Can the patriarchy be dismantled without women of colour?

In 2019, the Chartered Institute of Fundraising published a report entitled “Who isn’t in the room.” It felt like an exciting time for the fundraising community as we were all encouraged to challenge the inequity that exists within our sector.

Four years later, and clearly still working on the topic, the Institute hosted an event launching Rogare’s latest report, which is entitled, “Gender issues in fundraising – dismantling the patriarchy”.

Each panelist spoke about their section of the report and then attendees were invited to submit questions. The first question that was publicly asked was about the makeup of the five speakers at the event and why they were all white women.

Once again, we were encouraged to think about who wasn’t visible and/or represented in the room that the Institute had invited us to. I was pleased to hear this question asked to ensure that we weren’t falling into the “white feminism” trap[i].

Heather Hill, who is an Executive director of Rogare and Head of International Philanthropy at the fundraising agency Chapel & York was the first to answer the question. I was a little surprised by her response. I have summarised what she said however, if you would like to read the full transcript, her exact words have been included at the bottom of this article.

My summary of Hill’s response

• Intersectionality isn’t just about race.
• Just because this panel doesn’t have any visible protected characteristics other than our gender, it doesn’t mean we don’t have invisible ones.
• Intersectionality is complicated – we didn’t assign time to discuss it today, but you can read about it in our report.
• We are aware that we have a limited number of lived-experiences represented on the project team.
• We don’t have all the answers. This stuff is hard.
• We are all volunteers. Anyone was welcome to apply to volunteer.
• The team was put together based on who came forward.
• We made proactive efforts to recruit more diversely.
• The time scales we put in place meant that some people who wanted to participate could not participate.
• We take intersectionality very seriously and talked about it a lot as a group.

Later we were told that in the next stage of the project, Rogare would be looking for a more diverse range of people to test the recommendations they'd put in place.

An alternative view

The term intersectionality was coined by American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. In an interview with Time in 2020 she stated,

“We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.”

Here are what others have said on the same topic,

“At best, white people have been taught not to mention that people of colour are ‘different’ in case it offends us. They truly believe that the experiences of their life as a result of their skin colour can and should be universal.” ― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“We don’t want others to speak for black feminists—neither white feminists nor black men. It’s necessary for young black women to take on this fight.” - Valdecir Nascimento, UN Women

“Any feminism that purely represents the experiences of white, middle class, able-bodied, heterosexual etc. women will fail to achieve equality for all.” - Zoe Samudzi

“If feminism can understand the patriarchy, it's important to question why so many feminists struggle to understand whiteness as a political structure in the very same way.” ― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend.” ― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

International Women’s Day

Today is International Women’s Day. A day when we are encouraged to challenge the systems that create inequity for women across the world. With that in mind I will leave you with one more quote with the hope that it encourages you to think about who isn’t in the room, why this is, what is lost through their absence and the harm you may be unaware of.

“Co-producing systems change activities with experts will ensure that the activity meets their needs and they can play an equal role, rather than being just another item on the agenda.” – CFE Research.

Heather Hill’s words. Typed verbatim.

“Intersectionality is about so much more than just race. I would even point out that many of the intersectionalities that occur are not visible by looking at someone’s headshot or the small screen that you see on a zoom webinar.

It’s a very complex issue and we do address this in the full paper. We didn’t have time to dive deep into it today but just to recognise that we are well aware of our limitations by who we are as panellists and our lived experiences have been.

While we try to be thoughtful about things, we don’t pretend to have all the answers or come up with something for every situation. It is, again, a very complicated landscape for people navigating this. Even to talk about gender is a very complex conversation to be having.

We have tried to come up with recommendations that we think will be beneficial for anyone regardless of what their particular lived experience is and what challenges they are facing.

At the very least we don’t think that anything we are recommending will cause harm [laughs] to someone whose in these. What we are really trying to do is the rising tide of all ships; to take that approach to what we are saying.

As far as the project team themselves, Rogare is, as I said at the beginning, a volunteer run organisation. We seek out volunteers for every project and we try to cast a wide net and be inclusive of everyone and anyone who wants to participate in one of the projects. We did so with the gender issues project.

This is the team who came forward – who joined – but that’s not to say that there weren’t efforts made, or outreach done, to a broader potential volunteer base of volunteer project members. There were some who had initially wanted to participate and due to time constraints were simply unable to. But it is something we take very seriously. There was a lot of discussion about as we were preparing the blueprint.”

[i] If you’re not sure what this is, I’d recommend reading the books White Feminism

by Koa Beck, Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race by Reni Eddo-Lodge and White Women by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao