When I was a young copywriter trying to make my way in the very blokey world of advertising, I was regularly the only woman in meetings. I found the experience daunting and worried that my contributions would not be up to scratch. I often berated myself once a meeting was over for either saying too much or too little.
One day, we were discussing an issue with a client that might cost the agency a lot of money. I had an idea. I debated whether I should speak up but finally screwed my courage to the sticking point and said my piece. Everyone looked at me as if I’d just crawled out from under a rock. I was silently beating myself up for being an idiot when my boss repeated what I’d said word for word, but without any acknowledgment.
Suddenly, every man in the room thought it was a brilliant idea. I just sat there, mouth hanging open, wondering if I was going mad. I remember feeling like a pane of glass, as if I didn’t really exist. I have since learnt that this is a common experience for women in male-dominated situations.
Not being able to accept that someone you consider an inferior (young, junior, female, different ethnic background, working class, hijab-wearing, whatever) could come up with a good idea is bad enough, but taking the credit for that idea is annihilating.
The number of brilliant women (and others from marginalised groups) who have been sidelined by such bigoted assumptions is devastating but, what’s worse, it looks set to continue in the future.
Many have fought against it. Virginia Woolf pointed out that for most of history “Anon” was a woman. The late, great Australian feminist Dale Spender wrote a book called Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. You cannot get any clearer than that.
Yet, thanks to the manosphere, we are seeing a resurgence of the factually nonsensical idea that women have contributed nothing but their wombs to humanity. Watching men, and they are all men, posting such click (and chick) bait far and wide has helped me understand why it is so essential to patriarchy that women’s contributions, ideas, creativity, talents and skills remain either undeveloped, mocked, silenced or stolen. It is to prove that we are intrinsically inferior, not quite human – not in the way men are, anyway – and therefore not entitled to human rights. Dehumanisation, as we have seen over and over, is the prelude to oppression.
The number of women who have had their ideas stolen is countless. Many of them we will never know about, but some are being unearthed. Most of the beautiful lithographs created for John Gould’s famous bird books were drawn by his wife Elizabeth. While she was alive, he only took half the credit attributing them to “J & E Gould”. Barely acknowledged for Elizabeth’s contributions while alive, it got worse after she died.
The great Australian writer and columnist Charmian Clift was overshadowed by her more famous husband, George Johnston, during her lifetime and is only now being credited with much of the work they did together. The quality of the work she did alone is also being re-assessed. Her husband now stands accused of stealing a character of Charmian’s, a woman she invented as an avatar for herself. A theft that threw her into despair. There is currently a documentary screening on SBS On Demand, Life Burns High, about Charmian and her thwarted genius. (Full disclosure, I am in it.)
But it’s not just in Australia that women have seen their work ignored or credited to a bloke. I recently watched the film Joy, which dramatises the invention of IVF. It ends on a poignant note: one of the three major players in the creation of reproductive technology, nurse/embryologist Jean Purdy, was left off a plaque crediting their work. Her name was eventually included on a plaque unveiled in 2015.
Rosalind Franklin, who took the famous, landmark “Photo 51” image of DNA, had her work used without permission to help two men win the Nobel Prize. Here are other women who had their contributions ignored: Lise Meitner, co-discoverer of nuclear fission; Jocelyn Bell Burnell, pulsars; Nettie Stevens, sex chromosomes; Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin, what stars are made of. And it’s not just science or literature that are subject to such larceny. Lizzie Magie designed The Landlord’s Game only to have it stolen and rebadged as Monopoly.
In fact, sexism is so powerful it affects all females, not just human ones. Charles Darwin and almost every male scientist who followed in his footsteps believed that only male songbirds actually sang. When a few women were finally allowed to become accredited ornithologists and have their work taken seriously, they soon discovered that in more than 70 per cent of bird species, female birds also sing. Talk about not being able to hear female voices.
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