Women and platforms: a response
Steve Holmes has kindly taken time to response to my comments on his previous blog mail. I am reposting his comments here with permission, since it seems to me that this is an important word which needs to exist teased out.
Ian Paul, who I have never had the pleasure of meeting, just with whom I collaborate regularly online, posted some reflections occasioned by my weblog post on his weblog (I think it is better to depict information technology like that than as a 'response').
Before I start, I should say that I respect Ian greatly, that we agree on most subjects (although he belongs to one of those strange sects that sprinkle infants…), and have made common crusade together before now. Specifically, given the topic under give-and-take, Ian has been a committed and effective apostle for female leadership in the church, and has done much skillful equally such, for which I honour him. If nosotros disagree, it isen famille.
Ian's kickoff annotate relates to a passing phrase I used 'the Christian conference circuit'; I did not mean much by this, save that there are a sure number of (not-congregational) events in the U.k. to which a Christian speaker might be invited. It is non a closed shop; the 'gatekeepers' who invite people to various events are more often than not publicly identified and (in my – fairly extensive – experience) are always very proactive in seeking out potential new speakers. But, equally with any expanse of life, there's a learning bend; no-1 goes directly to chief stage. That was the extent of my reflection. I might weblog again about this, as information technology seems to have touched a nerve with a few people, but for now I just want to stress that I really didn't mean very much past information technology.
The nub of Ian's argument turns on some thoughts on parenting. I commented that 'the hard yards on this road come when, if you have family, your children are young, and it is generally harder for a mother than a father to take invitations to be away from habitation,' and located this 'generally harder' in sociology; Ian wants to locate information technology in biology, or possibly psychology, and so argue that mothers need/want to spend more time with their children, and and then volition choose, often plenty to skew speaker stats, not to practice those 'hard yards'.
At present, I recollect my sociological argument is stronger than Ian's biological/psychological one, merely neither of us are experts there and we're not going to solve that. So, for the sake of what follows, I will assume his point. Even with it, I suggest that (a) his conclusions do not follow and (b) even if they did there would be a gospel imperative to resist them.
I see at least 3 logical problems. The outset is this: Ian's argument is clearly a degree argument, not an absolute difference statement (a degree argument: women tend to be shorter than men; an absolute difference statement: men take more Y chromosomes than women). A degree argument, even if information technology applies well to two classes as a whole, may non utilise to particular subsets of those 2 classes. Then: female netball internationals in fact tend to be taller than men. Ian applies a general merits about women to the specific subset of female leaders without arguing that the transference is plausible. Information technology seems to me that it is non: his claim is something like 'in full general, maternal instincts will atomic number 82 women to value their families higher than their professional development'. For his argument to concord, Ian needs to demonstrate that female Christian leaders are not, on average, sufficiently invested in their God-given vocation to nullify this general gender gap he claims to see. (This would not, of course, be to merits that female leaders are less invested in their families than women in general, but that – properly, given their calling by God – they are more often than not more committed to their ministry building than, on average, other women are to their jobs.)
At present, I don't accept that there is a gender difference here, and my suspicion is that the reality, for female and male leaders, in church and without, is actually precisely the opposite. At that place is some evidence, for what such prove is worth, that senior leaders in various fields are more than, not less, invested in their families than less 'successful' people in those fields, and that holds truthful whether they are male or female person. This chimes both with my feel of the senior people I know – in the church building and in other fields – and with some Biblical cloth near the responsibilities of a Christian leader towards his/her children. Female or male, the leaders I respect most are (either single or) people who are deeply committed to, and invested in, their families, and they maintain that investment regardless of their travelling/speaking schedule.
This reflection leads me to a second logical problem with Ian's argument. I claimed, which I stand by, that there is a sociological pressure precisely nearbeingness abroad from domicile. I could specify this at length anecdotally, but the general point is a societal expectation that mothers, specifically, are present at various events. Ian has moved this into a broader point about 'investing fourth dimension and energy in their children', and has claimed that beingness away from dwelling house for a few days in antonymous to and then doing. This claim is, I am afraid, only bizarre; local presence and personal investment are fundamentally different things. Existence away from home ten days a year hardly compromises someone'due south ability to be profoundly invested in their children! So Ian'southward argument fails because his categories do non friction match.
