Breaking the bias: confronting the realities that hold women back in society

When the human rights barrister Helena Kennedy QC used International Women’s Day to release her much-anticipated report into how misogyny should be factored into the criminal justice system, she offered up a helpful definition of what misogyny actually is.

Though the popular imagination casts it as a straightforward hatred of women by men, the Labour peer wrote in her report that the group who assisted her in compiling it had come to the conclusion that misogyny is better defined as “a way of thinking that upholds the primary status of men and a sense of male entitlement while subordinating women and limiting their power and freedom”. 

“The definition makes it clear that misogyny is not about seeking to exclude women from society; it is not about wanting to banish them from communities,” she wrote. “Misogyny, as defined, allows for women’s inclusion, but on patriarchal terms.”

Kennedy – who has urged the Scottish Government to create three new crimes that highlight how misogynistic attitudes influence some offending behaviour and make misogyny an aggravating factor in a range of other crimes – was writing specifically with those legal recommendations in mind.

But, in a year when International Women’s Day was themed around biases and how they continue to hold women back, her statement about the role the law has to play in society could not have been more apt. “Law matters in a society,” she wrote. “It tells us who we are, what we value, who has power and who hasn’t.”

Helena Kennedy QC

Speaking at an event to mark the launch of the report, Kennedy elaborated on that statement, noting that she is urging the government to create a Misogyny and Criminal Justice Act because discrimination and bias will never be eradicated from society until there are laws that have women – and, not least, the explicit protection of women – at their heart.

“I have practised at the bar for many decades, a lot of my work has been around violence against women and girls, and I’ve written extensively about gender-based law; the law has always been from a male perspective,” Kennedy says.

“We’ve been working hard to try to introduce a wider perspective into the law so it delivers better but if the underpinning framework is based on ways of thinking that maintain the position of women as secondary – and often there are unconscious biases – then something more is needed. […] I hope this concentrates minds on why the law is not serving women well.”

If the law is so integral to society but is not serving women well, the implication is that society is not serving women well either. That can be seen in everyone’s day-to-day dealings, with things such as the gender pay gap highlighting the degree to which the most-senior and best-paid jobs continue to be filled mainly by men while women tend to do the bulk of the less economically advantageous work.

But Rosie Campbell, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, says it can be seen on a far grander scale too, with current geopolitical events such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine being driven very much by a masculine agenda that women and girls are having foisted upon them.

“It’s hard to measure but it seems clear to me that gender is playing a significant part in what’s going on in the world right now,” Campbell says. “Toxic masculinity is part of the make-up of the populist hyper-masculine leaders of which [Russian president Vladimir] Putin is the example par excellence. He’s a well-known misogynist who is surrounded by a coterie of hyper-masculine men. It’s a deliberate performance of masculinity that is damaging to women.”

Sometimes you have equality without systems that foster equality but then things revert in times of pandemic or war

The idea that women are victims of men’s wars is a theme that was taken up by SNP MSP Michelle Thomson when, earlier this month, she dedicated a Holyrood debate marking International Women’s Day to the women and girls impacted by the conflict in Ukraine.

“We know that women and girls caught up in conflict suffer hugely – and with women and children making up the bulk of the huge number of refugees who have crossed the borders from Ukraine […] it is essential that we recognise their plight and do all we can to help them,” she said. “Too often protecting women and girls from violence is seen as an afterthought. Already we have seen the fetishisation of women choosing to fight and the threat of sexual violence being used as a ‘weapon of war’.”

Yet while the impact of war is easy to see in terms of the death, destruction and displacement it causes, Karen Boyle, professor of feminist media studies at the University of Strathclyde, says it is significant that this year’s International Women’s Day was themed around bias because “that challenges us to think not just about what’s really obvious or explicit, but about the assumptions that shape our everyday lives and that impact men, women and non-binary people differently”.

“There’s lots of really explicit discrimination we could talk about, and that does fall into the realm of bias, but what’s more interesting about using bias is that it challenges us to look at the everyday and how our assumptions are gendered and how they impact on our aspirations and the opportunities we look at,” Boyle says.

“The idea of gender roles increases vulnerability for both groups in different ways – with war it creates women and children as refugees and it creates men as combatants. That’s the extreme version of what we’re seeing but these things impact on our everyday interactions.”

