Tag: Gender segregation

  • Sisters contact

    Damion Thompson reports at the Telegraph (yes, I know – the Telegraph) that the University of East London said No to gender segregation at an event on its campus.

    I blogged yesterday about this “segregated” Muslim event organised by the Islamic Society of the University of East London, due to happen tonight at UEL’s main lecture theatre on its Docklands campus.

    Much to my surprise, UEL immediately banned it from their campus. See the reaction below by Peter Tatchell, who brought this to public attention:

    Check out the poster for the event.

    SEGREGATED EVENT, spelled out right there on the poster, and then segregated numbers for the “brothers” and “sisters” to contact.

    Update:

    The New Ham Recorder has more.

    The dinner event, organised for tonight by the University of East London’s Islamic society, advertised it as a “segregated event”, and had separate booking phone numbers for “brothers” and “sisters”.

    But UEL pulled the event after human rights activist Peter Tatchell lobbied Vice-Chancellor John Joughin, warning the seating arrangement would breach equality law.

    The Day After Tomorrow event – which charged £5 for tickets – would have seen a lecture theatre at the UEL’s Docklands campus strictly segregated, with women and men sitting apart.

    Concerns were also raised about statements made in the past by two of the preachers booked to appear.

    A spokesman for UEL said: “The society will not be permitted to use any of UEL’s facilities or premises to host this event. “We have made it very clear to the organisers that the university will not tolerate segregation or hatred in any form.”

    The UEL Islamic Society was not available for comment at time of press.

    Mr Tatchell thanked UEL for the move, saying: “Gender segregated seating violates the university’s equal opportunities policies and the equality laws.

    “The swift, positive response of UEL stands in contrast to some other universities which, in the name of tolerance, collude with Islamist intolerance by allowing extremist preaching on university premises.”

    It’s interesting that those other universities are very high-status ones while UEL is not. Similarly, Brandeis is not East Topeka Community College. I wonder why it’s the high-status universities that are so woolly on this issue.

  • Only male lecturers are assigned

    More gender segregation at universities and colleges, this time in Israel. (Sorry about that site – it sticks a share button on the margin where it blocks some of the text and you can’t move either the button or the text. Top notch design, there, Al-Monitor.)

    Israel is trying to get more ultra-Orthodox to do some work besides poring over the Talmud, but there are complications.

    The Council for Higher Education (CHE) reported to the Knesset in February 2014 that many ultra-Orthodox men would like to study in the coming academic year. However, it seems that most will not do so, because they refuse to study in institutions where men and women sit together in classrooms.

    Girl cooties. Can’t go to university, can’t get higher education, because girl cooties. There is nothing worse than girl cooties. Starvation and being eaten by bears is preferable to girl cooties.

    For more than a decade now, universities and colleges in Israel have offered various programs aimed at solving this problem. Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University and the University of Haifa sponsor such projects and offer academic degrees to students of ultra-Orthodox colleges, which practice gender segregation. The students work from the campuses of those colleges, removed from the regular university faculty and students. In recent years, however, these universities have also offered such programs on their own campuses. The Israel Technology Institute and several universities opened college-preparatory study programs for men only, to which only male lecturers are assigned.

    “Some of the ultra-Orthodox students will agree to continue on for their degrees in the regular mixed classrooms after a year of preparation in the college-preparatory program,” explains Orna Kupferman, the vice rector of the Hebrew University, charged with integrating ultra-Orthodox students. “Others can study in mixed settings on the condition that they have a spiritual support framework that helps them maintain their lifestyle, something that the Hebrew University offers them. True, the programs are not necessarily compatible with liberal values such as gender equality, but that is a price we are willing to pay to live in a multicultural society and enable the ultra-Orthodox to integrate into the labor market and society,” she said.

    Who is “we”? What does it mean to “live in a multicultural society” where some people are systematically shunned and treated as contaminants? In what sense are the ultra-Orthodox [men] integrating into the labor market and society if they are shunning women in the process?

    Some things are non-negotiable. Equality should be one of them. Treating people as contaminants should not be countenanced. Women’s right to participate should not be a bargaining chip.

    …it seems that one of the key demands of ultra-Orthodox candidates for higher study is the enforcement of gender segregation in the classrooms. Among other things, this demand dictates that female lecturers will not teach male students, while male lecturers will be allowed to teach women.

    See? That gives it away, doesn’t it. Male lecturers will be allowed to teach woman, because that still maintains the hierarchy, but female lecturers will not teach male students, because that would put a woman above some men, and that will not do.

    People should stop paltering and bargaining with this shit. It is not ok.

    According to Adina Bar-Shalom, an ultra-Orthodox activist who founded an ultra-Orthodox college and for which she will be awarded the Israel Prize this year, the non-ultra-Orthodox public puts the ultra-Orthodox in an impossible situation. She said, “On the one hand, society demands of the ultra-Orthodox population that any [male] who cannot study Torah all his life should go to work. This is a justified demand, and the ultra-Orthodox society accepts it. But … if [society at large] is not willing to allow the ultra-Orthodox public to study on its own terms, then the ultra-Orthodox will be consigned to the lowest-level jobs and to lives of poverty and squalor.”

    That’s the nature of social life. To get its benefits, you may have to give up doing things on your “own terms” in every respect. Sometimes your “own terms” are the wrong terms and you just have to give them up. Other times your terms are better than the social norm, and then you should try to campaign for your terms to become the social norm. This is not one of those times.

    Of course, this clash of values does not take place only in Israel. But, according to Noah Efron of Bar-Ilan University’s Science, Technology and Society Department, this dilemma does not usually play out on the background of long-standing culture wars. “The debate with the ultra-Orthodox is a continuation of the modernity and education discourse from the beginning of the 20th century,” Efron explained. “If the ultra-Orthodox want modernity, it is only for pragmatic reasons and without accepting the liberal values that go hand in hand with modernity. The truth is … that most of the secular public does not accept the ultra-Orthodox, and wants to turn them to be more like us.”

