The leaky pipeline in animal liberation activism
By: María R. Carreras
Tags: Feminism, Animal Liberation, Discrimination, Animal Rights, Oppression

It is a proven fact that there is an under-representation of the contributions of women in different fields and areas. Or better said, of the contributions of all identities that do not correspond to that of men. This happens at work and at activism in general, but also in particular, when doing activism for the other animals.

As we, people who are not men, advance on our paths –or in the case that concerns us today, specifically on the path of our activism for other animals–, our presence is reduced, if we compare it with the space that men occupy.

This phenomenon is known as a leaky pipeline. One of the several factors that contributes to this wear in women is, according to several scientific studies, the lack of visible role models for women and people who identifies with genders other than men.

And from here on I will speak of women, specifically, since the scientific references that I have found are, in their totality, binaristic. That is, they divide their studies exclusively into two possible identities: women and men. I apoligize in advance for this gap.

Very different environments (the workplace, the activism, the world of academia…) have this common issue: an under-visibility of women and their contributions to different disciplines and issues. And this lack of references for the following generations will contribute negatively to a proportionality in the performance of men and women.

Often, when people who are not men speak up about these types of problems, there is someone -often finding themselves in a privileged position by not sharing our gender discrimination- who cannot avoid commenting something like “but in our movement / in our days / in our cardinal coordinates the issue is not so bad…”.

It can be tempting to say that gender inequality will soon be a thing of the past. However, the studies tell us that this problem is persistent and that the disparities are still there. In other words, it is not a problem that solves itself with time, but rather we have to be proactive to achieve change.

For instance, if we talk about academic production, men are overrepresented in terms of authorship, and men’s articles are quoted more frequently.

If we take a look at what the science says about this, we find that this unequal citation of women’s and men’s jobs is explained, on the one hand, by the fact that men cite themselves more frequently than women. On the other hand, it is also relevant that men quote other men more than they quote women.

This in terms of publications in the academic world, which represent a form of conceptual visibility. But there are many other more literal forms of visibility. For example, dynamics that can be given in conferences. Women give less talks and contribute more with less prestigious alternatives such as posters. Also, women are more reluctant to give talks when invited, and when they do give them, their lectures tend to be shorter.

Studies corroborate, in fact, that only 15% to 35% of keynote speakers at conferences are women. That overwhelming presence of men as lecturers, or all-male panels, has even a name: “a manel”.

Regarding our visibility at conferences as the audience, when we attend events, women ask less questions than men. When explaining why they did not ask questions when they wanted to, women, more than men, refered to internal factors (“couldn’t work up the nerve”), according to Carter et al.

In the same study about the participation of women in conferences they also found that structural factors also play a role. Thus, for example, when a man was the one who opened the question time, asking the first question, women asked proportionally fewer questions than when it was a woman who started the participation round.

Manterrupting

What happens when the people of underrepresented genders decide — apparently against all odds — to step up and speak up? What happens is that we are more interrupted when we speak. Research shows that men disrupt the most (roughly twice as many times as women), with women being interrupted three times more than men. Women also interrupt other women more than they do it to men.

And the most interrupted are those that suffer other oppressions, for example, non-white women, who often do not even get to speak. Let alone other non-male identities, of whose participation I have not been even able to find studies.

Are men talking too much?

Nowadays, there are digital tools to help us know how much men monopolize the conversation with respect to people with other identities. One of these tools is a timer available online which counts the time in which men and those who are not men speak, through two simple buttons, giving you the total percentage captured in each case .

I have used it to measure the assemblies of my work and of other groups. The result is kind of depressing: even in groups that try to be feminists, and where there is a similar presence of people who are men and people who are not, men tend to monopolize more than 70% of the conversation. I encourage you to do the exercise in your animal rights collectives and associations and then contact me and please tell me.

Animal liberation movements: Over-representation of men, under-representation of women

Today, the most visible people for the nonhuman animal rights are cisgender men, who happen to be also white. But historically women have always had a really important role in the activism for other animals. Women, trans, non-binary people, people of color… are and have always been also activists in this movement, but really their names and their faces are less familiar to us, with few exceptions.

As Emily Gaarder explained at her 2011 book, Women and the Animal Rights Movement, “one of the most striking characteristics of the animal rights movement is that the majority of its activists are women”. She explains that women have been at the forefront of animal rights activism in the United States and Great Britain since the eighteen hundreds, and current studies show that women constitute 68–80 percent of the animal rights movement.

The “Animals’ Agenda” report of two surveys concluded that “at all levels of participation . . . women constitute the single most important driving force behind the animal rights phenomenon” (Greanville and Moss 1985, 10).

Gaarder also quotes: “regardless of age, political views, or educational level, women are more likely than men to be animal advocates” (Kruse 1999). In general, as the experts say, “women are more likely than men to support animal rights” (Peek, Bell, and Dunham 1996) and to “express concern about the treatment of animals” (Driscoll 1992).

In Spain, my home country, Estela Díaz Carmona tells us that 71% of all the activists for animal liberation are women, and this same author also tells us that they show a higher level of involvement, at least initially, in the movement.

