Manel

An all-male panel at an academic conference or colloquium, or on a TV quiz, news or talk show, or any other public venue where women are known to have an opinion but are conspicuously absent from a featured panel discussion. See Manel.

Not to be confused with the Indie-pop band of Wikipedia.

Not to be confused with the Catalan form of the name Manuel.

I kid you not. In an age when there are significantly more women getting college degrees than men, academia (and possibly other types of venues) seem(s) to have a residual preference for male opinion. See "The Pervasiveness of Manels in Higher Education".

It's been said that there are areas of academic research that are dominated by men. Mathematics and Electrical Engineering come to mind, but there are many others, I'm sure.

It's also been alleged that in some venues, men need to be encouraged to express their opinions while women have no difficulty doing so.

It's also been said that women are still noticeably absent from top corporate management teams.

Why do we keep finding these differences? Aren't the brains of men and women indistinguishable?

What gives?

Even more interesting to this wiki guy, what would one call an all women panel? A wanel? Wouldn't that be against the trend of postmodern history? Wouldn't womyn (not to be confused with wymen, a form that appears to be of either Gaelic or Welsh origin. See, for example, Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern/Missus est angelus Gabriel) prefer wynel? After all, isn't the nub of the issue here a desire to do away with religiously inspired patriarchy, especially stories of origins, like Genesis 2:21-22?

And isn't it obvious this whole mess could be solved by an easy fix to the English language:

Replace all instances of "a" with "y". Replace all instances of "y" with "a". Alternatively (if it should be discovered that this doesn't work),

Replace a random selection of "a"s with "y"s. Replace a random selection of "y"s with "a"s. At any rate, shouldn't we make sure there are at least as many pynels as panels (since, presumably, it's not actually the letter "p" that's the problem here)?

And if, for some reason, this doesn't work, we can assemble a pynel or a panel of experts to consider this problem.