Women are often objectified and sexualised in popular culture, while other, non-binary genders are hardly represented at all. Three students from the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) use their art to explore and better understand this issue.
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Western tradition tends to view gender as something binary, either male or female. Fran Borg’s research takes a closer look at how Sanskrit philosophy understands the inseparability of gender through language and mythology.
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The festive season is a time for family, friendship, and remembrance. Over the last nine years, I’ve seen THINK magazine being born, grow up, and mature. First as its life giver, then as its pilot, my job has been to make sure the ship doesn’t stray too far off course while allowing the excellent editors Cassi Camilleri, Daiva Repečkaitė, and David Mizzi to bring their own flavours and thoughts to the magazine.
The journey has been long — full of hurdles and rewards. Some academics did not agree with the approach: ‘THINK turns researchers into superstars,’ blurted one researcher, making that seem like an awful thing. Other researchers couldn’t understand why we wanted to talk about their failures. Experiments don’t always work, and we wanted to show the passion researchers need in order to contribute to human knowledge through publications. Meanwhile, other people loved how much time we dedicated to design and how easy the magazine was to read, proud that the University of Malta could produce such a high quality publication on a shoe-string budget.
The year’s end has made me reflect on all the stories we have covered, from articles that affected every Maltese resident to research stories that rewrote Maltese history. It has been a great ride. Below are some of my favourites. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed working on them with the excellent THINK team.
Research sometimes brings shocking things to light. Imagine If one-third of the world’s shipping traffic passed by your door, and every ship burnt heavy fuel oil equivalent to a medium-sized power station. Prof. Ray Ellul and his team discovered that these fumes were causing pollution peaks in Malta, which also has high levels of asthma and other respiratory diseases.
Writing about this story showed me how important it was that THINK’s dedicated team was trying to find out what research was happening in Malta. We were the first to write about this research. Our story was picked up by issuu.com, gaining over a million hits through their platform. The story hit a nerve both in Malta and abroad.
Malta’s pollution problem is partly due to shipping, but also stems from traffic: fossil-fuel burning vehicles are Malta’s largest contributor. To this day, neither has been addressed. Lung conditions are still rampant.
We followed up the story in 2017 and again in 2020.
Other research shows how history tells many stories. History is not made up of one narrative but of many competing ones. The final story is written by the victor. Back in 1798, Malta was invaded by the French, but recent research by Dr Charles Xuereb adds nuance to the story Maltese children have been taught in school. The story was that the French were hated, stole all our silver, and treated the Maltese very badly. Xuereb found out that many Maltese people and the then-rulers, the Order of the Knights of St John (many of whom were French), had practically invited the French to Malta. Napoleon tried to bring his values of free education and health to Malta, but that didn’t last long as it upset the merchant class and church — two powerful forces that didn’t benefit from Napoleonic rule.
But this isn’t what surprised me the most from Xuereb’s research. Around 10,000 Maltese people died in the ensuing two-year siege by the Maltese people in rural Malta supported by the British, against those locked up in the Three Cities and the Valletta/Floriana area bolstered by the French. What’s shocking is that this event is not remembered in our history books or monuments. The British rulers who came after the French didn’t want the Maltese people to think they could overthrow a colonial power, so they emphasised the British help and reduced the role of Maltese residents in this bloody two-year war.
For more, do read MALTA | Stockholm Syndrome: or why we love the British. If you’d like to read about other rewrites of Maltese history, see 1565 – Was it that great?
Research changes lives. Dementia affects over 6,000 people in Malta. Cassi Camilleri wrote I’m sorry I forgot: Is dementia Malta’s next national crisis? Her story interwove Malta’s National Dementia Strategy publication with the sad story of Briton Geoffrey Morgan, who went missing and died because of his condition. His family opened up about their experience, showing just how important it is to invest in research on how to treat dementia, but also how to care for patients and their carers and families, who are normally overlooked.
