Chief of Bureau. When Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, who belongs to the Congress — a party that has been arguing for 33% reservation for women at the national level — was asked why there was no woman in his 33-member Cabinet, he responded that there was “no urgency”.

This gave an opportunity for the BJP to take potshots at the Congress. But the party is hardly in a position

to claim the high ground: the 72-member Council of Ministers in the Modi government has just seven women.

One woman decided to tackle it with humour. In 2015, Dr Saara Särmä, a researcher in International Relations at the University of Tampere in Finland, began collecting images of manels on Facebook. Soon, she began to receive contributions from people. She then added a photo of Baywatch star David Hasselhoff giving a thumbs up to each post. In an interview to The Guardian, she said, “He’s the embodiment of white masculinity, so I think it worked really well to have him congratulating these people on their job well done – you put together an all-male panel.”

That was 11 years ago.