In the email signature of a former United Nations Special Rapporteur was a sentence that has stayed with me: “I do not join manels.” A “manel”, now widely defined as an all-male panel, is not simply descriptive. It reflects structural patterns in who is recognised as an expert and who is not. On 31 March 2026, the University of Cyprus is holding an event on the status and future of the Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) in Cyprus. All speakers are male. Are there no female academics at the University of Cyprus who could speak? Are there no female experts in the field at all, especially given that the event is not limited to internal experts within the University, as the invitation of the former Attorney General of the Republic of Cyprus indicates? Clearly, this is not the case. Cyprus-based Dr. Nasia Hadjigeorgiou is widely recognised expert on the SBAs, yet she is not included in the event. That matters. The continued prevalence of all-male panels is indefensible in environments that value equality, expertise, and intellectual integrity.

Not available or not invited?

When there is an event in the field of law in Cyprus, I have occasionally reached out to organisers when I notice yet another all-male panel. With strong female candidates clearly in mind, I ask why only men appear to have been invited. The response I receive, almost without exception, is the same: no women were available.

This time, however, I took a different approach. I spoke directly to Dr. Hadjigeorgiou. Her answer was revealing. She was not invited. That exchange prompted me to reflect on all the previous occasions when organisers told me they had “tried” but found no women available. This recurring explanation becomes difficult to accept when strong and visible candidates are demonstrably overlooked.

Dr. Hadjigeorgiou is widely recognised as an expert on the SBAs in Cyprus. Her expertise is not abstract or marginal. She has written peer-reviewed academic articles, opinion pieces, given interviews, written reports, and presented conference papers on the matter. After the recent drone attack on an SBA base, she has been interviewed by, inter alia, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Dutch Broadcasting Corporation, the Cyprus Mail and others. Yet, for an event in her hometown on a subject on which her expertise is obvious, she is not a speaker.

In this particular case, at least, the issue was clearly not one of availability. It was one of selection. UN Women has stressed that manels are not the result of a lack of qualified women. Rather, they reflect narrow networks and unconscious bias in the selection of experts. The data confirms this. A report by the Open Society Foundations shows that three out of four speaking roles at high-level conferences are occupied by men.

Structural patterns

Having witnessed manels across Cypriot academia (and beyond), I cannot help but ask: what exactly are we getting wrong? This is not to suggest that every conference or panel in Cyprus is organised along exclusively male lines. On the contrary, there have been many gender-balanced events at the University of Cyprus and elsewhere that demonstrate both awareness and good practice. Yet such positive examples, while welcome, are not sufficient. Manels are not isolated lapses; they reflect deeper structural dynamics that many women experience as an inescapable part of both our professional and personal lives. As a telling example of how this culture extends beyond academia, one can point to a recent panel discussion on CyBC (the state broadcaster) concerning the upcoming parliamentary elections. The discussion featured an exclusively male panel, nine men, alongside a male journalist moderating the conversation.

The persistence of all-male panels in academic and other settings cannot be explained away as a coincidence or necessity. It reflects something deeper, a failure to align practice with what we already know about gender equality, expertise and inclusion. This is not because every panel must perform gender arithmetic to be legitimate. It is because all-male panels remain a visible symptom of a deeper institutional habit, the habit of treating male expertise as the default and female expertise as optional, exceptional or somehow harder to find. Homogeneous panels crowd out other expertise and other arguments, and they perpetuate the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women.

Gender equality as a legal and institutional commitment

At a European level, gender equality is not aspirational. It is embedded in the principle of gender mainstreaming, which requires equality considerations to be integrated into all policies and practices, including decision-making and expert participation.

It is currently Cyprus’s turn to the Presidency of the Council of the European Union. That role carries not only political visibility but normative responsibility. Official statements linked to the Presidency and to emphasise strengthening women’s participation and advancing equality in public life. If that is the language of public commitment, then academic and public events in Cyprus should reflect it in practice. The Office of the Commissioner for Gender Equality in Cyprus has emphasised gender mainstreaming, women’s participation and substantive equality.

This is not a gender war

This is not a gender war and please do not make this piece into one. This is not about diminishing the contribution of men. It is about ensuring that expertise is not systematically defined in ways that exclude equally (or more) qualified women. Inclusion requires meaningful participation, not symbolic presence. One might argue that the presence of a female moderator (from the Department of Journalism) in the aforementioned event means this is not a manel. However, that argument, for me at least, would be insufficient. Moderation is not participation. There is a growing tendency to avoid criticism of manels by placing a woman at the margins of the discussion while leaving the substantive exchange of expertise exclusively male. That is not inclusion. It is a workaround. Gender equality is not satisfied by symbolic presence. It requires meaningful participation in the production of knowledge.

Panel composition matters because conference participation affects visibility, professional recognition and access to networks, and because diversity in programming does not arise automatically without deliberate choices. In organisational and public-facing settings, it has been argued that manels perpetuate the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women by platforming men despite the existence of many qualified women in the same fields. Studies in medicine and scientific meetings point in the same direction.

Conclusion

This is not a personal critique of a single institution but a reflection of a broader academic culture that continues to reproduce exclusion. Universities should be at the forefront of change. When clearly relevant expertise is omitted, the quality of discussion is diminished. Repeatedly platforming the same profiles while overlooking others entrenches a narrow understanding of authority and weakens intellectual diversity.

Platforms matter. Access matters. Exclusion from meaningful public fora is not neutral. If certain voices are left off the stage, that shapes the discourse that follows. It also deteriorates the exercise of freedom of expression but also the freedom to receive pluralistic information.

The solutions are straightforward. Organisers must broaden their networks and treat all-male panels as presumptively unacceptable absent compelling justification. Institutions should adopt clear diversity expectations, and academics should be willing to decline participation in exclusionary formats. These are not radical demands but basic standards of academic responsibility.

UN initiatives, academic studies and professional practice all now point in the same direction. Better panels are possible when institutions decide that they matter. On an individual level, researchers and senior figures are refusing to take part. The UN Women Asia-Pacific “No more manels” initiative provides guidance on how to go about overcoming this phenomenon, with guidance for organizers, panellists and participants.

The continued normalisation of all-male panels is no longer defensible in environments that claim to value equality, expertise and intellectual integrity.