The Misogyny Factor by Anne Summers

Author:Anne Summers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New South
Published: 2013-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

The third indicator of success is respect. We can describe this as women being accepted as equals and treated with the same deference and courtesy that men display to each other. It means acknowledging a woman’s legitimate right to be there, to be included, and to be treated equally. In some workplaces, where men are a majority, being treated equally might entail women being invited to social or other activities they could find rather uncomfortable. For instance, it used to be commonplace in the high-pressure financial services industries for the boys in the office to let off steam at lunchtime or after work by going to ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ where they would relax by watching strippers or lap-dancers. Their female workmates who were invited to join them – they were being treated equally, let’s remember – faced an awkward choice. Would they go along and share the benefits, including the often work-beneficial camaraderie, of the occasion – and try to ignore the spectacle of other women humiliating themselves in order to entertain the boys? Or would they decline, risking being called a ‘prude’ or a ‘bad sport’, not wanting to be embarrassed by the spectacle – and thereby foregoing a chance for some extra-office socialising that might help them in their job? That sort of thing is lose–lose for women, but it is also symptomatic of a male-dominated workplace that such activities would even be contemplated. There is evidence that when more women enter a workplace, especially in senior roles, the dominant culture alters and such behaviour either vanishes or is diluted.19 This applies to supposedly innocent activities such as lunchtime lap-dancing and to the far more serious, sexual harassment, for instance. Sexual harassment is an extreme manifestation of misogyny and it is rampant in our workplaces.

Working without fear: Results of the Sexual Harassment National Telephone Survey, published by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) in 2012,20 found that 21 per cent of people in Australia has been sexually harassed since the age of 15, a slight increase since the previous report in 2008 (20%) and that a majority (68%) of those people were harassed in the workplace.21 Most of these were women. One-third of women had been sexually harassed, compared to fewer than one in ten men, with a quarter of women and one in six men experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace.

There is no clearer signal to a person that they are not welcome in a workplace. Back in the 1970s when women went for the first time into jobs that had been previously only done by men, jobs in the police, the fire brigades, the steelworks and similar traditionally male industries, they were constantly harassed. Often this took the form of photographs of naked women torn from magazines being placed in their lockers (this was long before computers, the Internet and Photoshop gave harassers previously unimaginable creative scope to personalise their artillery of sexual denigration). These days harassment extends to white-collar jobs and increasingly men are victimised too, mostly by other men.

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