600 Gender-Equality Advocates Met in Sweden and Earnestly Talked Through a Few Questions

Two possible shortcomings: not many men showed up, and — as at many conferences — how to actually push the agenda forward is still an open question.

"Yalla, forward!"

On April 15, in a keynote at the Stockholm Forum on Gender Equality, Lina Abirafeh said this.

Abirafeh directs the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW). A Middle Eastern face; clear, fluent English; short black hair, black suit and trousers. On Twitter her location reads "Lebanon," and she describes herself with these tags: feminist, gender equality, human rights, activist, and sometimes an academic.

I wrote "yalla" down phonetically, and only saw the correct spelling a few days later, on a drink bottle. A supermarket clerk told me that in Swedish the word does the work of the English "come on" — go for it.

About 600 delegates came to the Stockholm Forum on Gender Equality, from civil-society groups, governments, private institutions and universities in more than 100 countries. In the official description, they would spend dozens of breakout sessions "exchanging experience and methods, deepening dialogue, and taking solid steps to move the agenda forward." The topics included women in politics, building cities that are safer for women, women in peace negotiations, and using economic tools to empower women.

Right now looks like the best of times for feminists — over the past year the #MeToo movement has filled the mainstream press with coverage and argument. Many delegates don't see it that way. They point out that the progress has come with a backlash against the feminist movement: the room for some civil-society groups to operate is shrinking, and mainstream public debate has suddenly filled up again with "reactionary" voices, more than a few of them belonging to powerful people who can change the direction of policy.

Chen Xuefei is a journalist who has followed women's issues for years and now lives in Stockholm. She used the American president to make the point to me: "The most backward thing about Trump — I used to think you'd find it in Africa, and it turns out it's in the United States — is that he still opposes abortion on religious grounds…"

The forum's organizers — the Swedish Institute and Sweden's Ministry for Foreign Affairs — put "gender equality" in more official language. They place it inside the framework of the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals: "Gender equality runs through all of the goals, and it is crucial to guaranteeing sustainable development, peace and security."

At the same time they tried to borrow the language of the movement itself. "Yalla, forward" — the money line — came up again and again over two days. On April 17, when Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström repeated the slogan in her speech, Abirafeh wrote on Twitter: "My shero just quoted 'YALLA FORWARD' and I'm about to pass out from excitement…"

A group of people with a shared sense of mission and a shared language had finally come together. That should be a good thing.

"Swedish Characteristics"

This was not the year's only gender-equality forum, but few such forums insist so hard on their local character.

The folder handed out at the forum held a detailed program and also a pamphlet on "feminist foreign policy" — the platform Foreign Minister Wallström announced three years ago, as soon as she took office. A photography exhibition on the theme of "Swedish dads" hung on the walls outside the hall and drew plenty of people to stop and look; behind the pictures is Sweden's law granting men the right to parental leave.

Swedes have reason to advertise their record on gender equality. In the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) published by the OECD, Sweden ranks 4th of 144 countries. On the gender balance among professional and technical workers, in university enrollment and in ministerial posts, Sweden scores 1.000 — meaning Swedes have reached gender equality in these areas in the strict sense.

But to Chen Xuefei, the forum looked more like a "foreign aid conference" — building up Sweden's international influence by "aiding" "backward countries." A delegate from Hong Kong agreed that the forum had a tint of political publicity. Sweden's own delegation included three senior women officials — the Foreign Minister, the Minister for International Development Cooperation and Climate, and the Minister for EU Affairs and Trade — while the great majority of delegates from Asia, Africa and Latin America came from civil-society groups. The contrast carried a signal: the Swedish government wants to be the standard-bearer of the global gender-equality cause.

In fact, when Wallström put forward the idea of a "feminist foreign policy" in 2014, she ran into trouble both in diplomatic practice and in the press. Saudi Arabia cut off relations with Sweden in response to Swedish criticism of its human-rights record; The Atlantic ran a piece called "The Myth of a 'Female' Foreign Policy," questioning whether the claim that women in politics bring peace holds up: do women make peace possible, or does the prospect of peace make the public readier to be led by women? In the view of the author, Kathy Gilsinan, a foreign policy put forward by a woman is best treated as an uncertain product of "improvisation, domestic pressures, geopolitics, economics and much else." In other words, as a human being's foreign policy.

Wallström replied to the article in public. She stressed how practical the policy is: besides remaking the diplomatic system so that "feminism" moves from slogan to daily practice at every level of the administration, they have drawn up initiatives to support women taking part in local peace processes in Syria, Colombia and elsewhere.

She also restated the case for the "feminist foreign policy" in the first place: experience shows that peace agreements negotiated with women at the table hold up better; a McKinsey report finds that gender equality for women could add 12 trillion to global growth.

"Sweden's feminist foreign policy is modern, practical and clear," Wallström concluded.

Besides coordinating regional affairs, the host — the Swedish government — was trying to tell a "Swedish story" a little different from the one in popular culture, packaging itself as a case that is more universal and easier to copy.