    As it was in Little Rock and Birmingham, so it should be at Bar-Ilan and the University of Haifa.

  • Firm to the principles

    Chris Moos updates us on the situation with gender segregation at UK universities. It hasn’t noticeably improved.

    Worryingly even some elected student officials go so far as to openly advocate segregation. Joe Killen, welfare and diversity officer at Goldsmiths Students’ Union opposes bans on segregation based on an alleged “importance of segregation in political movements.” The Women’s Officer of King’s College London Students’ Union, Shaheen Sattar, who is also a National Union of Students delegate, has gone as far as demanding that “gender segregation should be respected, if not tolerated, in institutions of higher education“, as it was “firm to the principles of Islam”.

    What else should be respected because it’s “firm to the principles of Islam”? Stoning? Marrying off girls at the age of 9? Mandatory hijab?

    At my own university, the London School of Economics, the picture is hardly different. Despite the claims of the Students’ Union that segregation would “not be allowed“, the Islamic Society regularly holds segregated ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ circles’. This is institutionally endorsed by the LSE, who recently inaugurated new Islamic prayer rooms, next to a ‘multi-faith’ room for all other religious students, encouraging segregation with the provision of exclusive ‘male’ and ‘female’ Islamic prayer rooms.

    Notice how the most conservative version of Islam is treated as if it were the only version.

    Now, some Muslim scholars suggest that the provision of separate male and female praying spaces in mosques is desirable, whereas others, like the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, do not. In fact, there are numerous examples of Muslims drawing on traditional and progressive Islamic schools of thought, like theInclusive Mosque Initiative, who actively challengesegregation and encourage the full inclusion of women and LGBTQ people into acts of worship. As a place of progressivism and learning, it is hardly understandable why LSE would give its explicit endorsement to the segregation of prayer rooms to the detriment of existing egalitarian approaches within Islam, thereby side-lining progressive Muslims.

    Then Chris points out a truly revolting example of cultural cringe in the form of a chaplain at Keele University.

    LSE and UCL are not the only universities implicitly or explicitly condoning or enforcing gender segregation. An even more worrying example of official endorsement of gender segregation can be found at the University of Keele. On the Facebook page, students can be found discussing an event involving several religious speakers. As one of the student expresses that the Muslim speaker had displayed a “backwards mind-set” by saying that the cutting off of hands as corporal punishment was justified, and that men and women were different so must be treated as such, the university chaplain Reverend James Stewart takes it on himself to retort: “He said cutting off hands was acceptable as a punishment ONLY ONCE certain very specific, very extreme criteria were met. […] It’s a cultural, not a “backward” mind-set.” In the ensuing discussion, several students then go on to express discomfort about the fact that the event was ostensibly gender segregated. In what becomes clear in the following exchange, the university administration, in the form of Reverend Steward, does not only dismiss the concerns of the students, but actively defends gender segregation:

    Some cultures find it easier to stay within their gender groups, is all. […] They [Muslim women] are used to it, and feel protected in their gender roles. It does not impede their enjoyment of the event, but enhances it, as if they were more intermingled the sisters would have felt uncomfortable […] Sitting separate is not “wrong” and I will defend women to go separately if they feel more comfortable to do so […] “Many cultures do this – Sikhs in Gurdwara, many Churches in the past in the west, and now in the East. It isn’t Islam telling them to do this, but their cultural inheritance. It does not abuse or disempower the women in any way, but rather the opposite. Maybe it challenges our Western expectations of what “equality” looks like, but to them it feels like being respected and valued for being a woman.

    Right, and slaves in Mississippi were treated very well by their owners.

  • Nostalgia for Little Rock in 1956

    Ignorant student society proudly announces its rejection of what it ignorantly calls “PM’s call to ban gender segregation” – ignorantly because it’s far from exclusive to the PM and in fact he caught up days after many other people and organizations had issued the same call.

    Ignorant student society proudly announces its view that students should decide how societies are run, including segregating any way they want to.

    The society is SUARTS, the Students’ Union of University of the Arts London. (For an arts students union it has a remarkably crappy website that actually blocks the text of the article you’re trying to read, with no way to unblock it. You can read only a few lines without scrolling.)

    SUARTS rejects PM’s call to ban gender segregation

    The Prime Minister’s call for the banning of gender segregated events at university campuses has been challenged by an SUARTS officer on behalf of UAL.

    Mostafa Rajaai, Culture and Diversity Officer for SUARTS, stressed that students should decide how societies are run, without university or government interference.

    Rajaai told Arts London News: “I believe it is not right to force students to do anything, whether it’s forcing them to sit separate or to sit together. It should be left to the attendees to decide how they want to arrange their seating and if they do decide to sit separately, that is their choice.”

    You see where the problem comes in. Rajaai is simply demanding a return to the bad old days when people were outraged that anyone was “forcing them” to sit among people whose race or class or country of origin was anathema to them. Rajaai thinks the enraged racist mob outside Little Rock Central High School in 1957 was in the right of it, and the National Guard troops who made sure the nine African-American students were able to enter the school and be safe once in were in the wrong.

    Rajaai is also obfuscating, because attendees of course still would be allowed to decide where they want to sit and to sit separately where there was room to do so. All they would not be allowed to do is demand that anyone else defer to their decision to sit separately. I can choose any empty seat on the bus. I can’t demand that anyone move to give me a seat I like better.

    “Members of our Islamic societies, or other societies for that matter, do not need to be told how they should run their events by the university nor the government as they are meant to be autonomous, student-led entities,” he added.

    Yes? What if the ASH society had an event and demanded that the Muslims sit in the back? Would Rajaai think that outcome is fine? I don’t know, but I strongly doubt it. I think Rajaai is coasting on the fact that he knows damn well the ASH society would never make such a hateful demand.

  • Homer Plessy in Edinburgh

    The Student Association of Edinburgh University (EUSA) had a meeting a few hours ago. There were many items on the agenda. One item was a motion by the Humanist Society (a subgroup of the Student Association) to

    Commit to disallowing imposed or directed segregation, based on any characteristic, in EUSA buildings or at EUSA events.

