Record numbers of women are in work, and questions about how we ensure greater levels of participation and progression are on the agenda of many organisations. What do we then take from the recent news on sexual harassment, abuses of power and the prevalence of retrograde attitudes towards women?
As part of organisations, we all hold roles that are responsible for the recruitment, development, performance and daily wellbeing of the employees they contain. We have a responsibility to confront the difficult nature of complex and long standing systemic problems. We need to reflect on cultural change and take challenging steps forward. Parking stories of monstrous men into the category of ‘shocked and appalled’ just isn’t going to cut it. Here are my thoughts on why.
Women keep quiet about harassment.
There are a myriad of reasons why women don’t speak up. We teach girls that they should be nice, compliant and unobtrusive. The women these girls grow into speak less, and complain even less than that. If they do;
Recent hashtag campaigns such as #metoo and surveys by the BBC have prompted a deluge of admissions and acknowledgment about the extent to which this is part of the ‘normal’ experience of women. We need to ask what is going on in plain sight within our workplaces, and why we don’t often act to do something about it?
I would be interested not just in the have/haven’t nature of the questions in todays survey, but the question of ‘how many times has it happened to you?’ Which leads us to the next problem…
Harassment is part of our common experience.
It is tempting to want to create some sense of a man who is a monster, to distance ourselves from this Hollywood tale. It is more comfortable for us to think about this as an anathema. But, stories of abuses of power, and social inequality are common. We are familiar with structures in our organisations that enable these things to exist, and stories of the men to keep away from. We just may not be as interested in connecting the dots of a less visible person who has no less of a prolific career as a sexual aggressor, and whose victims have much less of a voice.
Until we accept that this is something that exists in our everyday experience, we aren’t going to look for it, challenge it, or expect better from those who are doing it. Tip – if more than 50% of women experience it at work, there are plenty of people who are doing it. They work where you work. What have we taught them about how we expect them to behave? And how do we expect a higher standard?
What is common, becomes the norm, and we normalise this behaviour.
That 53% of women have experienced sexual harassment at work is not a surprise. For me, the surprise is that it is only 53%. We spend most of our lives at work, and some estimates suggest that 65-90% of women experience sexual harassment in their lifetimes We know that rape and sexual assault statistics are chronically under reported, and that in most cases, they are committed by people that women know. What is unsaid in these workplace statistics?
For many women, sexual harassment can be seen as an extra tax to doing business. In order to succeed, you accept comments on how you look, how you dress, touches, advances and more. We avoid the ‘sleazy’ guy in the office, avoid social events, avoid being seen or accept that the availability of our bodies for commentary or commandeering is part of our progression.
Although normal for many, we treat it as too difficult to understand or change.
Treated as ‘normal’ or kept from being visible, there are times, such as these when the unseen becomes seen and debates about what to do ensue. If to explain unwanted behaviour, you find yourself saying ‘imagine it is your daughter, mother, sister…’ then stop. Judging women’s worthiness to be harassed or not by their relationship to men is the wrong lesson. If women are people, then they are entitled to not be harassed, irrespective of who they are related to. Teaching boys and men that they should think differently about the women in their lives, teaches them that they have power over, or possession of women.
If you find yourself saying ‘boys will be boys’, or something in that arena, you excuse this kind of behaviour, and reinforce the expectation that women should expect it, and that they should be unwilling to challenge it.
Be mindful too, not to demonise the men that do. If we accept that this happens, a lot, and we accept it gets spoken about very little then what we need is openness. Both men and women cannot be afraid to identify it, acknowledge it and move beyond it. Shaming each other drives things even further out of sight. There is a different between holding people accountable for their behaviour, and branding them as monsters. We need to meet all of this, with courage and compassion if we are to transform any of it.
So what?
Its complicated. It is part of systems that we are so entrenched in we find difficult to see. It is so common, that we cannot see an easy way to stop it. In addition, its subjective, its uncomfortable and we have limited understanding about how to fix it.
But…
If we want real change. If we want to provide environments for everyone to thrive in, if we want to address subjects such as gender pay gaps or women in STEM careers, we have to confront it. And we all have work to do.