If you are a woman there are a number of different ways of dealing with sexism in the workplace.
1. Find yourself a different workplace. Last night I watched a documentary from The London Markets series. Episode 2 features the first woman to secure a customer service position in Smithfield, London’s most famous meat market. (I suppose the wordplay is intended.) She expected the sexual harassment to wane after a few months, but when it still hadn’t after more than six months on the job, she quit. Although this documentary is an interesting case study of the meat consumption habits of Londoners through the ages, the episode functions equally well as a case-study in workplace harassment.
2. Become one of the boys. This so often involves shitting on other women trying to make their way up the ladder as you have, ignoring the fact that women have different strengths and weaknesses, developing corporate interests such as an interest in male-dominated sports (which may even have started out as or will morph into genuine enthusiasm) and harbouring a certain amount of femme phobia. If you consider yourself a ‘guys’ gal’, this might describe you.
3. Stay, put up with a lot of misery, but through minor everyday actions strive to make an unfriendly workplace slightly more friendly, as part of a wider movement. Not every feminist has that fortitude within. In fact, it’s easier to speak up if you’re not even a woman. I wonder sometimes if feminist activities can have the opposite effect to that intended. Gender equality makes slow progress indeed. Or maybe it just seems that way due to the limited years in a single human life.
BECOMING ONE OF THE BOYS
Why is it that so often, after it’s acknowledged that something needs to be done about gender equality in the workplace, women are the ones sent on special training courses and taught to behave more like men? It happened to a friend of mine recently. This friend works for the Australian government.
Now here’s a classic American case study for you:
From The Top 5 Mistakes Women Make In Academic Settings, from someone who runs a course cheesily called ‘Yes You Can! Women and Graduate School.’
I created [the course] because I just can’t bear to watch all the ways that women shoot themselves in their collective feet in academia (and other professional settings too).
So, it’s women’s own fault for failing to achieve equality in a patriarchal society. The author is careful to say that it’s not women’s own fault per se. So if the acculturation isn’t exactly our own fault, I presume it does become our own personal fault if we fail to mould ourselves around the existing dominant culture?
I work with some powerful and fierce women. Heck, I am a powerful and fierce woman.
I have a problem with ‘fierce’. Like words such as ‘feisty’, ‘fierce’ is suddenly a good thing for women to be. Hell no, it’s not just good; we’re in danger of it becoming a requirement. This word fails my basic gender test: Is ‘fierce’ used to describe men in the same context? No. It’s not. Men are not ‘fierce’. Mice in storybooks are ‘fierce’. The same characteristic in men goes unremarked. The media was all up in a frenzy last week after Hilary Clinton delivered a calm and thoughtful response to an inane question about abortion in America. This response was called ‘badassery’. The same measured response from a man would not have been called ‘badassery’. Such calm would have been expected from a leader. (If you google ‘Hillary Clinton badass’ you’ll find there are plenty of times Clinton has been called ‘badass’, and it’s never for doing anything other than calmly responding to a tiresome interview question.)
Here are the top five ways that women undermine their own authority:
1) Ending their declarative sentences and statements on a verbal upswing or “lilt” that communicates self-doubt and deference.
I’ve been around just long enough to have realised that people are always complaining about the way young women speak. It’s worth pointing out that there is nothing inherently obfuscating about upspeak (‘the terminal rise’ in linguistic terminology). The terminal rise is seen across all of the English speaking countries, though I’ve noticed that people seem to think their own country is particularly badly affected. It’s also worth pointing out that whenever language changes, young women are blamed for perpetuating a super-annoying verbal tic. The vocal fry is an excellent case in point.
The gendered nature of ‘vocal fry’ became a talking point recently when the old white man who hosts Slate Presents Lexicon Valley went on and on about the vocal fry as being a super annoying aspect of young female speech. All the while doing vocal fry himself. Fortunately, the women who host another Slate podcast, the Gabfest, pulled Bob Garfield up on this and dissected why the speech of young women is so often hated when men get away with doing and saying exactly the same thing. (Short answer: sexism.)
2) Waiting their turn to interject contributions instead of diving in assertively, and seeking a collective experience rather than firmly expressing an individual viewpoint. {raises hand and waits…}
Um, isn’t this called ‘good manners’? Why aren’t the men being sent on politeness training, leaving the women to consider each other’s insight without talking over each other and interrupting? Hang on, don’t we keep getting told that women love to finish each other’s sentences while men like to take turns monologuing? (Refer to Mars and Venus and every asshat spinoff.)
Leading with, and defaulting to, what they “don’t know” and “can’t do” and what “won’t work.” ie, “I’m not sure if this is always the case, but I think xxxx. I haven’t read everything in the field, though, so I might be off-base there.”