    The Treasurer of the Humanist Society, Jonathan Ainslie, reports that the motion was heavily voted down. Yes that’s right: down.

    Quoting Jonathan:

    The Humanist Society submitted a motion to Student Council – EUSA’s policy-setting body – for a ban on imposed or directed segregation on union premises, or at union events.

    Voluntary segregation was explicitly permitted. The motion was entitled “Separate but Equal.”

    That motion fell heavily, after a number of opposing speeches which either stated or implied that the society’s motivations were racist and Islamophobic.

    Here is the whole motion, available on the Society’s Facebook page:

    Separate but Equal

    What will we do?

    1. Commit to disallowing imposed or directed segregation, based on any characteristic, in EUSA buildings or at EUSA events.
    2. Petition the University of Edinburgh to prohibit imposed or directed segregation in University of Edinburgh buildings or at University of Edinburgh events.
    3. Acknowledge that voluntary non-directed segregation is permissible.
    4. Ask that Universities UK (UUK) clarify their position on segregation.
    5. Ask that the National Union of Students (NUS) clarify their position on segregation.
    6. Publicly endorse and support Stewart Maxwell MSP’s Motion S4M-08419: Universities UK Guidance on Gender Segregation at Scottish Institutes of Higher Education.

    What is the background to this?

    1. Universities UK published guidance that gender segregation at events may be appropriate. The NUS claimed that the guidance had their full support, and was drafted with their assistance.
    2. UUK has since retracted their guidance.  The NUS has since distanced itself from “endorsement” of enforced segregation, but is yet to express opposition to the idea.
    3. Students Rights has noted that at least 40 gender-segregated events took place within a one year period, at 21 higher education institutions in the UK. At one such event, a purely academic debate on Islam and atheism, despite prior assurances to the contrary, three audience members were ejected for refusing to comply with enforced gender segregation.
    4. Segregation on racial grounds is illegal, as noted by Universities UK.
    5. EUSA operates a Zero Tolerance policy towards discrimination based on gender and gender identity.
    6. Gender segregation requires that trans* and non-binary individuals identify themselves publicly.

    The UK Supreme Court deputy president recently ruled that, “To permit someone to discriminate on the ground that he did not believe that persons of homosexual orientation should be treated equally with persons of heterosexual orientation would be to create a class of people who were

    1. exempt from discrimination legislation.”  Allowing imposed gender segregation would similarly create a class of people exempt from discrimination legislation.
    2. Stewart Maxwell MSP has lodged a Scottish Parliament motion opposing segregation in universities.  Michael Gove MP has called the guidance “wrong and harmful”.

    What beliefs motivate the actions you propose?

    1. That EUSA should be pro-active in tackling issues of concern.
    2. That segregation as originally recommended by Universities UK is anathema to the principles of equality, and should not be tolerated.
    3. That “separate but equal” is a pernicious doctrine.
    4. That preventing a person or persons from oppressing others is not oppression itself.
    5. That religiously-motivated discrimination is no more deserving of respect or toleration than is politically-motivated discrimination.
    6. Gender segregation is no more acceptable than would be racial segregation.
    7. If segregation is enforced by gender, the case against segregation by race, religion, sexual orientation and disability has been profoundly weakened.

    [Update to include amendment I omitted for no special reason]
    Amendment 1 (Proposer: Kirsty Haigh)

    Amend ‘What will we do?’ point 1 to read:

    1. Commit to disallowing imposed or directed segregation, based on any characteristic, in EUSA buildings or at EUSA events with the exception of:
    1.1 toilets and changing rooms
    1.2 liberation groups who wish to exclude those who do not self-identify into that particular group

    With a list of signatories at the end.

    Voted down. In Edinburgh of all places. Hume’s statue will haunt their dreams.

    Major thanks to Helen Dale for this.

  • Enormous, disproportionate impact on black minority women

    The Independent reported on the LSESUASH et al. letter to the UN special rapporteur yesterday. That’s good: major media coverage, and non-right-wing major media coverage at that.

    Mr Moos, who was recently involved in a freedom of expression battle with LSE, believes that any type of segregation should be fought and that the UN pressure would help public discussion.

    He said: “We hope that the UN will air their concern about the on-going issue of gender discrimination in public institutions in the UK, and advise the UK government on how to ensure full compliance with the existing human rights legislation that outlaws discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics like gender.”

    As opposed to treating gender as a special case because culture or because religion or because oh shit we don’t want to get into it. (more…)

  • Cambridge student submits legal note to Universities UK against gender segregation

    Joint statement of Southall Black Sisters, One Law for All, Fitnah – Movement for Women’s Liberation and LSE SU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society

    We are pleased to learn of the legal note submitted to Universities UK (UUK) yesterday in the name of Radha Bhatt, a student of Cambridge University, against their Guidance condoning gender segregation.

    We share Radha’s apprehensions that gender segregation reinforces negative views specifically about women, undermines their right to participate in public life on equal terms with men and disproportionately impedes women from ethnic and religious minorities, whose rights to education and gender equality are already imperilled.

     Signs assigning different entrances for male and female students at Leicester University; (c) The Guardian

    Radha’s legal submission makes it unmistakably clear that despite UUK’s protestations, the law could scarcely be more unequivocal on gender segregation. The practice is specifically condemned by the Equality Act as amounting to less favourable treatment of women. We hope it will be noted that this condemnation applies equally to ‘voluntary’ segregation, a notorious misnomer used to pressure students to comply with ‘Mixed’ and ‘Segregated’ zones.

     

    The existing rights legislation recognises that gender segregation undermines the dignity of both men and women and creates a hostile, degrading and humiliating environment. We hope Radha’s representations will remind UUK of its Public Sector Equality Duty towards the imperatives of eliminating discrimination, advancing equality of opportunity and fostering good relations between those who share protected characteristics.