Asked by QDaily whether countries with different welfare policies should pursue different strategies on equality, Sweden's Minister for International Development Cooperation and Climate, Isabella Lövin, began with some history: by European standards, Sweden used to be one of the poorer countries, and gender equality in fact helped drive its economic growth.

Then she rejected the premise of my question and pointed to the need for wealth to be distributed evenly: "A welfare society is the key factor [in advancing gender equality], because economic growth on its own doesn't necessarily bring change — you also need to distribute the wealth, otherwise you're only adding to the world's top layer of people. I think that's the biggest challenge right now."

"Also, Sweden hasn't fought a war in 200 years," she added.

The universality of the "Swedish experience" showed up in the choice of topics too. Against expectations, the still-growing #MeToo movement did not hog the microphone — several speakers echoed the point Abirafeh made in her keynote: many women have plenty of voice, but no microphone. A movement started by middle-class white actresses plainly cannot speak for the suffering of women everywhere. Girls under the shadow of war in Africa, women held down by religious extremists in the Middle East, gender-based violence in all its forms — these topics got room to unfold at the forum, showing the different dimensions of gender problems around the world.

If anything kept reminding me that I was an outsider, it was probably that I never once heard a discussion of the birth rate. Chinese faces were few, and for most people the question was still too particular, too far away. Even though it bears on hundreds of millions of people.

"Where Have All the Men Gone?"

"Of all the gender forums I've been to, there have never been as many male delegates as there are today." Tapiwa Manyati said this to me at a breakout session titled "Working With Men and Boys to Advance Gender Justice: How Do We Make Change Happen?" He works for the South African NGO Sonke Gender Justice, coordinating regional work on HIV/AIDS, gender equality and human rights.

"We need… to work with other stakeholders and other institutions — human rights bodies, child protection agencies, the UN, governments, and the wider civil society. Our job is to raise people's awareness, and to talk to policymakers and stakeholders so they understand that stopping violence against women matters."

"Would you call yourself a feminist?"

"I consider myself a feminist because I believe in human rights. I support gender justice and empowering women."

"You believe in human rights, and women are part of humanity, so you believe in feminism — is that it?"

"Yes… Even men carry the oppression of patriarchy. I have to prove I'm a real man, and I have to do certain things to prove it. You know, society wants me to behave a certain way, to perform through a certain masculinity, to act like a man. If we step out of that box, society — even your close friends and your family — will stop seeing you as a man. But that isn't true. I should be allowed to express my own feelings and emotions, because our needs and our feelings are the same, whatever our background or our place in the family or in society."

Like Manyati, many of the men at the forum found their way to this session without arranging it among themselves. Their jobs were much alike: coordinating communication and cooperation on gender equality between governments and civil-society groups. Men are still the majority in their countries' governments, but the officials who actually decide policy never appeared at the forum.

Beyond "raising men's awareness of equality," Sweden's unusual parental-leave system also drew attention. Swedish law requires a father to take a full three months of leave, and encourages him to take more. The effect has been to weaken men's unfair "advantage" in the labor market and to cut sharply the risk that childbirth interrupts a woman's career. In other words, it breaks the traditional division of gender roles: it forces husband and wife to share the duty of raising children, and pulls what each puts into a career to the same level.

This is Sweden's star policy in gender equality. Two journalists, one from Hong Kong and one from South Korea, both made it the subject of their reporting.

The organizers worked to give men a sense of taking part in the agenda, and Manyati thought highly of the share of male delegates. Still, what you saw in the room had — at least for some of us — the flavor of dark comedy: this was not so much a conference for women's equality as a conference of equality-minded women. At most of the breakout sessions, men made up less than a fifth of the people present.

When Abirafeh cried out on Twitter that women's voices should be heard in every field and at every level, one field surely never crossed her mind: the gender-equality cause itself.

Some of the questions speakers threw out left almost no room for men to join in. At a session on making women feel safer in city life, the speaker asked everyone to stand up, and to sit back down as soon as she named a situation they had lived through. The situations included: Have you ever seen a group of men on a bus and chosen to give them a wide berth? Have you ever, walking at night, made a woman ahead of you turn around nervously to check?

After a few questions I was the only person in the room still standing. To avoid that scene, all it would have taken was changing "the woman ahead of you" in the second question to the neutral "the stranger ahead of you." A year earlier, walking home from the cinema, I had run into a young man who kept nervously glancing back.

"But I admit women still bear far more risk than men," I added, so that my explanation would not seem out of place.

At a forum aimed at inequality you will not hear dissent, and you will not hear the voice of the power structures being accused and rejected. It is like the classic paradox of representation: "Everyone who isn't here, please raise your hand!"

Not every woman thinks the presence of men is optional. Kawinzi Muiu is the gender officer at the UN World Food Programme. After sitting through a conversation on Sweden's parental-leave system, she could not stay in her seat.

"We're here talking about equality between men and women, so where are the men? How many men are actually in this room, huh?" She turned and looked around, worked up. Silence answered her. I thought back to the first time the press delegates met each other. Female journalists from several other countries and territories had been surprised that a man turned up at all.

"Why does this question matter so much?" I asked Muiu.

