He was once the face of hedonistic masculinity on Baywatch, whose mass popularity helped make him the most watched man on television.
Now the handsome features of David Hasselhoff are being used to
ironically expose a less seductive aspect of maleness - plain old-fashioned
sexism - as campaigners seek to promote more gender-balanced discussion panels
amid rising criticism of debate forums that include only men.
The actor’s
face, complete with him giving the thumbs up sign, is part of a Tumblr carrying
the message “Congrats,
You have an all-male panel” and aimed at embarrassing
organisations that form discussion groups with no women panelists. The Tumblr
was created last year by Dr Saara Särmä, a Finnish artist and feminist
researcher who was trying to inject some humour into her campaign against
all-men panels. Followers were invited to submit pictures and
screen shots of all-male panels, illustrated with a “Hoffsome stamp”
represented by Hasselhoff’s image.
Now the campaign
is gaining new adherents after Sree Sreenivasan, digital director of New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art. wrote on Facebook that
he would neither participate in nor attend debates featuring male-only panels.
“My 2016 pledge
to my daughter: I won't speak on any all-male panels (one-on-one chats are
occasionally OK),” he wrote. “Upgraded now to include not ATTENDING all-male
panels.”
Some of
Australia’s most sought-after male conference speakers have also said
they will boycott panel groups without women participants after setting up a
website called No Thanks, Mate.
The move followed criticism of PayPal, the
online payment company, for staging a panel on gender equality and inclusion in
the workplace that consisted only of male participants.
Of 200 policy
discussions on the Middle East organised by six of Washington’s leading think
tanks during 2014, 65 per cent contained no women at all, according
to Foreign Policy magazine.
Women made up
just 23 per cent of the speakers and moderators at this year’s World
Economic Forum in Davos, while one in five of the panels staged
included no female members - even though “women” was the third-most popular
topic on the forum’s Twitter feed, with 10,000 tweets.
Recent US
congressional hearings on last year’s historic nuclear deal with Iran called
just six women out of140 witnesses, according to the
Brookings Institution, despite female policy makers having played a
major role in shaping the agreement.