     

    Abhishek Phadnis, President of the LSE SU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society commented: “The beliefs of visiting speakers are no excuse to legitimise discrimination against women or any group. We applaud Radha for her principled and courageous stand, and hope that UUK will heed her solicitors’ advice to redraft its guidance to reflect the manifest illegality of gender segregation. Following up on our rally against gender segregation, we are looking forward to continuing to work with Southall Black Sisters, One Law for All and Fitnah – Movement for Women’s Liberation to ensure that the rights of all students in the UK are fully upheld at all times.”

     

    Pragna Patel of Southall Black Sisters commented: “We welcome the legal advice which clearly states that UUK’s position on gender segregation in universities breaches both domestic and international human rights and discrimination law in substance and in process. We note that not a single women’s rights organisation was consulted about the guidance. Had it gone unchallenged, it would have had a profoundly detrimental impact on black and minority women who already struggle to assert their fundamental rights to education, freedom and independence. The whole sorry affair is symptomatic of a bigger battle waged by the religious right (aided and abetted by public bodies like the UUK) to control women’s minds and bodies. We must remain alert to the dangers of religious fundamentalism in all religions because its very goal is to use public spaces to gain power and to destroy the very principles of democracy and the universality of women’s human rights.”

     

    Maryam Namazie, spokesperson for One Law for All and Fitnah – Movement for Women’s Liberation said: “For too long, cultural relativists have excused discrimination against women in the name of ‘respect’ for religious beliefs. Whilst the right to belief is absolute, the right to manifest it is not. Equality must trump religious beliefs, particularly if we want to respect human beings rather than beliefs. Moreover, let’s not forget that Muslims are not a homogeneous group. Endorsing segregation of the sexes means siding with far-Right Islamists – like Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, the Islamic Education and Research Academy and the Islamic Human Rights Commission – at the expense of rights and equality of many Muslims, ex-Muslims and others. We unequivocally support Radha’s stand and will continue to fight for an end to gender segregation at universities, including via teams of sex apartheid busters and a rally on March 8th.”

     

     

    You can find regular updates on our campaign here.

     

    For further enquiries please contact:

     

    Maryam Namazie

    One Law for All and Fitnah – Movement for Women’s Liberation

    maryamnamazie@gmail.com

    077 1916 6731

    @maryamNamazie

     

    Pragna Patel

    Southall Black Sisters

    Pragna@southallblacksisters.co.uk

    02085719595

    @SBSisters

     

    Chris Moos

    LSE SU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society

    c.m.moos@lse.ac.uk

    074 2872 0599

    @LSESUASH

     

  • Fons et origo

    I think I know where Pryiamvada Gopal got her distorted and ignorant idea of the people behind the protest against gender segregation. I think she read a repellent article at “Loonwatch” on the website “Islamophobia Today” titled UK: Islamophobes Manufacture “Gender Segregation” Controversy. It’s wrong in just the way her article is wrong, and it does it a few days earlier.

    The author is billed as “Ilisha.”

    An Islamic society wants to host a university event where–gasp!–men and women are seated separately. Suddenly this minor event is major news in the UK.

    Yes, “gasp,” Ilisha. It’s not just routine and normal for university events to seat women and men separately.

    People who apparently never planned to attend the event in the first place have decided they must publicly protest “gender apartheid,” an intolerable affront to their sensibilities. There is no evidence men and women who planned to attend the event complained, yet the controversy has become the subject of a national debate of such importance, Prime Minister David Cameron has weighed in on the matter.

    What a charming tone – as if people ought not to consider gender apartheid an intolerable affront to their sensibilities – as if institutional inequality should just be accepted, or even embraced.

    The event gained the national spotlight through the efforts of Student Rights, a group affiliated with the Henry Jackson Society. In other words, the “controversy” has its roots in the incestuous Islamphobia network operating on both sides of the Atlantic.

    Emphasis hers.

    See there? The same ignorant mistake Gopal made: thinking Student Rights was behind the protest, when it had nothing to do with it.

    She goes on to give an irrelevant denunciation of the Henry Jackson Society and a bunch of other societies that had nothing to do with the protest, then triumphantly winds up:

    The “gender segregation” campaign in the UK is reminiscent of the manufactured “Ground Zero mosque” controversy a few years back in the US. Once again, a minor (non-)event has been transformed into a national debate by the usual suspects. The purpose is to generate another round of anti-Muslim hysteria.

    As Associate Director at the Henry Jackson Society, Douglas Murray, has openly stated, “Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board.”

    Emphasis again hers. Several paragraphs, none of them relevant to the December 10 protest.

    Not the most reliable or careful source I’ve ever seen.

     

  • Annoying aspects

    Tehmina Kazi, director at British Muslims for Secular Democracy, has an excellent list of

    Aspects of the gender segregation debate that have annoyed and perplexed me.

    That’s on Facebook; there’s also a version re-posted on a blog (in case you can’t see the Facebook one).

    3. Those who are unable to see why it is problematic for a public body like Universities UK to prioritise the whims of external speakers over university public sector equality duties, and THE SPIRIT of equalities law.

    That; very exactly that.

    9. Confusion over the distinction between discretionary segregation (where people randomly sit where they wish, perhaps in same-sex clusters) and organised segregation (which is either enforced by the event organisers, or requested by the student societies in question).

    Minow please note.

    12. Assumptions that those who campaign against gender segregation in university events MUST also automatically oppose it in congregational prayers.  This is not about acts of worship, as Equality and Human Rights Commission Chief Executive Mark Hammond made clear: “Universities can also provide facilities for religious meetings and associations based on faith, as in the rest of society. Equality law permits gender segregation in premises that are permanently or temporarily being used for the purposes of an organised religion where its doctrines require it.  However, in an academic meeting or in a lecture open to the public it is not, in the Commission’s view, permissible to segregate by gender.”

    I hope British Muslims for Secular Democracy grows and prospers.

  • Ah there he is now

    So, to complete the picture, who should chime in at the Spectator but…Douglas Murray himself. And what do you know, he gets it all wrong too. But of course he gets it wrong from the opposite direction.

    He starts by quoting someone unknown who announced that ‘The left doesn’t really matter’. Hooray, he says.

