* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Gemma Simmonds is director of The Religious Life Institute, Heythrop College in the University of London. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters is hosting a live blog on March 8, 2011.
When I get asked to write articles on women’s role in the church, I know we haven’t made it yet. There comes a time in any organisation when the balance is sufficient for it to be pointless to talk about women or any other special interest group within it as if it were a great issue.
We don’t talk in the same way about women’s role in retail, say, or in school teaching or the voluntary sector because women are so well established there that there is little to say that doesn’t sound like a hangover from a previous era.
But women in the church are another matter. It isn’t a straightforward one either – which church, for a start? The Church of England has been ordaining women to the priesthood for over a decade now, and the argument has moved on to whether or not they should be ordained bishops.
To many on the outside, this just looks like another step forward, a promotion so to speak, and if women have cleared one barrier, why should they not clear another?
From the inside it is a far more complicated matter, to do with different understandings of the relationship between bishops and the line of authority within the church as handed down from the apostles.
That disagreement is not just about access to senior positions, but it is about power, and as such, the question of gender plays a significant role.
So does the discussion about women’s role in the church just boil down to who gets to do what? I think not. There are issues deeper than this which underpin other arguments.
Has the presence of women within the priesthood made a difference to the prevailing culture within the overall organisation?
It wouldn’t be for me to make detailed comment about this with regard to a church to which I don’t belong, but as an outside observer, it looks as if male perceptions, male perspectives and experience are still largely taken to be the norm.
I know many fine, intelligent, gifted women within the Anglican priesthood who are still struggling to fit the way they see and feel and think about things into a mould not made for them.
When the discourse in any group is dominated by men and what is considered normative is based on male experience and perceptions, then the perspective, ways of doing things and concerns specific to women tend to be seen as trivial or irrelevant.
Women become invisible in contexts where their experience is not thought to be significant. This can be unconscious, embedded so deeply into the internal culture of a group that the women in it themselves barely notice anymore that so much operates against their natural grain.
Gender imbalance and sexism, whether conscious or unconscious, affects both genders. I sometimes get asked what I think of gender collaboration within the church. I think it would bring about a wonderful transformation if we ever got round to doing it properly.
