By Lara Bushell director MC member Conference Interpreters UK CIUK As we mark International Womens Day there is at least one branch of industry where everything is hunky-dory on the equality side This remarkable exception is called conference interpreting Indeed to paraphrase George Orwell in our farmyard women are more equal than others We are in overwhelming majority here It certainly did not begin that way If any man speak in an unknown tongue let it be by two or at most by three and let one interpret St Paul ordered in his first Letter to the Corinthians 14 27 It would take the wildest of imaginations to see a woman involved in that scenario You can find many other fascinating facts on the subject in Nation Language and the Ethics of Translation Simultaneous interpretation was first used in Moscow at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern No information on the gender mix among the first simultaneous interpreters is publicly available but the organiser and chef déquipe was a Finnish man who could allegedly speak more than half a dozen languages If you study the pictures Nuremberg Trials appear to have started the trend that snowballed into the current situation One of them shows five women wearing headphones stand up in the interpreters enclosure alongside seven men And here we are The ratio of female to male interpreters worldwide today is about 3 to 1 In the UK among the 129 active members of the International Association of Conference Interpreters AIIC men can comfortably be counted on the fingers of two hands ie account for less than 8 While at Conference Interpreters UK CIUK the male contingent is down to 3 Do we see a cause for celebration herein you may wonder surely there are quite a few other female-dominated professions Absolutely Three and more heartfelt cheers to all of them However according to the data published in Business Insider UK interpretation is not one of the 20 pink-coloured jobs as economists have nicknamed occupations where women constitute a majority and which men shun unable to face the social stigma associated with womens work An article published by Mosaic and reproduced on the BBC website opens with The worlds most powerful computers cant perform accurate real-time interpreting of one language to another Yet human interpreters do it with ease Geoff Watts meets the neuroscientists who are starting to explain this remarkable ability The journalist sat with interpreters in their booths at a UN session where he watched something both absolutely remarkable and utterly routine then talked to some of our colleagues Executing it required versatility and nuance beyond the reach of most powerful computers It is a wonder that her brain indeed any human brain can do it at all he gushed The three interpreters who inspired the journalists article are AIIC naturally since the UN demands the best and there is a long-standing UN AIIC Agreement Two of the three are also members of Conference Interpreters UK Connoisseurs compare the degree of concentration required from conference interpreters as well as the adrenaline level reached by them while performing in the booth to those of neurosurgeons during operations and fighter jet pilots in the air The German Auswaertiges Amt Foreign Office apparently carried out physiological stress testing on all its employees The results showed their interpreters had stress levels similar to air force pilots in the air The interpreters insurance was subsequently upped According to rough estimates 19 of 20 neurosurgeons are men and the military jet cockpit is likely no relevant data yet to be at least as male dominated Why then does conference interpretation a métier no less demanding psychologically and sociologically factor in the jetting round the world and all too frequent absences from home of an AIIC interpreter so blatantly favour us women Loath to bore you with my own homegrown theories I would like to refer you once again to Geoff Wattss insights Talking about what distinguishes professional simultaneous interpreters from the average mortal he notes that they are good at ignoring themselves for example Wouldnt you say that women are generally better at that for example Anyway it is hardly worth splitting hairs over why today Women have spectacularly prevailed on the conference interpretation patch And thats that To all my amazing colleagues Happy Womens Day Felice Giorno delle Donne Alles Gute zum Tag der Frauen Bonne Journée de la Femme С Международным женским днём вас szczęśliwy Dzień Kobiet Feliz Dia Da Mulher وم المرأة العالمي Glad kvinnors dag mahila divas kee shubhakaamanae yeoseong-ui nal-eul chugha haeyo Feliz Día de la Mujer Поздравляю с восьмым марта vanitā dinattinṟe santēāṣaṁ Mahileyara Dinada Shubhashayagalu Mahiḷa dinōtsava śubhākāṅkṣalu Khuśa mahilā divasa Śubha nārī dibasa یوم خواتین مبارک 妇女节快乐 روز زن مبارک Kadınlar günün kutlu olsun Ευτυχισμένη η ημέρα της γυναίκας Kokusai josei day