In light of examining the systems around us, FutureAir founder and CEO, Simone Rothman, recently read Mary Beard’s, Women & Power. The two-part lecture examines women’s voices in Western history.
Beard harks back to antiquity and recalls accounts of women who, one way or another, lost their ability to speak. Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, is silenced by her son; Ponce cuts out Philomela’s tongue; the nymph Echo is only able to repeat the speech of others. Historically and literally, authoritative figures repeatedly silence women. Not only are women excluded from speech, but Greco-Roman texts attribute the capacity for public speech and oration as defining qualities of “maleness”.
The Greco-Roman era may be distant in time, but the traditions of gendered speech make up the foundation of modern speaking:
“Our traditions of debate and public speaking, their conventions, and rules, still lie very much in the shadow of the classical world… Classical traditions have provided us with a powerful template for thinking about public speaking and for deciding what counts as good oratory or bad, persuasive or not, and whose speech is to be given space to be heard; and gender is obviously an important part of that mix.”
Male civilizations of antiquity have heavily influenced the rubric of powerful speech. Those classical actors excluded women’s voices from the tradition of oration. This exclusion, Beard argues, established a Western civilization rhetoric rubric that does not hear authority in women’s voices. So it goes, that women, associated with a lack of authority, find themselves powerless.
Faced with this challenge, women often adopt male rhetoric in order to be included, but ultimately, we feel alienated. The issue here is not the women, but the rhetoric rubric women are expected to adhere to. “We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, if women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is ‘power’ that we need to redefine rather than ‘women’,” Beard writes.
As a founder of a tech start-up, Simone understands the necessity of powerful speech. But in navigating the invisible world of indoor air, she must also navigate the insidious structures of gender inequality. Having the wherewithal to simultaneously fight for one’s cause and compel people to listen requires twice the effort for considerably less reward.
The systemic forces at work cause an ingrained, historical, inherited sinking feeling of inadequacy for women when speaking in male-dominated spaces. A system that lacks the space for women’s voices reminds me of structural design that lacks the ability to measure indoor air quality. A system with ample examples of male oration and a void where female speech should exist parallels the endless outdoor air research and the lack of indoor air research. The overall non-acknowledgment of women’s speech and indoor air leads me to believe that we at FutureAir are measuring so much more than air. We are establishing visibility for both indoor air and women!
Follow the link here to continue investigating the distribution of visibility with FutureAir.
Beard, Mary. Women & Power: a Manifesto. Profile Books Ltd, 2018.
Image: John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus – Google Art Project
Written by Mollie Wodenshek for FutureAir