"[Gender equality] shouldn't only be about telling women, 'Now you know what gender equality is, you need to work harder on unequal pay for equal work, on women raising children alone.' No, these discussions have to bring men in. Because achieving gender equality is a job for both sexes. It can't be women talking to themselves and then going home to tell their boyfriends or husbands what they heard."

"At another forum, a young woman said: 'Look, I've heard what you say, I've seen what you do, and I feel full of power. But back home, who is there to talk to? What does he make of all this?'" Muiu recalled.

"Do men really believe in gender equality? I'm asking you," Muiu said to me suddenly.

"If I didn't, I wouldn't be here," I answered.

"So that's exactly the fundamental question," she said. "Do men believe in gender equality? You could run a survey on it. The way I see it, men don't come to this forum because they think gender equality is only a women's matter. And that idea is wrong."

"When the rest of us find that men like you exist — men who believe in gender equality — remember to write me an email," Muiu told me, smiling.

A report Lina Abirafeh quoted estimates that full gender equality is still 580 years away. Before I write to Muiu, I will probably have a long wait too.

A Conference of Unity, a Conference of Victory

Everyone was attacking patriarchy, and everyone was arguing from a different angle: gender-based violence, women in politics, equality at work… This may be the most central word in gender studies, and the one with the most room for interpretation.

Babar Bashir comes from Pakistan; the NGO he runs works on the health and safety of women, young people and children. In his view, current criticism of patriarchy has not taken in enough of the criticism of the neoliberalism that sells globalization and marketization: "Multinational corporations, big conglomerates — these are the people controlling the world… including the arms makers. But we hardly discuss them; what we discuss more are problems at the level of the individual, of relationships."

"You think we should take a wider view?" I asked.

"Definitely. We have to take in politics and economics. The economy matters very, very much… Without a strong body, without enough food, without somewhere decent to live, people have no security at all. Gender is not a matter of 'you're nice to me, I'm nice to you'… You have to look at the problem from the standpoint of the whole system," he said.

Few people deny this, but the discussion doesn't always get that deep. Or rather, people prefer to reach for a language of feeling to make gender issues visible. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argued at the closing ceremony that press coverage of #MeToo is full of abstractions, and that what really conveys women's lived experience is stories. The context a story creates makes people see that sexual harassment is not only about sex but about power.

Seen that way, the Stockholm Forum on Gender Equality took Adichie's advice. The organizers put rap performances before several of the conversations, trying to make the expression of gender problems land harder. The welcome dinner for all delegates was held in Stockholm City Hall, where the Nobel Prize is awarded every year. Before the meal, the hosts laid on another rich round of "entertainment," including a 40-minute reading from a script. The action ran through Guatemala, Cambodia, Russia and Pakistan and covered domestic violence, war and education. When the reading ended the room applauded, and some delegates who could not beat the jet lag hurried out.

"Welcome, bon appétit, and yalla forward!" Before the food came, the Secretary-General of the Swedish Institute greeted the delegates in three languages.

If the entertainment at the welcome dinner was merely tiring, the rap at the closing ceremony was faintly embarrassing. Its theme was a woman's authority over her own body. After denouncing (once again) the violence women suffer, the rapper began chanting in rhythm: "I want every woman every girl to decide what to do with their body and their life." Her pitch climbed until she reached a hand out to the audience and led them in repeating the line, wave after wave.

At last she stopped and handed the words over entirely to the room. "I want every woman every girl to…" The voices sank, scattered out of step, and then came a burst of laughter. The sentence was simply too long.

No need to worry. The leaders of the gender-equality cause do not look less sincere for failing to keep up with a rapper. Many of them come from the places where conditions for women are worst, and they are used to war, to policy obstruction, even to threats against them on social media. They never avoid talking about these difficulties; as a line that circulates among them puts it, "Every backlash from a patriarchal society confirms your power." For some of them, life consists of flying around the world and setting out their ideas at one forum or speech after another.

The question is what they do once they step out of these halls ringing with progressive voices.

One conference of unity and victory does not look like enough.

Back to the wrap-up session on the forum's first day. Liu Qian, president of The Economist Group for Greater China, summed up her impressions this way:

"I kept hearing people say how important gender equality is, because A, B, C, D; that gender equality is under challenge, because A, B, C, D. But wait a moment — what exactly is gender equality? Do we really know its precise definition? I think every country and every individual understands it differently, and we can't take all those existing notions for granted… We need to define gender equality clearly, with goals that can be reached and acted on."

"Our global initiative on climate change gives a very clear definition: everyone has to act, you meet your target, I meet mine, and in the end we hold the rise in average global temperature under 2 degrees Celsius. That framework is tangible, so people can work on it concretely. On gender we should have something similar."

To this economist, money is the necessary condition for moving the gender-equality cause forward.

"When you have the money, everything starts," Liu Qian said.

(The Stockholm Forum on Gender Equality was held in Sweden from April 15 to April 17. QDaily and eight other media outlets attended at the invitation of the Swedish Institute.)

Cover photo: Margareta Bloom Sandebäck

Long-form cover photo: Cai Yineng / QDaily