Showing posts with label equality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label equality. Show all posts

Lifting awareness of male supremacy: an elevator pitch with a twist

  November 21, 2025    

The source of much of what is wrong in the world today is male supremacy, awareness of which needs raising. Could one simple question do the trick? 
Stylized picture of an elevator car containing icons symbolising a man and a woman. To the right of the car are two buttons, one above another signifying up and down.
I believe there are many men out there who, like me, are sick to death of guys who perpetuate, knowingly or unintentionally, the evil that is male supremacy and all the pain and suffering that it is causing in the world today.

The burden of that pain and suffering falls mainly on women. But the pain and suffering caused by male supremacy also impacts men, through the oppressive hierarchical structure of society and the poisoning of our efforts to relate to each other.

In my opinion the solution to male supremacism is — or at least begins with — men and women improving their understanding of each other. One huge gap in mutual understanding that I see is the risk gap: far too few men truly comprehend the amount of risk that women have to deal with each and every day, throughout their lives.

According to a vast range of studies and statistics, life is a lot riskier for women than it is for men, even in so-called advanced countries like the US and UK. If you doubt this, consider this observation from a woman I know:

What a luxury it is not to have to think about being assaulted while you go about your day, to feel safe in a rideshare, loiter in a park, relax in a bar, walk home alone from work at night. — Soraya Chemaly

If you are still not convinced that women are forced to live with more risks than men, I have a question for you:

A man and a woman get into an elevator. Which one is doing risk assessment?

If you’re a man and your first thought was the woman, good for you! It sounds like you may have what it takes to truly understand what I mean about life being riskier for women. If you're a man and answered the woman and immediately felt discomfort, sadness, shame, or anger that even now, in 2025, this is how things: Congratulations! You have real potential to make this world a better place, a place where women feel as safe as men.

I'm talking about a place where women can enjoy the luxury of not having to think about being assaulted while they go about their day. A place where male supremacy is not exacting a constant toll on our mothers, sisters, daughters, partners, wives or lovers. A place in which it is no longer the case that: 

...men’s relative freedom of movement and safety are unspoken privileges. And we pay for them dearly every day. — Soraya Chemaly

To be clear, I think men can and should make this world a place where women are free to live the lives they choose for themselves, and it safe for them to do so. As I've said, it’s going to take a lot of hard work, but I truly believe this work will make life a whole lot better for both men and women. 

And there is one relatively easy piece of work we can all do right now: ask the elevator question (or the lift question if you’re in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa).

Working the Elevator/Lift Question

I’ve been asking the elevator question for many years in many different settings and I find it's an effective and relatively non-confrontational way of raising awareness of how different life is for men and women due to the huge gap in their risk exposures. And to say that I’ve learned a lot by asking this question would be huge understatement.

First of all, almost all women answer the woman. I had expected this when I first came up with the question, but I wasn't prepared for how many women said it right way, I mean instantly, sometimes loudly and with feeling. 

And I had not expected at all was the unprompted outpouring of elevator risk management strategies, some of which I will paraphrase here:

  • I always head to the back of the elevator.
  • If the elevator’s empty and the man goes first, I pretend I’ve forgotten something and don’t get in.
  • If the elevator’s empty, like it’s just him and me, I just don’t get in.
  • If it’s just me and and a man waiting for the elevator I take the stairs. 
  • I always take the stairs, and not because I need the exercise.
  • If I’m the only woman waiting for an elevator I make sure my keys are in my hand.

For me, these strategies shine a bright light on the huge gulf between the way men and women experience daily life; and the fact that women are doing this is a concrete evidence of the insidious nature of male supremacy. 

This risk gap, and the way that it reflects all the things that make up male supremacy today — the persistent misogyny, the enduring patriarchal structure of society and its institutions, the appalling level of violence against women — needs to be openly discussed by all of us. And I mean all of us everywhere, at dinner parties, in staff meetings, over drinks after work, and in our homes.

Which brings me to the elevator pitch, sometimes called the elevator speech, lift speech, or elevator statement. Wikipedia defines elevator pitch as: "a short description of an idea, product, or company that explains the concept in a way such that any listener can understand it in a short period of time." 