A few years later dementia treatment in Malta received another boost: dance. The Step Up For Parkinson’s Voluntary Organisation started working with dementia patients and carers in Malta. THINK worked with them to produce Dancing with Parkinson’s: A short documentary and an article by Dawn Giles about the lives of people changed by this movement. Research by the organisation’s founder Nathalie Muschamp showed the impact the organisation’s work has on people’s lives. We recently followed up on this story in Caring for Carers, where we take a look at these unsung heroes.
THINK hasn’t shied away from difficult issues. Our March 2020 issue focused on gender boundaries. THINK investigated how women are still held back in journalism, medical research, STEM careers, and even climate change. The issues are both Maltese and present the world over. I really loved how we celebrated the women who made it despite the glass ceilings. Read Making it in a male-dominated world to learn more about the three researchers we covered.
One article that is close to my heart is on the need to normalise the issue of gender. Rather than simply shrugging off the problem, the issue needs to be tackled head on. Dr Brenda Murphy spoke about Mainstream gender = mainstream funding. By focusing on gender and including more LGBTIQ+ community members in research, research quality will improve. I have spent tens of hours writing research grants to try and make this happen in Malta — the search goes on.
THINK has been an incredible life journey for me. Creating a magazine that speaks about Maltese research has been a dream come true. I had the idea while I was still living in Edinburgh, but the concept was a shared one, and many others pushed to start such a publication in Malta. That it is still going strong, with plans to make it even stronger under the helm of Editor David Mizzi, is the best Christmas present I could have received.
I want Maltese research to be known locally and worldwide. I want locals and politicians to talk to researchers and to make the best decisions for the country by balancing facts with public need. These wishes sound like pipe dreams, but let’s hope Santa is listening.
We often hear that women are more tolerant to pain than men. Many are also proud of it. However, in the famous game-changing paper titled ‘The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women In The Treatment Of Pain’ the authors Diane E. Hoffman and Anita J. Tarzian found that contrary to popular belief, women report more severe levels of pain, more frequent pain, and pain that lasts longer than men’s. Three Maltese women found out the hard way that confiding in medical practitioners does not always lead to help.
Culture and gender frame our behaviour around pain perception. Boys were, and some still are, told not to express pain by crying or showing emotion. Girls were told to calm down and not make a fuss. Pain meant weakness. Our language lacks the vocabulary to adequately describe pain. In ‘On Being Ill’, Virginia Woolf writes: ‘English which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache… The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare and Keats to speak for her; but let the sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’
Gendering pain
By analysing a number of studies, Hoffman and Tarzian found that women are ‘more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the healthcare system until they prove that they are as sick as male patients.’ This is a phenomenon known as the Yentl Syndrome. In other words, doctors may brush female pain off as fabricated or exaggerated. This can impact diagnosis, disease progression, and treatment plans — delaying care and fueling mistrust.
Prescribing uterus removal when a woman was ‘rebellious’ may seem like ancient history, but that bias has not fully retreated. Until the early 1990s, women were mostly excluded from clinical research studies and trials in medicine. What we knew about the body, about disease, and about medicine was based on men. Drugs that didn’t work on men, but might have worked on women, were discarded. With incomplete data, the medical world may have lost opportunities to improve women’s health. Have today’s healthcare professionals been trained to counter this gender bias?
Another doctor later referred Karen for an MRI, and the tumour was detected — a life or death analysis.
Antonia* doubts that. As a teenager she developed digestion problems and nausea every time she ate. When she complained, her family doctor downplayed the problem and suggested that she should just stop eating for a couple weeks. After this shocking response she ignored the issue for a long time, suffering in silence. Another doctor chalked it down to ‘growing pains’ and did not recommend a colonoscopy, even though Antonia asked for it.
Having received no satisfying response from her visits to medical professions, Antonia decided to do her own research, discovering that her symptoms matched the description of a condition called Crohn’s. Because of her constant discomfort and pain Antonia had no choice but to persist until she was granted testing and the correct treatment after years of suffering. This means that two doctors would have left her inflamed digestive system untreated, risking further damage.
‘It is just a phase’
Women are often told that their ailments are due to stress or other emotional factors. A little rest would solve the problem; it is just a ‘phase’. Some doctors would call a woman insisting on referral for further testing a hypochondriac, even in the presence of positive clinical tests (see e.g. Samulowitz et al. 2018 study and numerous articles in the New York Times, The Atlantic and elsewhere). Thankfully, there are enough doctors who look beyond textbook-like symptoms. They make it a point to listen and investigate as much as necessary. Yet the burden of finding a practitioner ready to listen lies with the patient.
Karen visited her gynaecologist complaining of headaches and substantial weight gain. Test results revealed a high prolactin level, which is normally produced during pregnancy or right after giving birth. Yet when Karen asked to be referred for an MRI to investigate for tumours in the pituitary gland, the doctor refused, telling her that she was ‘making a fuss’. Another doctor later referred Karen for an MRI, and the tumour was detected — a life or death analysis.
Some doctors would call a woman insisting on referral for further testing a hypochondriac, even in the presence of positive clinical tests.
Gynaecologists feature often when discussing gender bias. Without systematic training to counter biases, women are left to ‘shop around’ for a gynae that doesn’t shame them or belittle their wishes. This is surprising for a profession specialising in women’s health.
Reproductive issues open another can of worms. Some women who decide not to have children are treated as though they don’t know what they’re doing. Their doctors imply that the patient will inevitably change their mind, or try to guilt the patient into considering the feelings of a hypothetical man they might meet.
You would think that commitment to bear biological children would be respected, but women who undergo IVF are often treated with insensitivity too. Sandra* and her husband had a harrowing story to tell me. Sandra’s gynaecologist decided to immediately hurry her to IVF after the first visit about their concerns at not being able to conceive. The gynaecologist was rarely present for her many appointments at hospital, leaving Sandra to be passed from one doctor to another, internally examined by various doctors without explanation or prior request for consent. With the exception of one doctor, none of them introduced themselves. All along she tried to ask questions, but was kept in the dark about the situation, going along with the doctors’ instructions but losing trust. The outcome of the first procedure was unsuccessful, and because of how traumatising all this felt, the couple decided not to try again.
Unlearning the bias
Pain is subjective and difficult to measure. An individual’s tolerance to pain is affected by various factors, and pain perception may change with time and experience. Pain causes distress, which makes it difficult to measure objectively. So how can overworked doctors make the best possible assessment?
In her thesis titled ‘The Chronic Pain Management Service: Awareness and Perceptions Among Healthcare Professionals’ (University of Malta, 2008), Maria Campbell studied pain perception in other healthcare professions in Malta back in 2008, finding out that outdated attitudes have not been challenged. She writes, ‘Incomplete knowledge, outdated attitudes, myths, and misconceptions about pain and its management contribute to unsafe, inadequate, and inappropriate pain management.’ Medical practitioners wanted to be more up-to-date: ‘The need for information in the form of leaflets, seminars, and continuing education was echoed in the overall answers (90%) of the close-ended question and in the statements declared by participants.’ But before this training becomes systemic, the radical act of listening to women is a good place to start.
* Name has been changed
Further reading:
Fassler, J. ‘How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously’. The Atlantic. October 2015.
Hoffman D.E., Tarzian, A.J. ‘The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women In The Treatment Of Pain’. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Vol. 29, pp. 13-27, 2001.
Campbell, M. ‘The Chronic Pain Management Service: Awareness and Perceptions Among Healthcare Professionals.’ University of Malta. June 2008.
Today being an Internet user means being a social media user. The two have become synonymous.
According to the Global Web Index report, there are now over three billion people worldwide using at least one social networking site. The average Internet user has eight social media accounts and is active on at least three platforms. In our contemporary world, most of us spend a significant chunk of our lives online.
