52 MEN 52 WEEKS/ 48 CAN TONBİL
If You Would Excuse Me, I am Mansplaining
Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish
I am one of those lucky children who were able to turn their childhood games into a profession when they grew up a little. My name is Can. I have been a radio programmer for over seven years.
My journey started in my primary school years, when we recorded our voices on cassette tapes in a specific format in the only cassette-player in our house with my cousin Emel, who was a few years older than me and was also our next-door neighbor.
First greetings, then reading the news, then joining the program as on-air guests by changing our voices, then faxes coming out of the backgammon, songs played on a different cassette-player, and then recording new programs on the same cassette tape without listening to what we previously recorded...
I cannot remember if I said, "I will turn this game into a job" in those days. Anyways, I had to suspend my early radio career after Emel moved to another neighborhood.
Then the focus shifted as I met the "hammer and sickle" through the computer game Red Alert 2 in secondary school; followed by a few small-scale protest demonstrations with last minute escapes from the police bludgeon during high school; then studying sociology in university; and working, first, as a bookseller, then, as a civil society worker after graduation...
As a result of a series of coincidences and supports, I found myself playing the game of my childhood with a real microphone and a person who has been doing this job every day for 18 years.
I am continuing to "professionally" play the game, which I started playing with Emel in our childhood, with three men now; one of them is at the technical table, one provides editorial support from home and the third one sits right next to me, tidying up the broadcast.
I am on the microphone every morning on weekdays reporting news on a series of subjects, primarily on global climate change as well as environment, human rights, social movements, domestic and international politics, economy and sports; I make connections between these news and try to comment on them. Not to mention the connections made with the incidents that took place in the past...
But I know that something is missing. In a country, where men comprise 50.2 percent of the population and women 49.4 percent, there is something amiss in four men trying to describe a world where women comprise 49.6 percent of the population.
And this lack, unavoidably, poses the risk of mansplaining which is the most everyday inequality of our time.
What is mansplaining?
Mansplaining is a state of manhood which has been in existence for many years but was only recently diagnosed.
In Wikipedia, which has been banned in Turkey for 584 days as of the writing of this piece, mansplaining is defined as follows:
"Mansplaining (a blend of the word man and the informal form splaining of the verb explaining) is a pejorative term meaning '(of a man) to comment on or explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner'. Author Rebecca Solnit ascribes the phenomenon to a combination of 'overconfidence and cluelessness'. Lily Rothman of The Atlantic defines it as 'explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman'."
Mansplaining has been translated to Turkish as "açüklama" or "erkekleme". [In Turkish "explaining" is "açıklama", to get "mansplaining" the second syllable "çık" is replaced with "çük" which means "dick".]
In every area of life we can encounter this situation which we can summarize as the action of a man who makes an explanation to a woman on every subject regardless of whether he is specialized in that field or not. At home, in school, on the street, at work, in symposiums, on television and radio...
In many fields, we, men, are mansplaining. We are mansplaining sometimes with the confidence that we can use the power (status, money, title, age, etc.) in our hands, sometimes because it is what we have learnt from our families, but always because we are men...
The grounds are suitable for mansplaining. Let me remind you once more:
In 2017, the female population of Turkey was 40 million 275 thousand 390 people while the male population was 40 million 535 thousand 135.
If we restate it in percentages, while women comprise 49.8 percent of the population in Turkey, men account for 50.2 percent.
In Turkey, whose population is 80 million, the number of men is only 250 thousand people higher than that of women.
Even though there is only a 0.4 percent difference between the population of men and women, there is an enormous difference when the working life is considered:
According to the calculations of the International Labor Organization (ILO), in 2017, Turkey ranks 163rd among 188 countries with a 51.5 percent labor force participation rate.
While Turkey ranks 165th in terms of women's labor force participation rate which is around 32 percent, the average labor force participation rate of women in the OECD countries is 51 percent. As for the participation of men in labor force, Turkey ranks 104th among 188 countries with a percentage above the OECD average of 68.5 percent (World Bank 2017).
