Men often ask me how they can be allies to women. This is my simple response

Whenever I speak at an event, my audience is predominantly women, but there are always a few blokes scattered about. Most of them are probably accompanying their partners, but it is good to see them anyway. I don’t consider them “brave” – what’s with this weird idea that a room full of women is scary to men? And I certainly don’t make a fuss of them or single them out to thank them for attending, but I am aware that they are different from their fellows. Most men, sadly, still actively avoid anything they see as female-dominated.

I believe this male aversion to anything girly is a quiet form of sexism that profoundly affects both men and women. And I think it is an actual aversion, not just indifference or boredom. The anxiety men feel when confronted with women in a group has always struck me as odd. Women, as every verifiable stat confirms, have much more to fear from men than vice versa, yet women will happily be in the minority at a sporting event, a film, a political meeting, a conference or any other gathering you care to describe.

I have often been the only woman in a room, especially professionally. Never once did anyone congratulate me for being brave enough to be there. Yet the other day, in a full lift as the doors closed, the only man had to attempt a joke about how scared he was of us. Not funny. Not even close.

Meryl Streep brilliantly explained that women know how to “speak men”, but men have no idea how to “speak women”. As the subordinate culture, women are trained from birth to understand the dominant male one. Their survival and their ability to thrive depends on it. But boys are often brought up to actively avoid understanding women. After all, how does a dominant culture maintain its status if it allows itself to understand those it subordinates?

No doubt black people know a great deal more about white people than the other way around, and queer people about straight people, and the poor about the rich. That’s just how hierarchies survive.

But to return to my events, during question time, one of the men in the audience will often ask how they can be a better ally for women. I love getting this question, especially since, by their mere presence, these men are already doing what they are inquiring about.

All you need to do is engage with more cultural pursuits and entertainment created by and about women.

JANE CARO

It is easy to be a feminist ally. Even better, it’s good fun. All you need to do is engage with more cultural pursuits and entertainment created by and about women. This is practical allyship for several reasons. The first is that it increases the opportunity for women creatives to get their work published and produced. Just look at women’s sport. It’s succeeding because men and boys are supporting it, too. In the creative world, however, getting your work made remains much harder for women.

Research by UK group The Women’s Prize in 2024 found that of the top-20 best-selling female authors in the UK in 2023, only 20 per cent of purchasers were men, whereas 44 per cent of the purchasers for the top-selling male authors were women, proving Streep’s point rather neatly. This is perhaps why Joanne Rowling took the moniker JK Rowling for the Harry Potter books, and, indeed, why they are the Harry Potter books and not the Hermione Granger ones. Her publishers probably knew that sales would be halved if the books appeared to be by, and about, girls.

Interesting, even Rowling’s pseudonym for her crime novels – Robert Galbraith – is male. This bias happens in films, too, which is perhaps why the success of the unashamedly female-focused Barbie film was such a shock. But, as actor Geena Davis uncovered when she examined her industry from the point of view of her twin son and daughter, the situation is even worse for children’s films.

In Finding Nemo, for example, there is only one female fish in the entire ocean, and she can’t remember her name from one minute to the next. Both Frozen films have started to redress that balance, but who can forget the moral panic around little boys wanting to dress up as princesses Elsa and Anna?

And maybe that’s the crux of it. Books, films, TV series and stories increase our empathy. They get us to experience the world through the eyes of someone who is not like us. I call it “people travelling”. And if you empathise with people who are a different gender, class, race, religion, age or anything else, it is much harder to dehumanise them. And if you can’t dehumanise them, it’s much harder to bully, oppress, rape, beat or kill them.

Given the world we are in, we have never needed empathy – especially male empathy – more.

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