#8 DO YOU HAVE TIME TO THEORISE?
What's the problem represented to be, bridging the gap between academia and action + more updates on our latest goings-on,
Welcome to Visible Platform's newsletter, The Platform.
This newsletter was created as we thought it was important to keep you updated on our journey and share resources to help you recognise, cope with and heal from incidents of public harassment.
If you like what we’re doing, subscribe and share with your friends 📣
April Reflections:
April has come and gone in the blink of an eye and here at Visible we’ve doing the absolute unglamorous job of just doing the work. 👩💻
Sometimes when you’re fighting for a cause, you can get caught up in doing the doing, i.e doing the stuff so that it seems that you’re doing stuff. We’re forever conscious of making sure we’re not just making noise but also making progress and sometimes that means all the behind-the-scenes admin and learning (and endless endless meetings) that it involves.
This month we’ve been thinking about how problems are represented when it comes to the solutions offered. For example, women-only carriages may appear to be taking steps towards women’s safety, but this solution represents the problem as women taking up space that isn’t designed for them, and therefore getting harassed. When really the problem is the men doing the harassing.
We like this approach because it allows us to problem solve differently, or rather to make sure problematise correctly, and for age old questions- such as how do we stop men harassing women- this can be revolutionary ⚡️
Visible Platform
Platform Updates:
🚃🚃 Women-only carriages? We wrote a blog piece looking at the effectiveness of women-only carriages and if their intentions are misguided.
💎💎 Donate to Visible! By popular demand (one person asking us how to donate to the cause) we’ve now got a donate option on our site! Visible Platform is a not-for-profit, meaning any money we do receive is used to keep our systems up and running, and our research independent.
“Writing is not an ends in itself”
Most of our team are in academia one way or another. Bachelors, Masters, PhDs, lecturers; we seem to attract a certain kind of person, someone who enjoys research, sees it value, and wants to use it to provide the means with which to enable change.
And we can’t blame them, because we feel the same. Academic texts can be inspiring and innovating. But you have to read a lot of them to find those golden nuggets. This in itself is a luxury- though it doesn’t always feel like one!
We recently came across a quote stating that “feminists and policymakers ought to be encouraged to engage collaboratively in theoretical conversations about how ‘gender’, and other concepts (for example, equality, gender equality), are understood”, and couldn’t help but feel this was far easier said than done.
In reality, if you’re not specifically working in academia or being paid to theorise, the chances that you’re taking the time in your job to partake in theoretical conversations are probably pretty low. Engaging collaboratively means not only having the time to think deeply about the issues, but also read and reflect on literature and examples of theories in practice. If, for example, you work in the rail industry as a policy and compliance officer, time you spend theorising on the impacts of heteronormative policy in creating gender, is probably not going to be seen by your employer as a super useful activity for the job at hand.
Our short time working within the transport sector has shown us that most of time, companies do care about issues, and they do want to get it right. But the time, effort, and understanding required to do so is pretty limited because along with those tasks, there’s a million others to do.
That’s where we come in 👋 👋
Visible Platform are currently working on our Database, a part of our site that will sort relevant academic literature on a range of topics including male violence against women, gendered safety planning and perceptions, tech solutions, urban design, transportation and much more. Not only will we be putting all this literature in one place- and continuously adding to it- we will also be producing our own independent literature reviews. Which means rather than having to choose which one document to devote hours of your time to, we’ll be summarising and comparing 10-15 papers and highlighting the key findings.
The purpose of our Database is to bridge the gap between academic insight and real world application, to remove the elitism that sometimes accompanies theorising, and, ultimately, to educate and inform in order to get real results.
Exciting, right?!
We’re always open for submissions so if you find (or write) any relevant papers or studies just send them our way. We’ll be launching ASAP so watch this space. 👀
The Platform Recommends:
📝 Read: The club that teaches women how to say ‘no’ to office housework.
Women — in a chicken and egg situation — are both asked more frequently than men to do such tasks and then say yes more often. The key explanation for these drivers lies in the collective expectation that women, more than men, will do the unrewarded and non-promotable work. In one professional services firm, by analysing employees’ time, they discovered “whether senior or junior, the median woman spent about two hundred more hours per year than the median man on non-promotable work. That’s approximately a month of extra dead-end work.”
👀 Check this out: The ‘Shout-Up!’ Campaign trains hospitality venues to help prevent sexual harassment.
📹 Watch: Gender on the Agenda; Exploring gender bias in decision-making: data collection and analysis
Visible Platform is all about creating a community, so if you want to talk to us please email us on: info@visibleplatform.org
You can also message us on social media:
Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook
P.S. You’re receiving this because you’ve previously expressed interest in our work. But if you’d rather not hear these updates, you can unsubscribe at any time!