Mansplaining Media
In the radio program that is prepared with the cooperation of four men, we base our news on scientific reports, local and international articles and news, and our target audience is not a men's club. In the program, the story presented to the audience in the form of a conversation between two men is a media product which is offered to women, men and LGBTI+ individuals.
The situation in other media outlets is not very different. A news report made in 2014 by Çiçek Tahaoğlu from bianet summarizes the situation as follows:
Women account for 19 percent of the names on newspapers' mastheads while men account for 81 percent.
Women account for 36.5 percent of the newspapers' digital mastheads while men account for 63.5 percent.
As for the mastheads of online news websites, while women account for 40.9 percent, the rate of men is 59.1 percent.
Considering these figures, we can see that even though we are a slight demographic majority (49 to 51 percent), we, men, can find jobs, speak and write. And, as a result of these advantages, we lean on our majority in the public sphere and mansplain a lot.
I am mansplaining about mansplaining
I might also be mansplaining by saying these things. But, this time, I am leaning on not the unjustly acquired rights but this sterile space, which has been opened by bianet so that men can write about male violence.
And, there is also the case of mansplaining with the awareness that you are mansplaining, which opens this subject to discussion and inserts the beautiful notion of self-criticism into your consciousness. Thus, as you are writing, speaking, watching or reading, a part of your brain asks questions such as "Am I mansplaining now?", "Have I just mansplained or what?", "Why are all these panelists men?".
What is the connection between mansplaining and male violence? I am still thinking about it. But as long as we mansplain by saying "actually, this is how it is supposed to be done", we push women outside the social sphere and ignite the fuse of several mechanisms of violence and oppression including physical violence. Moreover, we sometimes do this by intellectual means...
It might be confusing since it is a relatively new term and concrete examples might be necessary to better mansplain what mansplaining is. If you would excuse me, I will try to mansplain mansplaining through the previous article "Artificial Stupidity" published in this series.
Mansplaining? Really, here?
"They say that artificial intelligence will dominate everything. Artificial intelligence might do everything but it cannot inflict violence on women."
First, bad news: Artificial intelligence, which Müfit Can Saçıntı argues will dominate everything in the future, is not as innocent as presumed.
Last October, the US-based e-commerce giant Amazon cancelled the artificial intelligence program that it had developed to use in its recruitment process. The reason for the cancellation was that the artificial intelligence created to automate recruitments discriminated against women candidates!
The company, which created 500 computer models to comb through the resumes of present employees and past applicants and recognize 50,000 key terms on the candidates' resumes, discovered that the system was ignoring the women candidates.
The system, which was caught discriminating against women, was cancelled despite being fixed.
As reported by Ayşe Özbek Karasu from Habertürk newspaper, the sexism of artificial intelligence is not limited to the biggest e-commerce giant of the world.
Iranian-American Alex Shams, who is a PhD student of anthropology at the University of Chicago, realized that when translating from Turkish to English, "Google Translate" attributes both the positive characteristics and the jobs held in higher esteem to men. In other words, when "Google Translate" translates an adjective or a profession with the gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun "O" in Turkish to English, the result is discriminatory to the core. For example, if one wants to translate the sentence "O çalışkan" to English, the suggestion of "Google Translate" is "He is hardworking". However, when the source sentence is "O tembel", the suggested translation suddenly becomes "She is lazy". Women are beautiful, men are ugly; women are faint-hearted, men are brave and ambitious; women are sad, men are happy... The list goes on and on...
Even the search engine of LinkedIn leaves aside the names of women and chooses men.
A similar incident has been reported also by Artı Gerçek news website. In a research conducted at Princeton University, artificial intelligences were assigned to match words using the popular GloVe algorithm. The artificial intelligences that were left to their own used online texts to better understand the human language.
