A concept under the microscope
We announced it just before the holidays: in 2014, the EVE blog invites you to new sections. The first of these is the " concept under the magnifying glass " of the month.
The idea is simple, we take stock of a more or less familiar notion of the discourse on professional equality and women's leadership to better understand the terms of the debate and engage in discussion with you.
To open this new section, we decided to explore a concept that Isabelle Germain, the founder of Nouvelles News, told us about when we interviewed her: the " Smurfette Syndrome".
Smurfette, everyone knows who it is, right? A bouncy and smiling blonde in a lace dress and immaculate cap mounted on small pearly pumps. She lives in the fabulous land of the Smurfs where she was sent by the evil wizard Gargamel.... In order to sow discord in the village of the gentiles! Ouch! When the role reserved for the female character is to disturb the beautiful and good established order, it starts to get bad!
But when, in 1991, the American essayist Katha Pollitt devoted an op-ed to the Miss Blue in the New York Times, it was not so much this role of troublemaker devolved to the Smurfette that she denounced. It is the fact that she is the only embodiment of the feminine in a 100% masculine universe. As a result, while each Smurf has the right to his own personality (there is the prankster, the coquettish, the strong, the greedy, the musician, the handyman...), that of Smurfette is totally erased in favor of a single criterion to designate her: her gender.
Describing the recurrence in cinema, and especially in children's animated films, of this imposed figure of the girl alone in a man's world, Pollitt and his disciples note that, when there is only one female character within an exclusively male community, this character tends to be represented in an ultra-stereotypical way. We expect her to behave in accordance with the most common (not to say the most caricatured) perception of femininity. She is the woman, and not a woman among others. At the same time an object of curiosity (How exotic, this creature in a skirt! How fresh! How pretty!) but also a ready-made alibi (Moo no, we're not just among ourselves, look, we have a wife, we're even very happy with her!).
It's precisely to get around this trap of the woman-pretext (the one who is there to guarantee that, no, no, no, we haven't completely forgotten that women exist, in fact, we've put one... That's already it!), that the defenders of quotas for women in governing bodies have taken up the notion of the Schroumpfette syndrome: an isolated woman in a predominantly male universe is not diversity, it's display ! Not only is this not enough to talk about equality (or even mixing), but it may also not allow for the change that comes from diversity.
For cultures and behaviors to be transformed under the impetus of the expression of various points of view, diversity must rhyme with multiplicity : several women on a board are women who are not there to appear as femininity (or who would feel obliged, in order to assert their legitimacy, to renounce their femininity to conform to the model of power as embodied by the majority), but who have the possibility of simply being themselves... To be able to really act!
