Fighting Myanmar’s patriarchy, one all-male panel at a time

CHIANG MAI — A panel discussion in Myanmar about female leadership had two speakers. Both were male.
Another talk, about how to stay safe from the military government’s deadly bombing campaign against civilians, featured four men and no women.
Yet another, an event to raise funds for rebel forces, gathered more than a dozen speakers online, all of them men.
Over the past four years, Ying Lao has documented scores of “manels” — all-male panels — organised by the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar. To her, this exclusion of women is evidence of the deeply ingrained sexism in the country, formerly known as Burma. This suppression of women, she added, is also hurting the yearslong battle to oust the Myanmar’s military rulers.
“Unless we are effectively fighting the patriarchy, we will never defeat the military,” said Ying Lao, who runs the Salween Institute for Public Policy, a Myanmar-focused think tank. “This is the time to be fighting all sorts of oppression.”
Part of the large Burmese diaspora in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Ying Lao has long worked for democratic and feminist causes. But she has faced a backlash for her public evisceration of manels and her demand that at least 30% of every panel be female. Some critics have implied that attacking opposition figures makes her complicit with the military.
A few manelists, or members of all-male panels, have vowed to change. Not all of them have made good on that promise.
With the exception of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s former civilian leader, the country’s politics have been dominated by men. She was the only female member of her administration, which came to power during a brief period of civilian rule before the generals again seized power in February 2021. The coup also brought back the patriarchal order the conservative military had imposed for decades.
One aspect of that order is the tradition of hpoun, a belief that asserts that men possess greater spiritual power than women. It often keeps women from rising in society.
But women have been at the forefront of the struggle against the junta. They have marched in peaceful protests. They strung up their sarongs over streets as shields because many men fear that walking under them will sap their virility. Women have rejected cultural norms by picking up weapons against the military. And they have suffered sexual violence perpetrated by the military for decades.
Not all segments of Burmese society see women as inferior to men. The shadow government, the pro-democracy movement’s alternative to the junta, has promised gender equality in its charter. But women make up only one-fifth of its Cabinet. And on the panel circuit, they are still left out in favour of male politicians, journalists, activists and civil society leaders.
“Some of them would tell you they are feminists,” Ying Lao said.
She realised how manels proliferated during the pandemic, when people hopped online to discuss Myanmar’s 2020 election, the results of which were rejected by the generals. Since then, she has documented more than 150 panels that did not include a single woman speaker.
Initially, Ying Lao challenged manelists and organisers in private. When her concerns were dismissed, she went public.
Now, she and a handful of other female activists call out every manel they come across with a campaign they call Burma’s Manels Watch. Both the organisers and the manelists are the targets of their ire.
“They made us look like criminals,” said Maui Phoe Thaike, deputy commander of the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force, a militia fighting against the military. He got upset about being among dozens of men featured on a Manels Watch poster. An angry Facebook post he wrote against the group then unleashed a flood of misogynist comments by his followers. He later said that he felt sorry about the incident.
As the country has sunk deeper into civil war, rights activists fear the militarisation of society could further exclude women from public discourse.
Lin Htet Aung, a former military captain who defected after the coup, was identified as a manelist by Manels Watch and has threatened to sue the campaign.
“There are topics specifically related to men, and that’s why we sometimes see manels,” he said. Referring to Manels Watch, he added, “They tarnish our image in front of the world.”
For International Women’s Day in March 2023, Ying Lao arranged an exhibition in Chiang Mai. Its tagline declared: “A manel a day keeps democracy away.”
Visitors gazed at screenshots and pictures of hundreds of manelists staring at them from posters. There was a bingo board showcasing common excuses used by manel organisers to explain the lack of female voices (“We couldn’t find any women experts”) and advice on what to do when invited to an event with no female experts (“Let your no-manels policy be known and ask organisers who the other speakers are in advance”).
Ying Lao received sexist hate mail, among them messages that she interpreted as threats.
Last October, Ying Lao and her team invited gender equality activists from Indonesia and Thailand to join them and took the exhibit to Bangkok.
Because of her confrontational approach, Ying Lao has been described as “too much” or “fixated.” Her colleagues reject that criticism as sexist.
“If a man is acting like this, they say he’s decisive and principled,” said Nang Moet Moet, general secretary of the Women’s League of Burma, which co-sponsored the exhibitions. “For women, they say we are aggressive.”
The campaign has also been criticised for being too casual about its methodology, such as ranking a “manelist of the year” while admitting that its data collection is not systematic. It has also been accused of invading people’s privacy.
But that is an incorrect appraisal of Ying Lao’s efforts, said Debbie Stothard, director of Altsean-Burma, a regional rights group supporting women’s empowerment in Myanmar.
“They’re shifting attitudes, and that is really positive,” she said. “Men now say, ‘No, no no, we’re not manelists.’ It’s too embarrassing to be outed as one.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.