On 1 September, I did a conversation with Ms. Pallavi Pareek from Ungender on why we need to address the issue of Manels and why it is important to have inclusion, balance and diveristy in our panels, industry boards and management.
The conversation can be found here.
This is the not the full transcript but a mere preview of some of the issues we discussed.
Manels are also a reflection of the blindness towards this bias. For instance, in the past few months, I have spoken to many of these Manel organisers and it doesn’t even occur to them that they are doing anything wrong. They are just not conscious of the fact that they don’t have any women on the panel and that there is something so wrong about it.
Recently, you have also been seeing so many Manels on TV shows – be it discussions on China or Pakistan… there is so much of women expertise on the subject and yet you see dozens of men. There was one discussion on one of the Indian TV channels had 12 men speaking on China and they are not even the top experts on the subject whereas you have equally good or even more substantial women who are China experts but why are they absent? The worst is that the person came out defending with the silliest of arguments saying time zone issues etc. one would have thought that with the lockdown and everything taking place in the virtual space, it might be easier for women to be part of many of these conversations. But sadly, that is just not the case.
This is because many of these meetings/ conferences are organised by senior men and they simply call their friends and peers whom they know already because it is also a small clique. They just have not made the effort to reach out to women, expand their circle of their peers.
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