In the month of August, I’ve been writing mainly about politics and reduced the frequency of my other type of content like personal development and travel significantly. This was due to our upcoming elections on 11 September 2015.
Traditionally, I track my reader’s demographic by looking at the breakdown of the Facebook followers I have. Last month, I started using Google Analytics instead of the built-in analytics platform on blogger. This gave me a better insight into the type of readers I was getting.
I checked my Google Analytics recently and found some unexpected results after focusing on politics primarily for a month.
What disturbed me was that the proportion of female readers I had fell significantly. Previously the ratio was about 50:50 (based on my follower count on Facebook). Now, female readers only constitute 35.8 percent!
I used to think that I had fewer female commenters because they were less vocal and didn’t like confrontation in general. However, numbers don’t lie I guess.
I did some research about this phenomenon and realized that in general, women are less aware about political issues and active. This is the case even for rich and developed countries in the world.
Professor James Curran, Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre at University of London, carried out a research by interviewing 10,000 people across 10 countries – Australia, Canada, Colombia, Greece, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Norway, the UK and the US.
The survey contained 8 questions and in every country, men scored better than women in their own country. British men scored an average of 5.8 correct answers out of eight on subjects such as the name of the United Nations secretary general, the national unemployment rate and what job Vladimir Putin did. Their female counterparts failed the test scoring 3.9/8 on average.
Researchers report that besides having lesser knowledge, women are also more disconnected from the political process; inclined to say they are not interested in politics and more inclined to say politics are complicated and difficult to understand,” reported the researchers.
Here is why:
1) The lack of female representation
First of all, men are more likely to be encouraged to take part in political activity than women. Ananalysis of primetime TV news coverage found it was “heavily weighted towards male sources”, with women interviewed and cited in fewer than a third (30%) of news stories.
Instead, women were interviewed for topics such as “family, lifestyle and culture”.
According to co-author of the research above, Kaori Hayashi, gaps in exposure to media are related to the gaps of knowledge between men and women.
“Such under-representation and topical bias of women in news media may curb women’s motivation to acquire political knowledge actively, and discourage them from political participation, and even prevent women from engaging as citizens in a democratic society,” he said.
Curran agreed with him saying that “Politics is projected as a man’s world and that encourages a sense of disconnection…It’s enormously off-putting for women to be looking at the news as always being about men,”
This situation is worsened by the fact that women are always super underrepresented in governments across the world.
Looking at the candidates for General Elections, I can’t help but notice there are so few women representatives when we constitute 50 percent of the population.
For the Worker’s Party candidate list, I could only find four women out of 25 candidates. The Singapore Democratic Party has only three women out of 11 candidates. Reform party has 0 female candidates out of 6. PAP’s numbers are no better as well though I’ve noticed they try to have one female representative in every GRC. Then again, they have more people and more resources.
Singaporean female politicians have differing views. According to Sim Ann, “in politics, women get it a lot worse than men… Names heaped on women are nastier”. I definitely agree with her because of what poor Tin Peiling had to go through in 2011. =(
SPP’s Jeannette Chong believes this is could also be due to “ruling party’s focus on co-opting military men and reliance on old boy’s networks is limiting the space in the front bench for equally capable women who do not come from those backgrounds.”
Either way, I really hope to see more women contesting in the next elections!
Emma Watson a good role celebrity model who focuses on doing well at school and championing causes like environmental protection and women’s rights.
2) Women lack confidence to discuss sociopolitical affairs
A separate study also found that a mere 20% of op-eds are written by women. While women wrote more frequently than men about so-called “pink” topics (like family concerns and home life), they were almost mute on matters such as Occupy Wall Street and other protests or rallies (14% of commentaries), international politics (13%), and the economy (11%).
According to Katherine Lanpher, an instructor for the Op-Ed Project, a group that works to increase the diversity of voices in the media, this is due to self-confidence.
She observed that women will write in when they feel certain they have specialized knowledge of a subject, whereas men don’t feel they need much more than a strong opinion or an interesting idea.
She explains:
“A significant part of the problem appears to be that women just don’t have confidence that their opinions matter, or that they are informed enough. Therefore, they don’t bother aiming for the op-ed pages…they are usually the first people to say, ‘Oh, I’m not an expert in that, you could find someone better to talk to,’” “‘What if someone who knows more calls me on it?”
3) Women’s interest are defined by society
Life isn’t just about fashion and beauty
In the magazine section, book shops or in online portals like elite daily, you often see a section titled “Women” or “Women’s interest”. The thing that falls under this category will be cooking; beauty; lifestyle; fashion; parenting; how to get boys to like you etc. So perhaps from this type of social conditioning, many women begin to develop narrow interests in these areas.
Furthermore, what I find disturbing in society is that women are mostly taught to focus on beauty alone. Female characters on television rarely have much character development beyond their main role of being ‘pretty’ or the ‘object of male attention’. Of course this is gradually changing with the rise of movie characters like Katniss in Hunger Games and Tris Prior in Divergent.
Similarly, in interviews with female actresses, they are often asked dumb and shallow question like their fitness regime or skincare secrets. This includes even smarter actresses like Angelina Jolie and Natalie Portman.
4) Women care more about harmony
Research has shown that women are, on average, more concerned with connecting to others and maintaining group harmony. They care more about what others think of them; how others feel and less likely to debate.
Thus, while men are likely to hold their ground, act independently, and refuse to conform, women are more likely to conform to the opinions of others in order to prevent social disagreement.
Perhaps due to these personality differences, women are less interested in politics where one has to make a stance about an issue or voicing it out.
As we move closer to the General Elections period, I’d like to encourage more women to pay attention to current affairs and social issues.
It is really important because ultimately who gets selected determines the path we will take over the next decade. Do you want more foreign talents in Singapore? Do you want more affordable housing? Would you like a less stressful education for your children next time? All these is determined by your vote and who you choose.
Politics is not a ‘guy thing’. Neither is it too ‘cheem’ or difficult to understand. It is not a topic you need to be an expert in to discuss. What makes you think you know less than the coffee shop uncle anyway?
I really hope to see more ladies coming forward to participate in the political process whether it is championing a cause they care about; expressing a political stance or even running as a candidate.
Source: www.jeraldinephneah.me