I've written a ton of these during my time as an entrepreneur, author, and film producer. Here's my elevator pitch explaining why we should be asking the elevator question:

"If you're looking for a way to raise awareness of how unequal life still is for people who are not rich white men, especially for the more than 50% of people who present as female or feminine, pose the following question whenever you get a chance: A man and a woman get into an elevator. Which one is doing risk assessment?" 

If the elevator ride is a longer one, I would add suggestions as to who should hear this question: your partner, your friends, your work colleagues, the people you meet at conferences, sports events, coffee shops and bars. 

Anyway, that's my pitch for starting conversations about male supremecacy. Ask the elevator question and see what happens. I'd love to hear how you get on. Could it be said better? Do some people just not get it? Would it be better to say risk management that risk assessment? 

(I tend to think of risk management as what's happening once inside the elevator car; but clenching of keys and taking the stairs are risk mitigation techniques — let's face it women are often very good at all of these things.)

Speaking of being very good at things, I think Sora Chemaly's new book — All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy — is very good at spelling out what male supremacy is, why it still exists, what great harm it is causing, and how important it is for us to — in her words — dismantle it. Cramming all that into one clear and concise volume is a major accomplishment, one that I hope will spark major progress in the dismantling of male supremacy. 

p.s. If you already know this stuff, recommend Soraya's book to folks who don't. Better yet, buy them a copy.


NOTES

1. Gender language: I made a conscious decision to write this article using the traditional terms men and women. My reason: I didn't want to lose any male readers before I had even made my point. That point is: male supremacy is bad for everyone and one way to advance the very urgent and very necessary task of dismantling it, is to raise awareness of just how much harm it does to us all, including cisgender women, trans and non-binary people, and those with Indigenous gender/social roles, and also cisgender men like me. I'm pretty sure most people in all those groupings already understand this, with the notable exception of an unacceptably high percentage of cisgender men.

2. Male Supremacy: The belief in cisgender men’s superiority and right to dominate, control, or erase “others,” women, trans and non-binary people, and those with Indigenous gender/social roles. —Institute for Research on Male Supremacism

3. Quotes: The exact source of Soraya's quotes in the article is All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy, Kindle Edition, p 12, 2025.

4. Transparency: I should mention that I did not come up with the elevator question in the context of dismantling male supremacy. It a rose from my efforts to recruit more women into the cyber security profession. There has always been a shortage of people with the necessary aptitude and inclination to do the vital work of defending our ever-growing digital information systems and the data they process. I'm sure I wasn't the first person to point out that the profession was male dominated but that women were entirely capable of making vital contributions to profession. But I was one of the first to point out that, on aggregate, women tended to have a greater awareness of risk than men, and hence likelier to possess an aptitude for security work.

5. Keys and self-defense: Clenching your keys in your fist with the points sticking out between your fingers has long been a staple of "self-defense for women" but many experts are now of the opinion that a different style of key grip is better, as enthusiastically demonstrated by a man in this blunt-but-on-point YouTube video on using keys as an improvised weapon, and discussed by a woman here.

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The Welcome Page

  September 06, 2024    

This post used to be pinned to the top of the blog but I decided to let it move down the stack. It's purpose was, and still is, to explain that I am Stephen Cobb and this is my personal blog. 

The blog was set up in 2005 but I didn't start regular blogging on it until 2006. That's because I had another blog, also started in 2005, where I covered my main interest back then: information security.

Over time, this blog became a place to talk about things other than cybersecurity. Things like dealing with several medical conditions: my primary aldosteronism, basal cell carcinoma, and very low grade prostate cancer; also my partner's hemochromatosis and Giant Cell Arteritis (UK readers can just add an 'a' after the 'e' in the hemo words).

Brief notes on 70+ years of life

I was born in a house in the medieval city of Coventry, in the middle of England, in the middle of the last century, to parents who survived heavy aerial bombardment in the global conflict known as World War Two, which ended seven years before my life began. 

After going to university—first in Leeds and then in Canada — I travelled the world for several decades before moving back to the city of my birth with my partner and our adopted cat, Lola (seen above).