    If there is anyone who thinks that a shame they should just look at the contortions ‘the left’ is going through now over the issue of gender segregation. This is the process – which has been occurring on certain university campuses for some time and which a number of people, including colleagues of mine, have long highlighted – that consists of separating audiences according to gender. This segregation occurs because of the demands of some immoderate Muslims.

    Anyhow – having been around as an issue for some time, the process has finally been picked up on more widely with such a head of steam that Channel 4 News has repeatedly focussed on the matter, there has been a public demonstration against such segregation, and now the Prime Minister himself has come out opposing it.

    See? Got it wrong. The demonstration came first, and then Channel 4 News focused on it, first by reporting the demonstration. The demonstration caused the Channel 4 focus; we can tell this because the focus began with the demonstration. And who organized that demonstration? Why, the left. Not the whole of the left, certainly, but the big chunk of it that cares about rights even for female members of minority “communities.”

    Which led me to spend some of the last hour reading the contorted posts and messages which self-described ‘leftists’ have been exchanging about all this and I think it is fair to say that there are several divides. A small number recognise that separating men from women in publicly funded institutions is a concerning and backward trend. Others disagree with that and (Muslim and non-Muslim) agree with that large number of people globally who believe that religion trumps women’s rights. Most interesting, though, are those who see that there is a problem with gender segregation but are fearful of saying so. The particular reason – and this really is a fascinating window into their minds – is that if they do oppose gender segregation they will put themselves in the same camp as certain ‘right-wing’ or ‘conservative’ people. Worse they will risk putting themselves on the same side of the argument as ‘right-wing’, ‘conservative’ people who are also male and possibly even have white skin. I discover that David Cameron and I are often cited as examples of where all this horror can lead.

    He’s taken Gopal’s lead, and diminished and minimized the part played by the anti-Islamist left, although he doesn’t disappear it entirely the way she did. “A small number,” he says, then proceeds to drop that large chunk of the left which negates everything he so breezily says about the left. He’s not interested in us, he’s interested in the Gopal variety, so interested that it blots out all the others.

    A plague on both their keyboards.

  • Concerns about the motivation

    Daniel Trilling at the Rationalist Association blog offered their position on gender segregation today. He started with Gopal’s article.

    The piece raised concerns about the motivation of the pressure group Student Rights, which has been campaigning on the topic, and the way in which the story had been picked up by the media, but argued that such concerns should not prevent people from criticising the policy.

    No, not exactly. Gopal was exceedingly unclear that her concerns were only with Student Rights and the way the media picked up the story. Exceedingly unclear. It was not at all clear that she wasn’t talking about the people who organized and publicized the December 10 protest that triggered the media coverage. If that’s really all she meant to say, she did a very clumsy job of it.

    Take the third and last sentence of her opening paragraph for instance.

    For us, it is especially difficult to practise a commitment to gender equality and social change in a context so heavily shaped by an intolerant Western ‘liberalism’ passing itself off as ‘secular’, ‘enlightened’ and more knowing-than-thou.

    It is just not self-evident that that is not aimed at secular liberals who protested the UUK’s guidance. I still think that looks as if she has exactly those people in mind.

    Her next sentence, in the next paragraph, is the one where she gets her facts so wrong, and says Student Rights brought the issue to national attention, with a link to the channel 4 story on the December 10 protest. That link has now been removed, but it was there before, so that is what she thought.

    No, it won’t wash. It’s really not that difficult to be clear about what you mean. I know this. I’ve done a lot of editing of other people’s writing, and I know the difference between clarity and the absence of it.

    Back to the RA.

    Regrettably, our initial choice of headline gave the impression that the piece criticised the whole range of groups who have spoken out on the issue. This includes groups we respect and support, such as the Council of Ex-Muslims and Southall Black Sisters, and a range of other individuals. The protest directed at Universities UK that took place on 10 December was broad based and worthy of support. We’ve now altered the headline but would like to apologise for any misunderstanding.

    It wasn’t just the headline though. It really wasn’t.

    Back to revisiting Gopal.

    In the wake of Student Rights’ aggressive campaign, which clearly targeted Islamic student groups, Universities UK – not a body known for championing social justice – issued guidance indicating that gender segregation of an audience at the request of a speaker at guest lectures was acceptable. The advice was withdrawn when the Equalities and Human Rights Commission deemed this advice discriminatory. The battle lines were drawn once again between so-called ‘muscular liberals’ (generally, in fact, deeply conservative white males with a commitment to the idea that West is Best) and defenders of the rights of minorities to their own customary or traditional practices.

    Again – it is far from obvious that she is raising concerns about Student Rights while not doing so about the CEMB or One Law for All or Southall Black Sisters or LSESUASH. It is far from clear that she didn’t mean the snide “muscular liberals” to apply to all opponents of gender segregation, or that she wasn’t herself siding with defenders of the rights of minorities to their own customary or traditional practices.

    After that she goes on to point out the obvious, which is that the silly two choices that she herself isolated are not the only possible choices, but she did that only after poisoning the well with all that belligerent rhetoric. If that’s not what she meant to do, she’s just not a good writer. She’s not dense or difficult, she’s just bad at it.

  • Why the one and not the other?

    Catching up with Catherine Bennett on gender segregation in the Observer on Saturday.

    Naturally, much speculation, not all of it fanciful, has addressed the further privileges that intolerant faiths might soon, with the support of UUK’s useful idiots, be extracting from academe. Some speakers, for example, feel equally incapacitated by the prospect of women’s faces in a university audience, or “congregation” as a Muslim chaplain, Saleem Chagtai, referred to it last week on the Today programme. Can they, too – lawfully, and with the continued backing of Fenella Morris QC – demand that women cover up, be screened from sight, or evicted altogether, supposing, of course, this is consonant with genuinely held religious beliefs?

    The answer is probably no, but then the question is why not? The question is why the one and not the other? Why is a comparatively minor form of gender inequality treated as acceptable when more major ones are not? Why is an incremental approach to gender inequality countenanced at all?