Confidence is a good thing. Overconfidence is toxic. We increasingly live in a world where pretend-confidence is rewarded. Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s wonderful book Smile Or Die and understand it is exactly this toxic overconfidence that lead to the global financial crisis. Why aren’t we teaching men to be honest about their own capabilities? Why aren’t we promoting to management people who accept vulnerabilities in their staff and who will provide mentorship in order to fill knowledge gaps? Wouldn’t this make for a better world?
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4) Having a weak handshake and deferential body language, including smiling too much, laughing too often, trailing off, taking up too little space, and defaulting to questions rather than statements.
I don’t even… No, I will. I will comment on this ridiculousness because people obviously believe it. First of all, the ‘weak handshake’.
If you follow tennis even a little bit, you may remember the time Serena Williams overestimated her own strength and said in 1998 that she and Venus could take down any man outside the top 200. Well, Serena Williams is older and wiser now, and she’s admitted that men are simply a lot stronger than women. Nothing can change this simple biological fact (except anabolic steroids, but that’s a whole different matter). Serena has more lately admitted that she has no chance. “My thing is to play women’s tennis.” I find this really interesting because to look at Serena Williams, she seems like she’d be one of the best female matches for a man. Her biceps aren’t smaller in girth than those of a man. But here’s the thing: Men can’t have babies and women have on average half the upper body strength of men. Apply that strength differential to the handshake, and there’s the floppy hand thing explained, right there. My husband has spoken to me about handshakes, and the way in which certain alpha males use a vice-like grip and a dominant stare to subtly assert their dominance. (I’m not married to an alpha male.) Do women really want to be a part of this bullshit? Even if we do like shaking hands, do women really have a chance, in a reality where men have naturally vice-like grips?
Much has already been said about the tightrope women must walk, smiling and laughing appropriately, but not too much. For the short time Julia Gillard was prime minister here in Australia, this often became a talking point.
‘Taking up too little space’ is almost incomprehensible to me — partly, I suspect, because I haven’t taken the course, but also because women are… smaller. Should we really be encouraging people to take up a lot of space in this increasingly overpopulated world? This isn’t an anti-obesity, anti-height argument I’m making, just to be clear — this is about the Western sense of entitlement that allows us to ignore people less powerful than ourselves. Let’s move past monkey moves.
As for ‘defaulting to questions’, I wonder if Socrates was ever accused of that.
5) Expressing themselves in a disorganized and emotional manner that muddies their main point and obscures their actual achievements and goals. ie, “I think it’s just really, really important to consider the impact of xxx, which, you know, a lot of folks haven’t really done, even though of course Nelson has done some important work on xxx, but still in my own work I try and extend that…” (in this example also note the default to “I try” and to making her work derivative and dependent through the use of “extend.” )
First of all, I suspect that anyone telling women to be less ‘emotional’ is blissfully unaware of the long and unfortunate history that women have with accusations of hysteria (and witchcraft) and how recent it was that women were deemed unfit for doing anything outside the house due to a natural mental instability. Hell, this was as recent as 1960. Just look at season one of Mad Men (in which a misogynistic audience will learn to hate Betty.)
Second, anyone who’s ever transcribed human speech as part of a linguistics course will know that all genders speak like this, with hedge statements and fillers and circumlocution. To accuse women of being especially bad at speaking is ridiculous, because on the other hand, women are widely considered ‘good communicators’ (see the work of Cordelia Fine for a lengthy insight into that particular slice of cultural bullshit). Obviously, women are ‘good communicators’ only when it suits. (In other words, women are good for looking after small children, preferably in the home.)
What can women do?
I’m afraid, deep down, that women can’t do much to change this toxic culture without sacrificing a lot of personal happiness. It’s no fun calling colleagues on their bullshit, and it’s impossible to call bosses on it without personal repercussions. One thing we can do, though, is to refuse to participate in women-specific courses which teach us to be more like men. If you’re sent on one, get up, walk out.
I regret not walking out on a course I attended at the age of 25. I was sitting next to my boss, also a woman, some decades older and correspondingly wiser. Later, on the way home, my boss admitted that she’d felt like doing the same. We could’ve had a much better day at a cafe or catching a movie, rather than listen to an old white man make subtle and disparaging remarks about female high school teachers. Better still, if I could go back in time with the reflection of hindsight, I would’ve called him on his bullshit in front of a crowded room. At least if it ever happens again, I’ve had some years of processing time.
Related:
Are masculine voices just naturally more powerful? Nah. If you’ve spent anytime with opera singers you know that both male and female voices can rattle your ribcage. The answer then must be cultural.
- from The Sexy Baby Voice vs. The Voice Of God from Sociological Images
This is related in a slightly metaphorical way: Learning to rock-climb is changing the way I teach math, from Math With Bad Drawings
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