WHAT WOMEN ARE STILL PUTTING UP WITH AT WORK

If there’s anywhere people want to convince themselves that we’ve already solved sexism, it’s in the workplace. I can’t count the number of well-meaning men who’ve earnestly explained to me that there just isn’t any sexism in their line of work (law, media, medicine) any more. And for every one of those men who slightly patronizingly explains to me that the problem doesn’t exist, because they’d know about it if it was happening under their noses, I hear from several hundred female lawyers, journalists or doctors about their experiences of workplace discrimination and sexual harassment. Not to mention the testimonies of waitresses, nurses, flight attendants and bartenders whose public-facing jobs present the particular challenge of simultaneous sexual harassment from clients, customers and patients. Or the mechanics, engineers, pilots and plumbers whose working lives are a daily litany of assumptions about their inferiority and requests to ‘speak to a man’. Or the women on zero-hours contracts without HR departments to complain to, pressured to put up with sexual harassment because complaining would mean losing their job altogether. Or those part-time workers, often caring for children or dependent parents, whose reduced hours come at the cost of lower wages and zero chance of career advancement.

In 2016, the Everyday Sexism Project and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) published the results of a joint piece of research into the experiences of women in the workplace, the first of its kind undertaken in the UK in over a decade. The representative YouGov survey revealed some shocking truths. Over half of all women, and two-thirds of young women, said they’d experienced workplace sexual harassment. The day the research was released, I did back-to-back interviews, discussing it across the national and regional media. The morning started out well enough, with straightforward segments revealing the findings and interviewers asking for more details. But by early afternoon, the tenor of the coverage was shifting. I was repeatedly asked if I would come on a radio or television programme to ‘debate’ the results alongside somebody who thought women had it easy in the workplace, or another panellist who believed we should shut up and stop making a fuss. By the evening, I appeared on a national news programme alongside another contributor who was given ample airtime to suggest that women deliberately use their sexuality to get ahead at work and that sexual harassment in the workplace, which she redefined as flirting, was completely natural. To me, this spoke volumes about the level of our societal denial of this particular problem. Rock-solid data about the serious harassment of a group of people in the workplace (revealing, among other things, that one-fifth of women had received unwanted sexual advances and over a tenth unwanted sexual touching) was greeted with dismissal, doubt and disbelief on the national news.

The same phenomenon emerged in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, after 12 million women worldwide used the hashtag #MeToo to share stories of sexual harassment at work (and elsewhere). The story quickly grew, with women working in Westminster adding their own voices to describe frequent sexual harassment and abuse within politics. But newspapers attempted to belittle the outpouring of experiences by running articles with headlines like: ‘A clumsy pass over dinner is NOT sex harassment’. I was invited on the BBC’s flagship Newsnight programme to discuss the wave of testimonies of rape and assault, only to find the discussion reduced to a debate about whether men were now too afraid to approach women at all, and whether touching a woman’s elbow to let her know she had dropped something constituted a form of harassment. On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, presenter John Humphrys asked William Hague whether there was a danger that MPs would no longer be able to ask anybody out on a date. In a stunning feat of combined misogyny and Islamophobia, Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens managed to contort the situation into a column entitled: “What will women gain from all this squawking about sex pests? A niqab”. One highly respected TV programme invited me to take part in a ‘debate’ about the ongoing revelations of abuse against women in the workplace with an email entitled: “Has feminism gone too far?”

The problem doesn’t end with sexual harassment. Recent figures from the Equality and Human Rights Commission reveal that a shocking 54,000 women a year are estimated to lose their jobs as a result of maternity discrimination, representing around one in eight of all pregnant women in the UK.

We tell women to ‘lean in’, but those who do negotiate more firmly or act assertively at work are often lambasted and punished. They’re seen as abrasive and shrill where their male peers would be considered authoritative and ambitious. We expect women to speak up if they experience discrimination but many who do are rewarded with a backlash at best, or redundancy at worst. Little surprise that 80 per cent of women in the Everyday Sexism and TUC research didn’t feel able to report the sexual harassment to their employer, especially considering the further results that among those who did report, three-quarters saw no change and 16 per cent said they were treated worse as a result.

We complain that women simply aren’t applying to certain fields in great enough numbers, while presenting girls with stereotypes and media portrayals that teach them those fields are not for them. We expect more women to move into male-dominated industries but those who do often face stratospheric levels of harassment and discrimination. We encourage women to combine motherhood with career, but fire them for becoming pregnant. And in every field, from the BBC to Hollywood, the football pitch to the boardroom, we pay them less than men for the same work. Recent figures revealing that just a third of the BBC’s top earners are women and that just two of its fourteen top-paid staff were female, as well as exposing a pay gap for BAME employees, represent the very tip of the iceberg.

This isn’t only devastating for women. When systemic discrimination renders career opportunities off-limits for over half the population, every business, organization and workplace suffers. Picking from a pool of only white, male candidates inevitably diminishes the excellence of the workforce by excluding some of the finest prospective workers. Workplace harassment and abuse cost businesses millions in tribunal fees, diminished productivity and lost employees. Studies repeatedly reveal that organizations with better diversity on their boards perform better and flourish financially. Fixing the problem is in everybody’s interest.