This is a modern reality: we access information online, purchase goods and services online, search for jobs online, follow professional interests online, schedule events online, invest in relationships online (some of them purely virtual), and then spend the remaining idle time browsing through our news feeds.
Humans are social creatures, and like other big apes we care about hierarchies and group status. This is reflected in our behaviour on social media, where we actively engage in impression management. We select aspects of our lives to present online in the hopes that they will bring us more benefits, while editing out other parts that could cause negative consequences.
We want to look happy, popular, rich, and successful, or if that doesn’t work, at least try to come across as dramatic or alluring. But in a world where the line between reality and the digital world continues to blur, can we really separate our real-life characteristics from our online persona? Can we effectively hide aspects of our offline identity when online? Are we as good at concealing our true selves as we think we are?
A few years back, Dr Michal Kosinski and his team set out to find answers to the above questions. They sought to determine if it would be possible to predict individual characteristics (such as age, gender, sexual orientation, and so on) and personality traits from Facebook Likes.
Over 58,000 people volunteered to take part in the study and provided their Facebook Likes, demographic data, and answers to a set of psychometric measures.
Ethnic origin and gender were predicted from Likes with the highest level of accuracy (95% and 93%, respectively). Prediction of religion, political preferences, and sexual orientation was also good, with 75% to 85% accuracy. However, predicting personality traits turned out to be somewhat more difficult.
In psychology, personality traits are described as characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours and, by definition, these are latent variables, meaning that they are not directly observable but derived from answers to a set of questions. Even so, Kosinski’s research team did manage to demonstrate significant connections between the study participants’ personality traits and their Facebook Likes, with the trait of Openness showing the best predictive potential.
The study has attracted a lot of attention. Other researchers have since been attempting to predict individual characteristics from various features of social media profiles. At first glance, some of the findings may look strange or even absurd. For instance, in one of the studies aimed at predicting personality traits from profile pictures, it was found that extroverted people are less likely to have profile pictures with nostrils showing. Sounds ridiculous… but it actually makes sense if you think about it. By definition, extroverted individuals are more likely to be mindful of other people’s perceptions of them, more likely to see themselves from another’s point of view. As a result, they’ll post better selfies and profile pictures when compared to introverts, who are more likely to upload casual snapshots as profile pictures.
This observation shows that we are unable to control the little details of our behavior. There as so many minute variables involved that it is impossible for us to keep track of them all. A lot of non-vital and therefore ‘unnecessary’ information slips through, yet it reveals a lot about us. This is also found in language. While we usually have no trouble controlling what we say, it is much harder to control how we speak. The topics of our conversations with friends and strangers are firmly under our control, but our use of pronouns and articles in everyday conversations is not. The style of our language is invisible to us.
James Pennebaker, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, USA, was among the first behavioural scientists to propose computational approaches for the study of these invisible, functional components of language.
Pennebaker’s research demonstrated that it is these ‘stealth’ elements that connect deeply with our psychological makeup and state of mind. His ideas provided a starting point for a lot of current social media-based research. After all, our online presence is still largely text-based and rooted in language, and it is only natural that a lot of social media research is based on linguistic analysis.
Many studies are exploring predictors of how online language is being used. For instance, in a recent Facebook-based study, conducted in collaboration with my colleagues from St. Petersburg State University, Russia, we explored connections between subjective wellbeing (i.e. level of satisfaction with one’s life and positive emotionality) and language used in wall posts.
We were able to show that individuals with lower levels of subjective wellbeing are more likely to use ‘should statements’ in their language. In psychotherapy there is a long-standing tradition to regard ‘should statements’ as a type of irrational thinking associated with distress and mental health problems. It is interesting that we were able to demonstrate the relevance of these classic, pre-Internet theories to the contemporary world.