In many ways the overt biases that held women back for centuries have been broken already. In Scotland we have had a female first minister for close to a decade, the current parliament is the most diverse it has ever been (not just in terms of gender but race and disability, too) and – notably, given Kennedy’s comments about the role the law has to play in society – our two most senior law officers are women: Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain and Solicitor General Ruth Charteris.

Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain (left) and Solicitor General Ruth Charteris 

It is a situation that is replicated around the world, with institutions in traditionally male-dominated sectors like finance being led by women – the World Bank by managing director Anshula Kant, the European Central Bank by president Christine Lagarde and the International Monetary Fund by managing director Kristalina Georgieva. Even in the legal world Kennedy notes that, while society is still held together by laws written by men and for men, inherently misogynistic crimes such as rape – though still grossly under-prosecuted – now carry significant sentences rather than the rap on the knuckles and discharge that was common when her career was starting out.

However, Boyle points out that while it is undoubtedly positive to note the progress women have made, unless and until the biased systems that held them back in the first place are dismantled, there is always the risk that things are going to regress.

“If you look at the make-up of boards or parliaments you can see if they don’t reflect the populations they serve and you can do something about it – it’s not easy to fix but you can do it,” she says.

“One of the problems is that there’s too much emphasis on the idea that by eradicating bias you would get a 50/50 gender split in the Scottish Parliament, for example. On one level if there was a 50/50 split between men and women that would be good but if you don’t do the work to see what distorted it in the first place, it’s only certain kinds of men and women who will be there. Do you have a system that fosters equality? Sometimes you have equality without systems that foster equality but then things revert in times of pandemic or war.

“What seems to be the most straightforward answer is to look at things like quotas or hiring practices, but ultimately the only way to foster complete equality is to undo gender bias and that involves all of us, not just governments or the law. It requires rethinking what’s at stake for everyone in these systems as, ultimately, change will never happen without some people having to give up some power.”

In the corporate world there has been much emphasis on unconscious bias training, the idea being that if everyone is made aware of the biases we all assimilate through being part of society we can take action to address them. There is some evidence that it works, too. In the Scottish legal sector, which was an early adopter of diversity training, there has been a huge shift in recent years, with practically all the large corporate firms now either led or co-led by a woman.

Yet Alys Mumford, communications and engagement manager at feminist organisation Engender Scotland, agrees with Boyle that such initiatives only work if something is done to address the system that created the imbalance in the first place.

“Unconscious bias training does help but it doesn’t work if it doesn’t come with structural changes,” she says. “It’s supposed to go along with saying things like ‘let’s look at our recruitment practices – do we have blind recruitment? Do we ever ask why we didn’t get more women applying? Can we get the tools to investigate why [women’s approach to applying for jobs] is different?’”

What’s interesting about using bias is that it challenges us to look at the everyday and how our assumptions are gendered and how they impact on our aspirations and the opportunities we look at

Mumford notes that while the pandemic impacted disproportionately on women – who were more likely to be in frontline caring jobs than men, more likely to bear the brunt of unpaid caring roles and more likely to end up losing their jobs – the fact that so much data has been gathered on that shows that it is possible to identify, and so break down, the biases that continue to hold women back.

“Data is a big thing,” she says. “There’s a need for really good quality data to identify where the gaps are and to contradict some of the myths we hold about the different lives of men and women and the different interests of men and women. The Women in STEM campaign [which is focused on dismantling the stereotype that women and girls are not interested in, and so shouldn’t study science, technology, engineering and maths] was a really good example of that.

"Things like that are really vital. The Scottish Parliament [under Presiding Officer Alison Johnstone] is looking at female representation but also whether women are being funnelled into committees that are seen as soft, such as health and education, while men are doing budgets. That will be really important.”

In Scotland at least there is the hope that something significant can be done to reverse the negative impact of the past two years while also breaking the biases that maintain the misogynistic (in Kennedy’s definition of the word) status quo.

Kennedy believes that, if it implements the recommendations of her report, the Scottish Government will be able to start shifting the dial on the kind of misogynistic biases that have built up over millennia and that continue to pervade all areas of society. Creating laws designed specifically with women at their heart won’t change things overnight, she says, but if they aren’t created things will never change at all.

“If we don’t shift this we will never have a just and fair society,” she says. “This is the baseline of where all discrimination comes from; it’s where it’s learned.”