    As much as this episode promised to endear our universities to certain clients, there must be reputational fears when their representative body, having considered all the evidence, concludes that sexual regulation by a controlling, all-male religious elite has nothing to do with sex discrimination. Like the Saudi driving ban, it just looks that way. “There does not appear to be any discrimination on gender grounds merely by imposing segregated seating,” the report concluded, instantly facilitating further religious appropriation of publicly owned university spaces.

    It’s so rich, that “merely” – especially coupled with that “imposing” and that “segregated seating.” There does not, does there? I beg to differ. There does.

    …as Dandridge says, fetters were in use long after 1911, after the vote, even after 1920, when women were first allowed to graduate. In the 70s, her interview reminded me, it was still legal for the five newly co-ed Oxbridge colleges to impose limits (usually about 20), on the intake of female students, whose reception was apt to be guarded, when not overtly resented.

    Prior to our rebellion, young women joining my – notionally co-ed – institution, many of us from mixed comprehensives, were herded off on our first night as undergraduates to be lectured by the resident cleric and doctor on our responsibility not to get impregnated. At least, back in the institutionally sexist day, we did not face intervention by a 70s version of Nicola Dandridge, drawing on her considerable legal education to argue, on behalf of the college, that treating women like brainless temptresses was a traditional feature of the academic culture.

    I never got a lecture like that. I didn’t even realize I was fortunate not to.

    If a cleric such as Saleem Chagtai, whose Islamic Education and Research Academy blanks out female faces on its website, can assure BBC and Channel 4 audiences that separate seating is justified by “psychological studies” as well as equalities legislation, presumably he is open to a change of heart when scientists such as the physicist Lawrence Krauss (who walked out of a segregated lecture) and advice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission dictate the exact opposite?

    Less promising, being inexplicable and beyond rational argument, is the matching enthusiasm on the part of British universities to find space for “genuine belief” and the supernaturally ordained. Although UUK has promised to review its guidance, it is not legal advice it needs at this stage so much as complete religious deprogramming.

    We’re doing our best.

     

  • Unified Community Response

    Ah here comes the “unified community response” – at least, “unified” “community” according to the people doing the responding.

    It’s an interesting ploy, isn’t it, just announcing that one’s own view is, by fiat, the unified community view. Disappear the opposition merely by say-so.


    It calls that “a panel of Muslim women from across the community” – which community? The community of reactionary fundamentalist theocratic Islamists? Because it’s certainly not the community of all Muslim women. If “from across the community” is meant to convey “with a range of political views” – as surely it is – then it’s very dishonest.

    But at the same time that it’s meant to convey that, I think it’s also meant to convey communitarian majoritarian menace. I think it’s saying “this is how our community sees it, and if you don’t, you are outside that community” – and we will banish you, ostracize you, and when we get enough power, we will execute you.

    I hope some of you Londoners are free this Friday evening, and willing to shoulder the burden of attending that panel discussion. You Londoners who are women, that is – note the “women only” on the poster.

  • Until the West comes along to teach us progress

    I said I would continue my disagreement with what Priyamvada Gopal wrote, so here I am continuing.

    The fact is that challenging traditions and questioning authority are practices common to all societies; changing in response to circumstances is a human capacity and not one limited to a particular culture.

    Again – no kidding, and no one who is criticizing gender segregation said otherwise. It’s the other way around: Universities UK are treating authority (in the person of the external speaker who demands segregated seating) as if it is not to be challenged. It is the protesters who are challenging that authority, and the authority of UUK, from the standpoint of universal rights, which is to say, rights common to all societies, limited to a particular culture.

    It is at our peril that we, particularly women who come from non-European communities, cede or suppress that capacity in the cause of anti-racism, vital though the latter is.

    We know. That was our point. You’re the one who is talking about “an intolerant Western ‘liberalism’ passing itself off as ‘secular’, ‘enlightened’ and more knowing-than-thou.” You’re the one talking about “deeply conservative white males with a commitment to the idea that West is Best.”

    It’s a capacity that allows us to ask whether, say, women’s colleges are a useful defence against a wider institutional sexism contexts while simultaneously debating whether there’s anything to be maintained or gained by men and women sitting apart when addressed by religious speakers who demand it, even if voluntarily and non-hierarchically. Are such arrangements always just ‘harmless symbols’ of community identity? Selective attacks on our communities make the job of self-analysis more difficult but we should not let our thoughts and actions be entirely determined by those we oppose.

    It’s not an attack on “your communities” – unless you consider iERA your community, in which case I have nothing to say to you, but then why are you talking about challenging traditions and questioning authority? Liberal universalists are not your enemy. We’re not the ones who think you should be at home instead of teaching at Cambridge.

    There is no doubt that both racism and xenophobia is on the rise, with Muslims and Islam singled out for attack. It is essential to fight back. But we must also ask ourselves whether, because the evocation of issues of misogyny or gendered oppression within minority communities often plays into the wrong hands, we should let go of our own traditions and histories of self-criticism, internal dissent and change. If we do so, ironically, we play into the falsest imperialist stereotype of them all – the notion that non-European communities are static and unchanging until the West comes along to teach us progress.

    But then why are you bashing the critics of gender segregation who reject that stereotype? Why, for instance, are you ignoring Maryam Namazie and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Abhishek Phadnis and focusing on Student Rights who had nothing to do with the protest against gender segregation? Why are you ignoring the very possibility of international solidarity, and the reality of it that is so conspicuous in everything Maryam does? What the hell do you think that accomplishes? Why not drop the fake accusations of imperialism and just join Maryam and the rest?

  • “We would not condone that at all”

    The LSE Student Union Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society is not impressed by the way the SU has reacted to the gender segregation controversy. It explains on the SU website.

    We are disappointed by the LSESU General Secretary Jay Stoll’s statement that the threat of forced gender segregation is “practically non-existent” (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) and his accusation that anti-segregation campaigners are ‘Islamophobic’. We also have good reason to distrust LSESU Community and Welfare Officer Anneessa Mahmood’s defence that only “voluntarily segregated” meetings are taking place on the LSE campus, and that there have been “no meetings at LSE where segregation has been enforced upon people“, even if she states that “as an organisation we would not condone that at all, we would break up the meeting.”