Identifying markers of mental health problems in online language is another important strand of research. Anxiety and mood disorders are the most common mental health conditions, responsible for a significant burden worldwide. They are also treatable, so early identification is vitally important, and social media may provide a platform for screening, psychoeducation, and connection to treatment (including affordable digital interventions). Research can change these citizens’ lives.
Social media-based research on mental health disorders has consistently found an increased use of first person pronouns (I, me) by people with depression. The finding reflects the painful self-centeredness of the mind in mental illness. Some other findings include observations on language use in post traumatic stress disorder, seasonal affective disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder, as well as on identification of suicide risk.
Social media can be risky, but is it the monster we are seeing splattered all over mainstream media? Research can help build systems that bring mental health interventions to low resource regions, and it can aid in identification of suicide risk and risk of violence. Ultimately, it can promote healthy living and save lives.
Food is one of life’s constants. Yet, what we eat has major ramifications on global climate. Food production uses up major resources: it accounts for more than 70% of total freshwater use, over one-third of land use, and accounts for just shy of 25% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, of which 80% is livestock. Yes, that steak you just ate has had a direct impact on the world’s climate! There is something of an oxymoron in the world’s food ecosystems. Overconsumption is linked to major health problems like obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and certain cancers that together account for up to 71% of global deaths. On the other hand, there are around one billion people in the world who suffer from hunger and underconsumption. All of this is compounded by problems of food loss and waste. This raises important questions related to the ethics of worldwide food production and distribution.
Food production and consumption is determined by many factors: population numbers, incomes, globalisation, sex (biology), and gender (socio-cultural) differences. The combination of a sedentary lifestyle and an unbalanced diet, high in red, processed meat, low in fruits and vegetables, is a common problem in many developed countries. And this impacts not just human health, but also biodiversity and ecosystems.
Supervised by Prof Simone Borg, I chose an exploratory research design with embedded case studies. The aim was to analyse the dietary patterns of men and women. I wanted to critically question the power relations that feed into socio-economic inequities and lead to particular food choices. I used both quantitative and qualitative methods, modelling the life cycle assessment and scenario emission projections for 2050 in Malta, Brazil, Australia, India, and Zambia among males and females aged 16 to 64.
The four dietary scenarios I took into consideration were present-day consumption patterns (referring to the 2005/7 Food and Agriculture reference scenario), the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended diet (300g of meat per week and five portions per day of fruit and veg), vegetarian/mediterranean/pescatarian diets, and the vegan diet. From there, I measured ammonia emissions, land use, and water from cradle to farm gate, with a special focus on gender.
The findings were alarming, indicating that none of the five countries are able to meet emissions reductions under current dietary patterns. If we were to adopt the WHO recommended diet, GHGEs would be cut by 31.2%. A better result would be gained from a vegetarian diet, which would slash emissions by 66%, while a vegan diet comes out on top with a projected 74% reduction.
Some interesting points that arose were that the Global Warming Potential is higher in men in all countries due to higher meat consumption. Zambia and India would benefit the most from the proposed dietary shifts in absolute terms, while Australia, Malta, and Brazil would feel the positive impacts on individual levels in per capita terms, reducing carbon footprints considerably.
Reduced meat consumption substantially lowers dietary GHG emissions. We need to prospectively consider the interplay of sex and gender, and develop climate change, health, and microeconomic policies for effective intervention and sustainable diets. Adopting a flexitarian diet that is mostly fruits and vegetables, with the occasional consumption of meat, can save lives, the planet, and economies—some food for thought!
This research was carried out as part of a Master of Science (Research) in Climate Change and Sustainable Development at the Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development, University of Malta.
Author: Precious Shola Mwamulima
Life is hard sometimes. Juggling the demands of work with family while remaining healthy and sane can be tough. Done successfully, that lifestyle can look like a carefully choreographed dance. Add a bout of the flu to the mix though, and the dance gets thrown off. Now you find yourself strewn on the dance floor, with hurdles coming your way.
