Can women step up as Green Capital leaders?

This comment article is writter by Ujima Radio presenter Cheryl Morgan

It will soon be 2015 and Bristol will be the European Green Capital. What will that mean for the women of the city? I asked this question after listening to Ujima Radio’s excellent Big Green & Black Debate programme, which Bristol24/7 reported on here. The show was about the need to involve the city’s ethnic minorities in the Green Capital project, but it occurred to me that most of the voices I was hearing were male.

That was surprising. After all, look at the leading figures of the Green Party. The leader is Natalie Bennett; their sole MP is Caroline Lucas; our local MEP is Molly Scott Cato; the leader of the Greens on Bristol City Council is Daniella Radice.

That pattern is repeated at a grassroots level. Paul Hassan of Voscur, the organization that supports Bristol’s voluntary and community sectors, told me that many of the people leading green projects at a community level are women.

Are women somehow naturally green? In ancient times we almost always represented the Earth goddess as female. We still talk about Mother Earth, or Gaia as the Greeks called her.

Personally I am not a great believer in Mars and Venus theory. While I’m happy to admit that, on average, women are better than men at some things, and vice-versa, I think there’s a lot of overlap in the range of abilities. The average man might be better than the average woman at tennis, but put most men up against Serena Williams and she’ll beat them easily. What I do believe in are structural social inequalities, and social conditioning.

The Green Party is aware of the structural issues in our society. Daniella Radice told me that when choosing candidates for Westminster the Greens have a rule that no list can be all male. The preponderance of women in the Greens may simply be because they have bothered to consider them as candidates.

As for social conditioning, there is evidence that parents encourage girls to be cooperative and nurturing, boys to be competitive and self-reliant. Could this mean that women become much more open to the message and goals of the environmental movement?

Unfortunately, when money is on the table the competitive types move in. There is a lot of money involved in the Green Capital project. Women might be more interested in the environment, but will they get shouldered aside when the cash gets doled out?

Nina Skubala, the Vice-Chair of the Bristol Green Capital Partnership, was confident that women would be involved. She explained to me that there are many different types of project that will take place. It won’t just be a case of the men doing Important Engineering while the little ladies get sent home to sort through the garbage and make sure we are recycling properly. Food issues, for example, are of significant concern, and that’s an area where women often lead.

The first round of grants from Green Capital project has recently been announced. Many of the successful organisations don’t list their leaders on their websites, but a quick check revealed several of them were led by women: Talking Money (Helena Thompson); African Voices Forum (Peninah Achieng); LitterARTI (Annali Grimes); Travelling Light Theatre Company (Dienka Hines); Imayla (Deasy Bamford). Here’s hoping that they manage to make a difference.