    They do have good reason. Anneessa Mahmood is the one who first accosted Chris and Abhishek at the Freshers’ Fair and started grabbing their materials off their table. They reported back in October:

    On Thursday 3rd of October, we (Abishek Phadnis and Chris Moos) were at the LSESU Freshers’ Fair, manning the stall of the LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society to meet other non-believing students. At around noon, we were approached by LSESU Community and Welfare Officer Anneessa Mahmood, Anti-Racism Officer Rayhan Uddin, and Deputy Chief Executive Jarlath O’Hara and several others who identified as LSESU staff.

    Without explanation, Anneessa Mahmood started removing material from the stall. When challenged, she claimed that it was “offensive”.

    “Community and Welfare” indeed.

    Back to the current post:

    Chris Moos, Secretary of the LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society, points out: “It is disingenuous of Anneessa Mahmood to claim there has never been forced segregation. She cannot deny, as a former officer of the LSESU Islamic Society, that that Society regularly conducts“brothers circle” and “sisters circle” events on campus. This is in direct contravention of the LSESU’s policy on inclusivity, which requires that all society events be accessible to all students, no matter what their belief, race or gender is.”

    Abhishek Phadnis, President of the LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society, added: “I am saddened, though not entirely surprised, by Mr. Stoll’s reckless and unfounded accusations. His irresponsible statement is emblematic of the flippant manner in which university officials have deliberately ignored the misbehaviour of religious organisations on campus, and have allowed this sordid practice to balloon into a serious menace to gender equality. Mr. Stoll’s allegation of ‘Islamophobia’ is a crude attempt to smear principled opposition to the imposition of religious mores on universities as bigotry, so as to enable him and his fellow officials to continue to abdicate their duty to address the legitimate concerns of students”.

    It’s discouraging, seeing officers of the LSE Student Union supporting theocracy and demonizing secularism.

    At the end of the piece is a long and useful list of links to media coverage, including one to Maryam on the World Service, which I didn’t know about.

  • Advice from robots

    Since Maryam saved the original UUK guidance, I’m reading pages 27 and 28 again for the nostalgia. It read as if it had been written by a robot.

    The segregation request is not yet in the public domain but the students’ union has an active feminist society which is likely to protest against the segregation request. Other societies are likely to express similar concerns. The event is also due to take place a few days after a number of campus-based activities to coincide with International Women’s Day.

    See what I mean? A robot or an extra-terrestrial. There – might – be – some – groups – who – would – not – like – the – idea – of – segregations – by – sex – at – a – public – event – at – a – university. Ya think??? Only it wouldn’t be some groups, it would be everyone. You don’t have to be organized, you don’t even have to be political, to bristle at the suggestion that some reactionary external speaker gets to tell you where to sit and separate from whom.

    Things to consider

    Legal framework – points likely to be particularly relevant

    • Aside from freedom of speech and the S.43 duty, the paramount issue is to consider how equality obligations apply, and how those interact.

    Robot again, you see? As if everyone needed to sit down and think really hard and make a list of issues and decide which ones are paramount.

    Some issues have been decided. There’s a ratchet, and where there’s not there should be. We don’t wake up every morning and re-decide what we think about slavery. That’s over. Slavery is out. Burning people for heresy is out, genocide is out, letting children work in factories and coal mines is out. We don’t need self-appointed university unions starting over from scratch; we already know what we think about gender segregation.

    Granted there are people who go berserk and dynamite the ratchet, but that doesn’t mean university boffins should be following their lead. We don’t need robots here.

  • Who sits where

    Kate Maltby on the gender segregation dispute.

    I spent much of Tuesday afternoon shivering outside the offices of Universities UK. I was there to protest their publication of guidelines which suggest segregated seating of men and women may be legally required where guest speakers demand it. It’s reassuring to learn that protest sometimes works: by Friday, the beleaguered body had shifted their position twice within 24 hours, thanks in part to criticism by Michael Gove and David Cameron.

    It is reassuring, isn’t it. I’m still surprised at the speed with which it happened.

    But for all their fair words, I’m told the Cabinet have no plans for legislation to clarify the law. And I hear some members of the Islamic Education and Research Association, the group behind most confrontations over this issue, are agitating to launch a test case, heading to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary, to argue that their Islamist speakers do not enjoy freedom of speech unless they can speak to audiences segregated exactly how they like.

    And, if they succeed, setting a useful precedent for racist groups, anti-Semitic groups, the WBC…Oh yes, that should work out really well.

    … this isn’t some hypothetical we can forget about: as Nick Cohen notes, a notorious incident occurred earlier this year at my university, UCL. Meanwhile, the University of Leicester’s Islamic Society has been in the spotlight for routinely running segregated events, including several with the iERA.

    Most such Islamic societies are affiliated to the student union, receiving funding and support. As I told Radio 4 yesterday, as a member of the same student union, I have a right to engage fully with the intellectual life of the campus. The ECHR protects my right to education regardless of sex – and as a woman, even if I’m allowed the privilege of a seat, I don’t engage intellectually on equal terms at an event whose organisers think I need to be kept away from men in public.

    And the union of university vice-chancellors doesn’t get to impose such a situation on students who have the bad taste to be female.

  • Shoulder to shoulder to shoulder

    There was a new comment yesterday on Nicola Dandridge’s November 25 blog post about the gender segregation bit of Universities UK’s guidance on external speakers. The new comment is by Jane Kelly, who went to the protest.

    Seats For Women!
    On Tuesday 10th December  I joined  ex Muslims from One Law For All, and various secular groups to attend a demonstration outside 20 Tavistock Square,against sexual segregation at lectures and debates. My mother laughed heartily at the thought of me going on a demo, something I have not done for thirty years, not since I was supporting Polish Solidarnoc. I promised her I would resist knocking off any police helmets.