Again, in that location is a reality check here. I did several years on team at Spring Harvest (nosotros've not been for the last couple); the first year I went because I was pleased to be asked, &c., only by the 3rd twelvemonth, I enjoyed going, certainly, only I think that – if nosotros are honest – we said yes for the sake of our children, who found information technology a brilliant week, and grew visibly in their faith through it. (I year I turned down the opportunity to requite a keynote at a major academic conference to go, entirely for family reasons.) I don't expect to exist invited back at that place once again (it seems every bit if that season has now passed for whatever reason), merely if I was, we would concur at least as much for the girls every bit for anything I was going to leave of it. (And I should say that SH were – and I suppose are – really skilful with speakers' children in a whole diversity of ways, from cheap adaptation and registration to offers of infant-sitting in the evenings to invitations to exist a function of team social events.) Of class, this i anecdote isn't generalisable, but information technology does highlight the fact that Ian'south proposed disjunction between embracing speaking opportunities and being invested in family is at least not ever existent.
This anecdote also takes me to a tertiary logical problem with Ian'southward argument, which is a generalisation of the second: for information technology to work, he needs to assume a naught-sum game betwixt taking speaking opportunities and caring for the family unit – but no-one's life is so binary, surely? A church leader can give time to external speaking out of fourth dimension she would take otherwise given to the church, not out of family unit fourth dimension, and and then her care for her family need not be lessened in any way by her external speaking commitments. Again, to requite a personal example, if I wanted more than time for external speaking without compromising my family life (or my proper professional commitment to my employer), I could: withdraw from a denominational committee; step down from local church leadership; end my involvement in a couple of local ecumenical initiatives; finish writing for one or more of half-a-dozen organisations; stop to exist a trustee of a charity or four; stop blogging; stride off a journal editorial board or three; … That's my list; I suppose everyone else has one like – and, while we all do – Ian's claim that someone would need to lessen her commitment to her family in club to have on speaking engagements must be simply imitation.
So, even granted his premise, I do non think Ian's statement works, or that his conclusion follows. Allow me, however, presume that it did. Suppose that it was the case that gifted women were being prevented from exercising and developing their teaching gifts considering of a proper concern for their family. I suggest that we should however resist that, and do whatever nosotros can to minimise and eradicate the problem, for gospel reasons.
The question of paying a pastor is one that has occasionally exercised Baptist churches: why do it, given that we hold to a plurality of eldership and so on? The answer given, always, is that the ministry of the Word matters profoundly to the life of the church, and so relieving the one primarily gifted and tasked with the ministry building of the Give-and-take from the normal duties and cares of life – particularly from the demand to earn a living – was the right thing to do for the sake of the gospel. Biblical arguments to defend such a decision are non hard to notice, and – unsurprisingly – were developed at length past various Baptists. The betoken seems to me straightforwardly transferrable: if God has gifted a woman to teach, and she is being prevented from total do of that ministry building by family unit responsibility, there is a gospel duty on the church to find means to salvage that responsibility so that she may build upward the church through the exercise of her gift. I propose therefore that, even if Ian is correct in every argument, that is notwithstanding not a reason to accept the situation he describes; rather we should piece of work confronting information technology in the name of the gospel.
Ian ends with some interesting, only undeveloped, suggestions well-nigh gendered ways of didactics. Once more, let me grant the bones premise, that women and men teach in different ways, for the sake of the argument. This still does not entail any conclusion about who should speak at conferences until we take specified what the differences are. If we discovered that men were mostly more than adept at 'ready-slice' type oratory, whereas women were generally better at workshop-fashion didactics, and so we might properly expect a gender imbalance in different contexts (given the preponderance of seminar-style input at the bigger conferences, we would await a significant bulk of female speakers in the overall numbers: Ian suggests platform oratory is male; even if it is, the statistics we collected through Project 3:28 covered all the seminars and workshops at the various conferences, not just the main platforms; there are many more people involved at seminar/workshop level, and most of them are nonetheless male.). If however nosotros discovered that the deviation was simply to do with mode – perhaps the utilise of narrative, or empathy, or humor – nosotros might think that this was really good reason to press for gender balance in every context, so that a full range of teaching styles could be experienced everywhere.
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