GloVe was designed by using the database known as Common Crawl which comprises a mixed list of 840 billion words compiled from different websites. When this database was closely observed, it was seen that while the words "female" and "woman" are grouped in the same cluster with the words about domestic work, the words "man" and "male" are grouped in the same cluster with the words about mathematical intelligence and engineering.
But, why is artificial intelligence (AI) doing this?
As Artı Gerçek cites from The Guardian, computer scientist Joanna Bryson from the University of Bath has answered this question as follows:
"A lot of people are saying this is showing that AI is prejudiced. No. This is showing we're prejudiced and that AI is learning it."
According to the figures announced in 2018, 69.1 percent of the employees of Google, one of the above-mentioned companies, are men and 30.9 percent are women.
A vast number of Google employees, especially women, who have been working at this company—a dream of many young people—and have constituted these numbers that reveal a blatant inequality, went on a worldwide strike last month and stopped working in protest against the sexual harassment and inequalities faced by the women workers of the company.
The protests were staged after a New York Times article documented that the senior executives of Google, who were dismissed from their jobs upon accusations of sexual harassment, were paid millions of dollars in compensation though the company did not have any obligation to do so.
As for Amazon, whose founder and CEO is Jeff Bezos, the richest man of the world, the figures are as follows: 73 percent of its professional workers and 78 percent of its senior executives and directors are men. Of the 10 employees who directly report to Jeff Bezos, all except for the human resources director Beth Galetti, are white and men!
According to a report titled "Amazon's Unfair Deal of the Day", the only category where the number of women employees is close to that of men is the category of "laborers and helpers", who do the hardest manual labor. In this category, women account for 45 percent, and men for 65 percent.
The situation is not any different in other companies operating in the information sector. The rate of women working in senior positions at Apple is 19 percent and at CISCO and Facebook 30 percent.
As for the companies operating in Turkey, this inequality is all the more marked. According to the results of the household labor force survey conducted by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat), as of 2016, the rate of women working in senior or middle management positions in companies is 16.7 percent. As for the CEOs in Turkey, only 12 percent are women. The rate of women who study in the top 10 computer engineering departments of universities in Turkey, whose graduates will shape artificial intelligence, is 19.3 percent.
In summary, it may not be a correct assessment to regard artificial intelligence, which is designed by male programmers working for male directors employed by male bosses, as the architect of a future free from sexism.
And, then what?
Suppose that a socialist revolution breaks out tomorrow or we suddenly transition into a nomadic society, can we return women their rights, which have been usurped from them through ownership that was further consolidated via capitalism? I do not know.
But, contrary to what Saçıntı has argued in his piece, the current situation does not necessarily mean that women can prevent the physical and emotional violence or the sexual harassment once they attain higher positions.
The research report on the impact of domestic violence on workers and workplaces titled "Domestic Violence Against White-Collar Working Women in Turkey" has shown that 75 percent of white-collar women workers, most of whom are university graduates, have been subjected to a form of violence at least once in their lives. 40 percent of working women have been subjected to psychological-emotional violence, 35 percent to social violence, 17 percent to economic violence and 8 percent to physical violence.
Moreover, around one third of the women have stated that if the woman employee informs her manager about the violence that she is subjected to, it will have a negative consequence. Almost half of the women have indicated that they would be embarrassed to share the situation with their manager.
And, what about the ones at the very top?
In his article entitled "Artificial Stupidity", Saçıntı asks the following question to his readers:
"Can we imagine a male employee, who works in the same workplace with [the famous businesswomen] Güler Sabancı or Leyla Alaton, subjecting them to mobbing, harassment or violence?"
And he immediately answers his own question: "No, we cannot."
Let us remember how Rothman has defined mansplaining: "Explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman."
Now it is Leyla Alaton's turn to speak:
P.S.: My cousin Emel developed a passion for photography after moving to another neighborhood. She is now one of the famous photographers of Turkey. She is still listening to our program in the mornings. (CT/HK/SD/IG)
* Images: Kemal Gökhan Gürses