Cast your mind back to the week of the “Pathway to Status” Bill and resulting “Occupy the Hill” experience in 2016. During the course of a long week, the country was able to witness and listen to, or read about, four of the primary holders of power in the country as they articulated their competing positions and perspectives. The unions, the Progressive Labour Party, the One Bermuda Alliance and the business community leaders all appeared.

Some watched and listened from the Hill. Many watched and read from inside their office spaces in the private, non-public sectors. Some did both. Some only read the Gazette; some only listened to the radio. Some tried to ignore the whole thing.

Whatever your level of engagement, there was one striking visual and aural feature of the whole week, one feature that united all four groups of power holders.

Did you see it? Did you hear it? Testosterone.

A little more than 50 per cent of the population is female and in Bermuda women make up more than half of working people. How many of the voices and faces of our leading stakeholders that week were women?

None. How present is 50 per cent of our population in any of the top levels of anything?

Nowhere near 50 per cent present.

There is no doubt there have been periods of our history when there were many more women active in positions of power and influence. There have also been periods when the numbers of women present in public life were far fewer, but their voices calling for full participatory equality were much louder and stronger than any we hear today.

The debate surrounding affirmative action, for any group of historically disadvantaged people, is complex philosophically and can easily be made into a vehicle for all kinds of other subtextual arguments.

One good place to start is with the observation that a society that has enacted basic human rights, non-discrimination and equality laws can, and should, be understood to have come to a consensus that the future should not look like the past, and that discriminatory values and unequal practises are those of the dead, not the living.

One should also be able to make an assumption that living members of a community who happen to benefit from the structures, practices and habits of the old ways would really prefer if the playing field were not so tilted in their favour because, after all, they believe in the now and future values of equality, and wish that injustices had never happened.

This is the corollary of those who jump to point out that men today are not personally responsible for the sins of their paternal ancestors. It’s true. They are not.

However, unless men and women together decide that the future is now, not later, and unless the community decides that it wants to actively run the experiment of 50 per cent participation by 50 per cent of the population today, not maybe later, giving proper expression to the insights and truths that lie behind equality legislation will remain elusive. The community will continue to be one that has agreed in theory that the experiment should be run, but has not committed to doing so.

Committing does not simply mean agreeing that historical discrimination and non-equality was a bad thing, wishing that it never happened and stating that it should not happen any more in the future. It also means doing the best the community can in the shortest period of time to restructure the society so that it no longer reflects the gross effects of long-term advantage to one group — for example, men.

It is a fairly, if not exceedingly, simple thing for a community to decide to become what it aspires to be in terms of equal gender participation at all positions in all areas of civic, social, cultural and economic life — especially the top positions. This requires short-term, explicit affirmative action by the community as a whole for the overall good, including and especially those men who would have to give up their future place in favour of achieving equal gender participation.

Given that women make up 50 per cent of any population, anywhere and at any time, it is perhaps fair to say the extent to which a society actually takes the values of equality and fairness seriously is to be seen in the extent to which women are valued, empowered and participatory. It is perhaps futile to expect that any other type of historically disadvantaged or minority group can experience actual rather than theoretical equality if women — of all colours, persuasions, opinions and backgrounds — are not actually participating in equal numbers at all levels. And for equal pay.

Six months? Two years? Five years? Just how long would it take to find suitable and competent women to fill 50 per cent of the positions of all leadership groups? If we all decided that the future is now, not later?

There is a great falsehood in any suggestion that if women ran things or were in charge, or were even 50 per cent of those in charge, it would necessarily be so much better or simply better. It is a false assertion because we simply do not know how it would be if 50 per cent of the population was proportionally present in all levels of public, social and economic life.

We have not run the experiment. We do not know if having 50 per cent of women in everything would result in something better, or worse, different or the same. Wouldn’t it be great to find out?

• Christina Storey, PhD is the founder of Eureka! Academic Services, a guest lecturer and curator for the Bermuda National Gallery, and an intern at Canterbury Law