    The demo was for a cause which should get the attention of anyone interested in basic, long held principles of equality. Astonishingly sexual apartheid has just been allowed by UUK, the body which represents university Deans and faculties. This has been done to appease Muslims, probably in the hope of getting more wealthy students in from the near East.

    Only of course it didn’t and wouldn’t “appease Muslims,” because so many Muslims want nothing to do with it and are insulted that university administrators would think they do. Islamists are not all Muslims.

    There was about fifty of us there in the cold and fog, including Yasmin Alabi Brown, who is a tiny lady but speaks very forcefully. The following day  the event was reported on Today, but Maryam Namazai,  http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/ who is behind it,  can never get interviewed by the BBC, and is ignored by Woman’s Hour. The radio report also included a report from the LSE where some atheist students were banned from having a stall and wearing T Shirts bearing the names Jesus and Mohammed, in case they offended Muslims.

    It’s not quite true that Maryam can never get interviewed by the BBC, I think.

    If these segregated university lectures go ahead, there are plans to disrupt them which may mean  women like me dressing up as Muslim clerics to get into meetings to sit among the men.  Later at my church coffee morning, I mentioned what I had been up to. One of the older ladies, who spends most of her time cooking for our social events, got very excited.
    ‘I fought for gender equality’ she expostulated.

    Well yes. We older ladies did fight for gender equality. Noisily, visibly, obstreperously. We older ladies aren’t from Victoria’s day, yaknow. We’re battleaxes from the 60s and 70s.

    Many people who were students in the 1960s believe that they did this, even if they never left the bar or library. I told her about the plans to disrupt segregated meetings. ‘I’ll come, I’ll do that!’ She said, and I think she will. Suddenly I was back in another age, one we thought was long, long dead, my Grandmother’s time, when she as a young woman had to take a view on her sisters who were joining the Suffragettes. Some women in our family were chaining themselves to metal railings in Liverpool, while others, like my Granny, remained quietly at home.

    When I was a teenager I saw a wonderfully good BBC drama series called, ‘Shoulder To Shoulder,’ about the suffragette movement and how I longed to join Christabel Pankhurst’s radicals, and then Sylvia’s socialists. Those women were all the world to me for awhile, but it was fiction and it was history. But now in 2013,  the same issues of equality before the law have to be redefined and fought for all over again – I once regretted not being able to join a struggle which started in 1903 and ended in 1914, now I am getting into a struggle which also  has the disadvantage of being utterly unnecessary before international law, and absurdly forced on us by men from Pakistan.

    And resisted by other men and women from Pakistan and Bangladesh and India and Iran and Algeria and Egypt to name only a few. Shoulder to shoulder.

  • Maltby and Barkatulla on PM

    Radio 4′s afternoon news program PM had the UUK-gender segregation story as its lead item, and then its first in-depth story. The talking heads were Kate Maltby, a Christian and a PhD student at UCL, and Fatima Barkatulla of Seeds of Change which (PM failed to say) is part of iERA.

    Barkatulla pushed the UUK line that it’s voluntary, with extra added “live and let live” and “religious Muslim women just want a space.”

    But that’s all nonsense. You can’t have separate space in a public auditorium or class room or lecture hall without keeping the “wrong” people out, so it can’t be voluntary. The minute some “wrong” person tries to sit in that space, some sort of action is required to keep that wrong person out. It might be just a very polite request, but that still makes the keeping out not voluntary.

    Suppose a bunch of women went together and went very early, so that there was a big bloc of women. Then maybe any men who came later would simply decide not to sit there, to be polite. That’s still not voluntary. It may look voluntary to the willfully naïve onlooker, but it’s not.

    And anyway it’s all just fake. it’s at a university. People mix there, all the time. Trying to create segregation at particular debates isn’t really for the sake of people who go all wobbly without it, it’s to make a point. A bad, illiberal, creepy point.

  • Those who wish to sit in separate areas

    The Telegraph has the skinny on what the Equality and Human Rights Commission thinks of the gender segregation issue.

    The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) announced it will help re-write guidance, published by Universities UK (UUK) last month, which said Muslim societies and other groups were entitled to practice gender segregation at public meetings on campus.

    Mark Hammond, the EHRC’s chief executive, said gender segregation was “not   permissible” under equalities laws, adding that UUK’s guidance required clarification.

    By agreeing to go back to the drawing board with the EHRC’s help, the vice-chancellors’ organisation appeared to have headed off the prospect of a legal challenge from the official watchdog.

    There: the Telegraph described UUK properly: it’s “the vice-chancellors’ organization”; it’s not the representative of the universities.

    Its controversial guidance   to universities across Britain said segregation could be acceptable as   long as men and women were seated side by side rather than with women at the back.

    It also said that any event where some segregation took place for religious reasons should also provide a separate, non-segregated area.

    Mr Hammond said: “Equality law permits gender segregation in premises that are permanently or temporarily being used for the purposes of an organised religion where its doctrines require it.

    “However, in an academic meeting or in a lecture open to the public it is not, in the commission’s view, permissible to segregate by gender.”

    What we said all along. Public meeting or debate or lecture. That’s what the “guidance” was about and that’s what we disagreed with so strongly.

    The EHRC’s announcement came after UUK’s chief executive insisted gender segregation was not completely “alien” in British life.

    Nicola Dandridge said: “It’s not something which is so alien to our culture that it has to be regarded like race segregation, which is totally different and it’s unlawful and there’s no doubt about that whatsoever.

    “This is about ensuring that everyone has the right to sit where they want, including those who wish to sit in separate areas.”

    You know…Dandridge really ought to stop saying that. She’s not thinking it through. (Why the hell not? Since it is after all her specialty?) She is forgetting that “those who wish to sit in separate areas” can include those who wish to sit in areas with no Jews / blacks / foreigners / dalits / you name it. This attempt to control and purify and sanitize public spaces from the pollution of filthy Others is at the heart of racism and all its cognates. It’s the direct opposite of equality and as such it is not a “right”. She might as well claim that white people have a right to swim in separate municipal swimming pools.