An interview with Caroline Criado-Perez

WVoN talked to the co-founder of The Women’s Room and Mediawatch who wants women to stay on banknotes.

Caroline Criado-Perez has been a very busy woman lately.

Not content with taking on British media with The Women’s Room, a database of female experts available to talk to the media, and mediawatch, as the woman behind the campaign to keep a woman on British banknotes, she took on the might of the Bank of England.

That started following an announcement by the bank that it was replacing Elizabeth Fry – the last remaining woman on a British banknote – on the £5 note with Winston Churchill; Criado-Perez felt compelled to act.

She started a petition to try to get the bank to re-think its decision, but despite gaining over 35,000 signatures and counting, the bank proved reluctant to engage with the concept of equality.

‘I’m amazed at how hard we have had to fight to get a woman on a bank note,’ says Criado-Perez. ‘It shows how far we have to go, especially with big institutions.’

One of the biggest criticisms of the campaign came from people claiming the issue was a trivial one, that the campaign was making a fuss over nothing.

Why bother about a picture on a bank note when there are so many more important things in the world to worry about?

But as the petition points out, a sexist culture where women are routinely overlooked, undermined and abused is made up of small issues, and if we want to tackle that culture we can’t ignore the small issues.

And Criado-Perez is clear that the amount of ‘fuss’ that was made was purely down to the bank.

‘If the bank had simply engaged with the issue of equality instead of attempting to dismiss it, it wouldn’t have become such a big deal,’ she said.

Contrary to the legal advice Criado-Perez received when she consulted lawyers about mounting a legal challenge against the Bank and its actions, the Bank steadfastly refused to acknowledge that the 2010 Equality Act applied to its decision.

However, that changed with the appointment of a new governor of the bank, Mark Carney, who replaced Mervyn King; on July 24, the bank confirmed that while Elizabeth Fry would still be replaced, the new £10 note, due for release in 2017, would feature Jane Austen.

It is without doubt a victory, but can I be the only one wondering why we couldn’t have kept Fry and got Austen as well? Presumably civilisation would fall if we had two women on currency at the same time.

Criado-Perez is clear that the campaign owes its success to the new power of social media.

‘There was a similar campaign in Canada,’ she said, ‘which never took off because the instigator didn’t utilise social media.

‘Big institutions like the Bank of England just don’t ‘get’  social media and don’t realise that you can no longer just dismiss criticism in the way Mervyn King thought he could.’

After a meeting with the bank, Criado-Perez was convinced it would re-assess its decision.

‘Mark Carney arrived in his job when the bank had had three weeks of bad publicity over this. He just wanted to clear the issue off his desk,’ she explained.

Criado-Perez has also used social media to great effect in her other role as founder of The Women’s Room, a site that encourages women to sign up as experts in their field to help redress the imbalance of expert representation in the media.

Criado-Perez started The Women’s Room in 2012 after the BBC’s Today programme ran segments – two days in a row –  on female issues; teenage girls and contraception and breast cancer. Both programmes featured contributions exclusively by men.

Responding to the ensuing criticism, the BBC claimed that they had been unable to find female experts – despite their best efforts.

Criado-Perez wasn’t buying it.

‘Their best efforts clearly weren’t very good,’ she said. ‘The Women’s Room has so far found nearly 3000 female experts in all kinds of fields.’

She has found, however, that there are issues when it comes to female experts.

‘There are several issues,’ she said. ‘The first being which news stories are thought to be important; that’s a value judgment for a start and you often find that women’s issues aren’t considered newsworthy, so that’s the first thing we need to tackle.

‘The second issue is who the media thinks it needs to speak to.

The BBC in particular always has a thing about speaking to the person who is accountable regarding the topic in question.

So it will, for example, just want to speak to the particular politician responsible for a political news story, which is fair enough in itself, but it means the public doesn’t learn anything new and it means they tend to speak only to men.

‘It’s much better to also speak to people who have different opinions around an issue so the public get a much bigger picture of what’s going on. And all of those people could be women.’

There is also, she said, a real problem with imposter syndrome for women.

‘It’s very real. The most extreme examples are women who say, “well, I’m a PhD with 10 years’ post-doctoral experience in my field but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert.”‘

‘Women tend to need to be much more certain than men about their knowledge before they’ll speak out as an expert on an issue.’

This tendency is perhaps at least partly explained by what Criado-Perez sees as the final problem.

‘There’s no doubt that there are extra pressures on women when they speak out.

‘Women get criticised much more than men for their opinions and we do sometimes feel we have the weight of our entire gender on our shoulders. A man makes a stupid comment, it’s on him, nobody says all men are stupid, but if a woman does it, all women are stupid.’

But the efforts of The Women’s Room are, Criado-Perez believes, starting to change this culture.

‘Just the fact that people are talking about it helps,’ she said. ‘The BBC now knows people are watching it, so it knows if it presents an all-male panel people will notice.’

And the BBC notices too.

When a BBC programme makes it onto ‘Mediawatch’, the section of The Women’s Room site which names and shames specific programmes for gender imbalance, Criado -Perez says she has had BBC personnel contacting her, ‘upset that their programme has made it onto the list.’

The situation, although improving, is still pretty shameful, however.

But Criado-Perez is optimistic about the future.

‘It only takes somebody willing to make a change. Sky News use experts from The Women’s Room regularly, because one producer there has decided to address the issue and do something about it.

‘Sky takes a wider view than the BBC, for example by asking female experts to speak about research which has been done by a man, rather than just asking the researcher himself to speak.

‘Now Sky News is doing much better at using female experts, so it can be done.’

Not content with changing the face of British media and – quite literally – the face of national bank notes, Criado-Perez has big dreams for The Women’s Room.

One idea, says Criado-Perez, is to take The Women’s Room into schools.

‘I’d really like to start going into schools and talking to young girls about the ways in which the media perpetuates a culture which tells them they’re useless.

‘I have lots of other ideas about how to expand The Women’s Room, all of which, unfortunately, require funding. My time at the minute is spent finding funding streams.’

In the meantime, Criado-Perez still writes for her blog site, ‘Week Woman‘, which started it all.

The reason she started writing it was simple enough; ‘I just wanted to change the world,’ she said.

It’s fair to say she may well be on her way to doing just that.

UPDATE:

As a result of Criado-Perez’s success over the bank note issue, she was subjected to rape threats –  “about 50 abusive tweets an hour for about 12 hours” – on Twitter which is now facing a major backlash over claims it failed to deal with the threats. Sian at Crooked Rib gives a good account of why it is important to fight such abuse and also points out that it is against the law.

A change.org petition has been set up to persuade Twitter to improve its current mechanism for reporting such abuse.  The petition – which has over 13000 signatures to date – can be signed here.

Let’s hope that Twitter listens.