Initially, she remarks. Let’s now recall that leaky pipeline I was talking about at the beginning of this article. For various specific reasons, from constant daily manterrupting and mansplaining to very serious issues such as physical and sexual assaults, that add up to the more general issues that make women abandon their leisure activities and interests over the years (mandatory family care, among others) women and other non-male identities are leaving the movement, fed up with personality cults that lead to nothing productive; much more on the contrary.

However, the voices of women must also be heard, not only because of course we also have good ideas to share (that is, for a matter of effectiveness), but because it is simply the right thing to do in a movement that works against oppression (that is, for a matter of justice), and because as we have seen, this would encourage the equal participation of subsequent generations.

In a movement so little as ours, we cannot allow to ban out more than half of the population.

So far I have seen a few attempts to make visible the contributions of non-men to the antispeciest movement. One is the list on Corey Lee Wren’s website and the rest of her work.

Other example is the Collectively Free blog, which is a very good example of making intersectional issues visible.

Elsie Beatrice Shrigley

To finish, and just as a tiny example, I am going to tell you about a couple of ladies who have been sadly almost forgotten in our movement.

As an article by Sarah Fox on the Collectively Free website reminds us, there is a popular belief that it was Donald Watson who founded the Vegan Society and that he by himself coined the word “veganism”, but Fox explains that this only is true in part. As she explains, Donald Watson was the first secretary of The Vegan Society, and was the first editor of the Vegan Magazine, roles in which he would continue for the first two years of the collective’s existence.

What is not so mentioned, Sarah Fox says, is that there were about seven people at the founding meeting, including Elsie Beatrice Shrigley, also known as Sally by her maiden name, which was Salling. Sally was also another of the co-founders of the Vegan Society, and several sources cite her as a co-founder of the term “vegan”. Still, whenever we mention the original definition, we quote Watson alone and not always Sally.

Sally and Watson are said to have had the idea of founding the Vegan Society on a vacation they both attended with the Vegetarian Society, when they realized neither of them was consuming either animal milk or eggs. At the founding meeting of ’44 they found a word to label their way of life, vegan, differentiating it from “vegetarian” that was used for those who included some animal products in their diets.



At an article by Samantha Calvert she tells us that Sally was also president of the Vegan Society in the early 1960s, and that she held almost all official positions on several occasions. She also developed the Animal Free Shopper, which was one of the first lists to spread different vegan products that could be found at the time.

Brigid Antonia Brophy

I wanted to talk you also a little bit about Brigid Antonia Brophy. She was an English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer and playwriter. She was a feminist and peace activist who expressed controversial opinions about marriage, the Vietnam War or about sex, being openly bisexual already at that time. She was a defender of animal rights and vegetarianism.

On October 10, 1965 Brophy published an essay entitled The Rights of Animals, in the London Sunday Times. Before, in 64 she had already written the fictional work Hackenfeller’s Ape, which tells of Percy, an ape caged in London Zoo. Brophy was sadly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in ’84, and died 11 years later.

Her daughter has published a website https://www.brigidbrophy.com/ about her mother in which she explains that “some of the causes for which she fought, which were then considered something strange, such as animal rights or parity for same-sex relationships are popular topics today ”.

If we draw a line in time, we would find that in 1964, another author I have not talked about here, Ruth Harrison, published the important book Animal Machines. A year later, in 1965, Brigid Brophy wrote her article Animal Rights in the London Sunday Times. It was not until 1970 that Richard R. Ryder coined the term speciesism, and five years later Peter Singer published Animal Liberation (in 1975). This means that women were pioneers too, but they are not equally remembered or referenced.

Further reading about sexism and the animal rights movement

· Aph Ko, Syl Ko (2017): Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters

· Carol J. Adams (1990): The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory

· Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (2007): The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader

· Catia Faria (2018): The silence of the bitches. The political structure of misogyny in antispecist activism

· Corey Lee Wrenn (2018): “Building a Vegan Feminist Network in the Professionalized Digital Age of Third Wave Animal Activism.” Preprint, DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/jtps8

· Corey Lee Wrenn (2017): A Vegan Feminist Response to Nonhumans First

· Corey Lee Wrenn (2013): “The Role of Professionalization Regarding Female Exploitation in the Nonhuman Animal Rights Movement.” Journal of Gender Studies 24 (2): 131–146. DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2013.806248

· Emily Gaarder (2011): Women and the Animal Rights Movement

· Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Siobhan O’Sullivan, Yvette Watt (2019): Pussy Panic’ and Glass Elevators: How Gender is Shaping the Field of Animal Studies

Further reading in Spanish:

· Catia Faria (2018): https://www.pikaramagazine.com/2018/03/el-silencio-de-las-perras-la-estructura-politica-de-la-misoginia-en-el-activismo-antiespecista/

· Parole de Queer especial antiespecismo (2019): A first version of this article appeared last year at Parole de Queer magazine here.

Do you have recommendations for further reading on this topic? Please do comment!