My partner of 39 years, the phenomenal Chey Cobb, is a US citizen, legally resident in the UK. I am a citizen of both the UK and the US. We have both spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time researching how humans create and confront technology risks and health challenges. I write about my research for a variety of websites and publications, like:
This blog is where I write about more personal stuff such as: the fact that I'm retired, although I'm still open to interesting projects; my plans to publish another book, but I'm not sure when; my attempts to raise awareness of the medical problems which disabled my partner; the role of registered carers and how it can be supported; my hopes for radical reform of the patriarchal medical establishment that continues to fail women so badly. 
Photo of a Minolta lens on my Olympus camera

On a lighter note, Chey thinks I should have a hobby to take my mind off things, so I'm been trying "classic glass" photography: using lenses from old 35mm film cameras to take pictures with modern digital cameras (for example, the Minolta lens on my Olympus camera shown here).

On a more serious note, I feel the need to use some of my "free" time to contribute to society. So in addition to sharing my knowledge about thwarting digital criminals, I serve on the board of a charity, Carers Trust Heart of England. 

I also do driving jobs for our local hospital as one of the hundreds of UHCW Volunteers. As I travel around Warwickshire collecting and delivering patients I engage in another hobby: sampling independent coffee shops and their menus.

Fortunately, I still find some time to continue my research at the nexus of ethics and technology. I am currently exploring the harm caused by abuse of technology, which I have written about here. and talked about here, on YouTube.

If you want to contact me, you can use the form on this page or find me on Facebook or LinkedIn. 

Note: I am aware of some formatting issues and missing images in the older articles on this site—a side-effect of moving this blog from WordPress to Blogger—I'm fixing them as and when I can.

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What's this #HeForShe thing?

  November 15, 2017    

Technically speaking, #HeForShe is a hashtag, a social media tool defined as: "a word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) and used to identify messages on a specific topic (Wikipedia).

The #HeForShe hashtag originated with, and is the name of, the UN Women’s solidarity movement for gender equality.

The idea behind HeForShe is to invite men and boys "to build on the work of the women’s movement as equal partners, crafting and implementing a shared vision of gender equality that will benefit all of humanity."

Tagging things #HeForShe is a way for me to share the fact that I have accepted that invitation and I have been using the hashtag for a while now. Why? Because I truly believe that gender equality does benefit all of humanity. I also believe that gender equality will not be achieved unless more men - most men, all men - commit to it, and make it a priority, in practical terms and not just as a vague aspiration.

Getting schooled on #HeForShe

I came to know about #HeForShe because I was studying at the University of Leicester when, back in May of 2015, it joined the UN Women’s HeForShe solidarity movement as an "IMPACT 10x10x10 champion," one of 10 universities around the world participating in the program with the goal of taking "bold, game-changing action to achieve gender equality within and beyond their institutions." Here's how the program was introduced:
"Announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January of 2015, HeForShe’s IMPACT 10x10x10 programme engages 30 key leaders across three sectors—the public sector, private sector and academia. All 30 IMPACT champions have made common commitments and have also developed tailored commitments, formally reviewed by an expert team at UN Women and approved personally by the Executive Director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka."
But the fact that my school had embraced HeForShe was not why I chose to embrace it myself. Gender equality is something I have always believed in, from well before my first stint at university (University of Leeds, 1971-74). I can't say that I was born a feminist - the scientific jury is out on whether that is even possible - but I knew that I was a feminist-sympathizer as soon as I heard the word used in a sentence. That would have been around 1965, shortly after I became a teenager and read my mum's copy of The Feminine Mystique.

That book, and several other "radical" texts, showed up in our house in the mid-sixties when my mum enrolled in a teaching college under a government program to reduce the shortage of teachers created by the baby boom. Her decision - which my dad supported practically, emotionally, and philosophically - resulted in a real world experience of gender equality in action. Among other things it demonstrated that:
  1. Women can have a productive career outside the home.
  2. This is not a threat to men.
  3. Men and boys can do housework quite well if they try.
On top of that, mum's time as a mature student created a steady flow of interesting books into our house, notably the afore-mentioned 1964 classic, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan. This has since been "widely credited with sparking the beginning of second-wave feminism." As I read - entirely of my own volition - Friedan's analysis of women frustrated with society's narrow and deeply limiting definition of what a woman should be - wife, mother, cook, cleaner - it rang true with my own observations.

That's right, I had - for whatever reason - been observing women from an early age (maybe I was born to be social scientist). As a child I was surrounded by women, at home, at church, and at the shops. I listened to them talking. I read women's letters to the advice columns in ladies' magazines (which were definitely not feminist back then).

