The Women They Refuse to See

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A few weeks ago, I sat down with a bright young journalist from The Highlander, AUA’s student magazine. She was interviewing me about the arbitration writing lab I run. At one point, she looked up from her notes and asked, almost as an aside, “So, Davit, I noticed all 15 participants are women. Is there any explanation for that?”

I smiled. There is, I said, and it’s a simple one.

Forty-five people applied. Three were men. For reasons unrelated to the selection itself, those three didn’t make it through. Fifteen participants, all women. No design, no filter, no intention. 

She wrote something down, and we moved on to the next question. But I sat with that one longer than the interview lasted, because it wasn’t really new. It was the latest version of something I’ve been noticing for quite some time, across every professional context I work in, and haven’t yet quite known how to say.

I’m not a sociologist. I’m not a gender studies scholar. I can’t write about feminism with the conceptual precision of someone who has spent years inside that literature, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I have are eyes and a working life conducted in this country; and what I see, I’ve been trying to find the words for. So here is what I see, as plainly as I can manage.

Armenian society, at the level where it functions day to day, where institutions are built, professions are sustained, and work gets done, is held up by women. This is not a metaphor or a slogan. It is a description of the room. Walk into the spaces where the daily labor of Armenian academic, professional, and civic life is carried out, and look at who is doing the carrying. Look at who has prepared, who is following up, and who is still engaged when the work has stopped being interesting and become merely necessary. 

I know this is the kind of observation one is supposed to qualify, to soften, to surround with caveats and disclaimers. I will not do that, because the observation does not require it. I have spent years in professional environments in this country, and know that what I am describing is real and it is the dominant pattern. 

The women I am talking about are not a single category. They are young students discovering their professional identities. They are mid-career practitioners juggling demanding jobs while raising families. They are scholars and researchers, program coordinators, junior lawyers, civil society organizers, and policy specialists. They do different kinds of work in different kinds of places. What they share is the quality of presence they bring to it. This is not a small thing. It is the difference between institutions that function and institutions that do not.

The point is not that men are missing. The point is that the weight, the consistency, the engine of daily institutional life in this country is supplied disproportionately by women. 

What does not match this reality is the recognition that follows.

The energy is absorbed as a given. Reliability is treated as background, as the natural condition of the world rather than the specific, sustained, hard-won achievement it actually is. Titles, senior positions, and public platforms continue to disproportionately reflect a different demographic from the one supplying the labor. This problem is so familiar internationally that I do not want to repeat it without adding anything. So let me add this: the gap between who carries the weight and who receives the recognition is wide enough that pretending it is not there has become a form of dishonesty.

The parliamentary elections are around the corner. I want to turn now to those elections, because to write about the actual labor of Armenian public and professional life without writing about the political class that purports to represent that life would leave the piece half-done.

The campaign is a disgrace. It is loud, coarse, ethically compromised, and frequently in violation of the basic legal and procedural standards that are supposed to govern democratic competition. It is conducted overwhelmingly by men, in registers that range from smug to openly threatening. The substantive content of the campaign, what should actually be debated by a country in Armenia’s position, at this moment in its history, has been almost entirely displaced by spectacle, accusation, recrimination, and the personalized theater of figures who seem to believe their own performances.

This country has lost Artsakh. It is negotiating peace terms from a position of significant asymmetry against an adversary that has spent two decades preparing to wield this leverage. It faces serious, unresolved questions about the rule of law; the independence of its institutions; the integrity of its judiciary; the future of its economy; the welfare of the displaced; the architecture of its democracy; and the durability of its sovereignty. Any one of these questions would justify a serious electoral debate. None of them is receiving one. Instead, the ruling party has turned the word “peace” into a domestic political cudgel, running on it as a substitute for a program, while the opposition is largely composed of figures whose records in office provide no reasonable basis for restoring them to power. New voices exist, but the political environment is so saturated with noise that substantive arguments struggle to be heard at all.

This is not a partisan analysis. It is a description. I have no horse in this race; I don’t believe any of the assembled options offers this country a politics adequate to its situation. 

And here, finally, is where the two halves of this piece meet.

Look at the field of figures contesting the highest offices of this state. Look at the campaigns themselves—the spokespeople, the rallies, the broadcasts. Look at who is being put forward as a contender for the office.

It is predominantly male.

In a country whose institutions, professions, civic life, and daily labor are sustained disproportionately by women, the political field offered to voters does not reflect that reality in any meaningful sense. There is one female candidate for prime minister. There is no female-led party with a realistic prospect of leading a government. The women in the political campaign who do exist are largely subordinate figures within male-led structures, or they are pushed to the margins by the brute mechanics of campaigns built around male personalities. The gap between the country that exists and the country its political class purports to represent is not a marginal flaw of this electoral moment. It is structural.

I am not making an argument for quotas, although a reasonable person could. I am not arguing for representation as symbolism. I am pointing to a more basic failure of legitimacy. A political system that produces only one female contender for its highest executive office among 18 competing forces, in a country where women do so much of the work of holding society together, has failed at something fundamental in its relationship to the population it governs. The electorate is being asked to choose, and the choice has been pre-narrowed in a way that excludes nearly everyone who, at the working level, is keeping the country going.

I want to be clear about what this piece is not. It is not an argument that women are uniformly better than men, or that Armenia’s political failures can be solved by wholesale replacement of one demographic with another. It is not a claim that all women in Armenian public life are doing serious work, or that all men are not. What I am saying is narrower and harder to evade. The political class that will be on the ballot on June 7 does not look like the country it is asking to govern. 

I don’t know exactly what the women I have watched over years of professional life in this country make of the campaign unfolding before them. I suspect that, for many, it registers as it does for me: a noisy, irrelevant distraction from the real work of building a serious country. They will continue with that work regardless of who wins, because it is what they do, and because someone has to. But patience is not infinite. 

I’ve been turning this piece over for some time. When I finally sat down to write it, I opened the Telegram group for the arbitration moot competition I coordinate. The competition was about to take place, and the chat was alive with the final stretch of preparation.

The pattern was visible in the messages themselves. Who is putting together the case files? Who is drafting the announcement texts and the emails to participants? Who is following up with the teams and arbitrators? Who is tracking registrations, booking rooms, printing materials, and holding the schedule together? The names doing the most necessary and least visible work were the same names that have appeared in every similar group I’ve been part of for years.

When we organized the Yerevan Arbitration Colloquium earlier this year, the picture was the same. The colleagues and students who carried that event through months of preparation and the long hours of the days themselves, were women. And this is not limited to the work I’m directly involved in. In every lecture I attend, every professional school I sit in, every seminar and training program I visit in this country, the same pattern holds. Women drive the work. The continued engagement, the building of the next thing based on what has just been done—most of it is carried by women.

So let me close by saying directly what this piece has been circling. To the women I have worked with, alongside, and behind for years, the colleagues, the students, the junior practitioners, the coordinators, the quiet engines of every institution I have been part of, the credit is yours. Almost all of it. I have benefited from your leadership, reliability, wisdom, patience, and seriousness. I have not always thanked you adequately for it. Let me thank you now. I am nowhere near the resilience you bring to this work, and I know it.

And the day when the political class finally catches up with what you have been doing for years is (hopefully) coming, not because anything in the current moment suggests it, but because the gap between what is and what is offered cannot sustain itself indefinitely in a country that wishes to take itself seriously.

Until then, thank you. For all of it.

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