Some events I won’t be going to at Conference

Well said, Emma! I’m involved with a brand new group that’s hosting our first fringe event, (Labour for a Republic), and even though we’re new and tackling an issue that may not have the drawing power of some of the events you’ve talked about, we haven’t had any difficulty in getting female speakers. I can’t help but think that events without female representation are doing so through a lack of commitment to ensuring a balanced panel.

(incidentally, info on our event http://www.labourforarepublic.org.uk/events/fringe-debate-at-party-conference/)

To boycott a meeting because a panel of three are all men is just preposterous – normal statistical variances would produce such panels even if the class of people qualified and willing to appear on them was evenly divided.

And all those panels are ‘stale and pale’ because they are male?

This is genuinely insulting to comrades who actually had no choice about which genitalia they were born with and who are giving up their time.

As for Deborah Mattinson she is not a lone feminist siren – she was a significant figure in the New Labour clique that utterly dominated the party for 15 years and at the end of it – well you’ve just described how all that female-friendly re-branding and diversity-monitoring and all-women short-listing hasn’t worked in that the activist cadre who populate fringe panels remain so disproportionately male.

And the freakish wierdo males obsessing over process at the 1980s party meetings Mattison so condescendingly describes in her book did so because back then we were still a democratic party and those processes still made happen in the real world and it was vitally important that we got them right.

If is almost unimaginable now but when I first joined the party in the 1970s any member could move a motion at a branch which could make its way through conference into the party programme and the election manifesto and change the lives of millions.

So damn right we were obsessed with the processes – that to to say the rules that every complex democratic organisation needs to function – that allowed that to happen.

But destroying that democracy and turning us into a cheerleading claque of shiny happy people the Blairs and Goulds and Mattinsons  didn’t even produce real diversity – as the people that once Labour served became even more alienated from the party and even less likely to join us, attend meetings and sit on those bloody panels.

Restore actual democratic powers to Conference and CLPs and branches and let people believe that their vote and their voices matter and you will get more people joining up and becoming active – or we can carry on as we are but carefully re-arrange the deckchairs at the meetings so that we just look more representative.

 Jon.  May I say I agree with virtually every word you have written here.

Even in 2012, men are still expected to get on with it, and as you so rightly say, it seems to be ignored that middle aged men are now the highest risk group for suicide.

You have one plausible point on prostate cancer: while the age standardised incidence is 106 per 100,000 compared to 124 per 100,000 for breast cancer this difference is negated by the lower survival rates for prostate cancers.

And while that figure of breast cancer getting 4 times the funding of prostate cancer is endlessly broadcast around by male victimhood groups it is actually hard to substantiate  – looking at UK data for instance in 2006 breast cancer got 18.8% of research funding while prostate cancer got 7.9% – a big difference but not 400%.

However decisions on how to allocate research funding are not driven by incidence and mortality rates alone but by what is scientifically feasible and it may well be (my not being an Oncologist I have no more idea than you do) that there is simply more that can be done with breast than prostate cancers. 

In any case I’d be very surprised indeed if either the boards making cancer research funding decisions or the people doing it are predominantly female – these choices are like most important decisions in our society made by men (and maybe there is even something noble in that here at least we may genuinely be putting women first).

On suicide your figures are again exaggerated: 2010 statistics show that men are three not four times more likely to kill themselves than women:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_254113.pdf

Although finding hard data is problematic I’ve read several studies suggesting that suicide attempts are considerably more balanced between males and females than deaths are – it is just that men are genuinely better at killing themselves than women as they choose quicker, more violent and irrevocable methods and are less likely to change their minds during the act.

What we do know is that for men who do succeed in killing themselves hanging is by far the most popular method chosen – while for women it is a drug overdose – and clearly it is much easier to change your mind and call 999 when you’ve just taken a bottle of paracetamol than when you are hanging from a home-made noose.

Similarly while surprisingly few suicides involve the use of firearms and sharp objects it is generally men who make that final choice – and the same applies to locking yourself in a car with a tube connected to the exhaust.  

Anyway if you have a solution to the problem of male suicide all of us who’ve had our lives devastated by losing a friend or relative this way would just love to hear it.

Boys underperforming at school is just the consequence of their having recently stopped overperforming – as they did for so many decades when the girls underperformance was rarely considered an issue.

And everyone who knows classrooms will tell you that the failure of so many boys is a cultural and behavioural problem for which there is no easy fix (or at least none that Guardian-reading liberals or choice- and privatisation-obsessed conservatives will accept).

Men dying earlier than women? – again that is largely down to the sh*t we eat and the mind-bogglingly stupid stuff we do and is hardly going to be resolved by a fringe meeting proclaiming our victimhood.

Assuming anyone else is still following this thread I did ask where are the numbers and having now got my conference pack can provide some.

As there are 400 events there is no way I am going to analyse them all but taking the first 40 and omitting anything that looks like a reception I get  118 male to 42 female panel speakers or a 74% male dominance.

(of course I am going entirely by names and using only the info in the conference magazine listing which will be somewhat out of date)

Of all these 40 meetings only one has zero male speakers and 15 (37.5%) have zero female speakers.

I also get the impression that corporate-sponsored events (of which there are still a surprising number) are more likely to have all-male panels than the purely political ones.

So assuming that the first 40 meetings are a representative sample of the 400 fringe events Emma should be able to strike as many as 150 off her list….

If anyone (Emma?) does want to make an issue of this and is willing to add more data I’ve saved it in google docs:
at https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B7M9tEwN6qsJMU9xM0pmbnZORGM