So far, mothers in our societies have carried the lion’s share of caring responsibilities and bear the Motherhood Penalty, affecting their earnings and career progression, amongst many other things. The International Labour Organisation claims that closing the gender gap in caring responsibilities between women and men is a priority for social development in the 21st Century.
The European Union (EU) is proposing a series of measures which aims to do exactly that. The first tackles paternity leave. At the time of writing, men in Malta are allowed at most two days off from work when they become parents. Under the new scheme, fathers will be able to take at least 10 working days of paid paternity leave around the birth of their child. When it comes to parental leave, a non-transferable quota of four months will be reserved for each parent to take, up until the child is 12 years old. It should be noted that 90% of fathers across the EU do not make use of parental leave at present. Finally, there is caring leave for workers who care for seriously ill or dependent relatives. These people will be entitled to five additional days of paid leave.
Whilst these three initiatives make sense, when analysed through the gender lens, the reality is that when people make use of these measures, they will not be compensated in full, but at the replacement rate of compulsory sick pay level. This immediately sets off the alarm bells.
Taking parental leave could mean a reduction of around 80% in income. Are Maltese parents, especially fathers, willing to accept such a drastic pay cut with every new child that arrives, along with a spike in costs? The result will be that fathers are likely to shun this additional leave, while mothers may be more prone to take the extra leave at the reduced pay rate. This will simply reinforce gender roles and gender stereotypes.
The aspect of this law that equates parental and caring leave to sick leave has to be removed. Parents manoeuvring through the fast lane of life and trying to care for their children by taking paternity, parental, or caring leave are not sick, so why pay them as such? Why impose a parental penalty on parents who are bringing up the next generation of citizens? The EU needs to do some serious rethinking if it really wants to contribute to the most significant social development of the 21st century.
Author: Dr Anna Borg
Back in the old days it was assumed by most that if you had male sexual characteristics you were a MAN and as such your nature was to be macho, brave, and aggressive and bring in the money for the family; and of course, if you had female sexual characteristics, you were a WOMAN, and as such your nature was to be sensitive, emotional, nurturing, and an ‘angel’ in the home.
Then we discovered ‘gender’, i.e. not the physical/biological characteristics, but the social and cultural meanings attached to being a woman or a man, our learnt behaviour. At this stage, it became clear that having male sexual characteristics in itself did not necessarily make one incapable of holding a baby or wiping up vomit. At the same time, it was now agreed that possessing female sexual characteristics did not necessarily make one unfit for public life, employment outside the home, or leadership (political or otherwise).
And we embraced these changes with gusto! Now, we thought, women (and men, or other) could be whatever they wished to be! We were no longer held back by our sexual characteristics, by being seen as ‘woman’ (or ‘man’). This was a big step forward for ‘gender’ equality.
Somewhere along the line however, ‘woman’ disappeared…
In the past, we spoke about women’s liberation, women’s rights, feminism, equality for women, women’s studies, violence against women. When we talked about domestic violence, what we meant was intimate partner violence perpetrated far more by men against women.
Nowadays we speak about human rights, gender equality, gender studies, gender-based violence, family violence, and when we speak about domestic violence we get told; ‘What about the men? What about the children? What about older adults?’ When we speak about feminism, we are labelled passé or extremists.
Effectively, ‘woman’ has become invisible. The still-dominant patriarchal discourse has succeeded, with the help of all of us, in neutralising ‘woman’ and camouflaging this as ‘progress’.
If we had indeed achieved ‘gender equality’, if women’s rights as human rights were really being upheld, if we had eliminated violence against women, then this would be right and proper… But have we?
My answer to that is, of course, as you would expect, a resounding NO, we have not! And making ‘woman’ invisible once more will not help us achieve this!
Photo by Steven Levi Vella from Artemisia: 100 Remarkable Women, a project by Network of Young Women Leaders