What is a manel? Allow the Karachi Literature Festival to explain. On February 21, someone took a screenshot of the KLF’s description of their panel discussion on “Financial Inclusions and Women Empowerment” and uploaded it on Twitter.
The panel list read like a who’s who of the Pakistan’s finance scene: State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Governor Reza Baqir; Planning Minister Asad Umar; former SBP Governor Dr Ishrat Hussain; and Habib Bank President Muhammad Aurangzeb.
Amazingly, despite being a talk about women, the panel included no women.
Please let us take a moment to appreciate the irony here. Despite being an event about being inclusive towards women, the panel managed to somehow be exclusive of women. The KLF’s thinking was: why do you need women to talk about women?
Twitter’s outrage paid off. As a form of mitigation and damage control, the organizers quickly looked for women to bring on board for the panel, and brought in one woman, Ayesha Aziz, the CEO and Managing Director of Pak Brunei Investment Co Ltd.
There was no way that we were not going to attend this ‘manel + 1’, held at the Karachi Beach Luxury Hotel on March 1. We are the only two young female financial and economic journalists writing in English in Karachi, as far as we can tell. We have had men explain to us what interest rates are, despite us both being economics majors from IBA and Yale respectively; and yes we do know how to calculate CAGR. (compound annualised growth rate). Our bread and butter is finance reporting, despite men’s incredulity; and these are our thoughts.
Why would anyone agree to this?
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