Rather fortuitously, my childhood in Coventry, England, was enriched by frequent visits from numerous aunts and great aunts, all of whom had all survived World War Two. My mum's mother had actually lived through aerial attacks in both World War One and World War Two. All of these women had lived through large-scale bombing campaigns, including the one in 1940 that killed over 500 people in Coventry in one night and destroyed two-thirds of the city's buildings (Wikipedia). My grandma and several of her sisters worked in munitions factories which were targeted in these bombing campaigns.

Often when I was small these women, most of them housewives with grown children, would sit and talk about those times gone by, and I would quietly listen at their feet. That is how I came by precious historical vignettes like this: my Great Aunt Tot standing in the middle of the street shaking her fist and swearing at a German Messerschmitt 109 as it made a daylight strafing run on the factory at the end of her road.

So maybe it is not surprising that I grew up thinking of women as strong, independent individuals; all the while becoming increasingly angry that society would not treat them equally. Yes, there has been some progress, but nowhere near enough. Hopefully #HeForShe can help us move things forward.

Of allies, male feminists, and good men

I hope to find time to write more about HeForShe but in the meantime I will try to use the hashtag wherever appropriate in order to raise awareness of gender inequality and the need for men to work to eliminate it.

What I will try to avoid is referring to myself as an ally of women, or a male feminist, or a good man. Those are designations to which I aspire, but it is not part to claim them.

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Of Beatles, Brits, and the Slave Trade: History gets personal

  April 18, 2007    

If you are a history buff you may know that 2007 is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Britain. The British might have been big bad imperialists--okay, they were big, bad imperialists--but they had the decency to ban slavery before their American cousins gave it up. (In fact, it was not until 1833 that the ban on slavery took effect throughout the British Empire).

If you are a Beatles fan, and I mean a serious fan, you may know that the street name they made famous --Penny Lane--got its name from a wealthy eighteenth century Liverpool slave ship owner and ardent opponent of abolitionism: James Penny. (Liverpool ships transported half of the 3 million Africans carried across the Atlantic by British slavers.)

I am not for one moment suggesting that, in some weird way, the Beatles supported slavery. Indeed, I think it is safe to say all four of them were strongly opposed to racial discrimination of any kind and, through their music, did much to promote themes of equality and racial integration. What I am saying is that slavery was woven into the fabric of British life and, to this day, Britain reaps lingering benefits from past slavery. For example, it is my belief that the benefits of an affluent society that I enjoyed while growing up there came, in some part, from slavery.

When you look at England, a country much smaller than Greece or Romania, then look at the one fifth of the world's land surface that was called the British Empire, you have to wonder how they did that (I'm using England rather than Britain in this statement because the Scots and Welsh and Irish probably don't want to be included when it comes to the nastier aspects world domination carried out in their name).

You have to wonder where such a small country got the means to achieve that much power and influence. Okay, so Sir Francis Drake and his like made good money stealing treasure from the the Spanish conquistadors (who had stolen it from the people of Central and South America) but a big chunk of the wealth that funded the expansion of the empire was derived from the slave trade.

Which helps explain several things, including an entire web site devoted to marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. I encourage you to visit this site. It also explains the depth of sorrow expressed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York when they led a procession through London to mark the 200th anniversary of Britain's abolition of the slave trade. It may even explain why someone like me, born and raised in England but now living in America, feels drawn to issues of racial equality.
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Teach for America: There is much work to be done

  December 03, 2006    

I was struck by the truth of this statement by Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America and an evangelist for education reform in low-income areas:
"Six percent of the kids who are growing up in the communities where we were working will graduate from college," says Kopp. "We believe that that issue has to be our generation's civil rights issue."
Based on my work with Dare Not Walk Alone and my experiences in the predominantly black neighborhood of West Augustine, I am inclined to agree. I think there is a whole sector of American society that has been below most folks' radar for the last twenty years or so. These are families, even entire communities, where nobody, not the parents or the kids, has a high school education.

Not that a high school education is, in itself, a great benchmark, but the correlation between graduating high school and "making it" in our society is well established. Yes, you can get by without one, but it is going to take exceptional effort, and the kind of hope that rarely flourishes in this part of our society. And frankly, if it wasn't for hurricane Katrina, I think a lot of Americans would still believe these neglected souls don't exist.

So, I say Wendy Kopp's organization is to be acclaimed for stepping up to this challenge and framing it in these terms. Read the NBC story here.

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