If we are to change the way we work, there is one thing I’m sure of: women must join together to create change. We can’t fix this problem on our own. I’d like us to begin by stopping thinking of this as a ‘me’ problem – ‘the barriers I face’, ‘the pay gap I can’t solve’, ‘the positive attitude I must maintain’. Instead, we must start seeing it more in terms of ‘we’.
Because if women started getting a little more pissed off, or at least called out some of this stuff in the places where we work, we could create a force for change that is unstoppable.
As Alice Walker said: ‘The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.’
But we do. And sometimes the most effective way of exercising it is together.
Just imagine for a moment if every woman who is working – for pay or not – went on strike at the same time. Even for just a couple of hours. What would happen?
In Iceland in 1975, there was chaos when women decided they’d had enough and took the day off to prove just how crucial their work was. They didn’t do their jobs. They didn’t cook. They didn’t look after their children. Men had to take their kids to work. Corner shops ran out of sausages as dads rushed to find something easy to cook for tea.144 And that one day put Iceland at the forefront of an equality movement that it’s still leading.
‘What happened that day was the first step for women’s emancipation in Iceland,’ said Vigdis Finnbogadóttir who, five years later, was elected president of Iceland – the first elected female head of state. ‘It completely paralysed the country and opened the eyes of many men.’145
Forty years later we are still having to down tools to get men to take notice of us. In 2018, more than five million women went on strike in Spain to call out inequality under the slogan ‘Without us the world stops’.
Organizations and governments clearly have a key role in helping to create the conditions for change. But we, as women, also have a crucial part to play in the process. The painful truth is that we are not just the victims of all this. Sometimes we are the active architects. (Hello to all the women in HR departments who’ve been dealing with people’s salaries for years and somehow haven’t spoken up about the gender pay gap.)
Recently, I was asked by BBC Radio 4 to talk on Woman’s Hour about the scarcity of women on retail boards, and there was a lot of chat from other women taking part about how much things were improving. They didn’t sound too annoyed by what is still massive under-representation, which perplexed me. Did they really think things were sorted out? Or were they unwilling to rock the boat?
And if women who are senior and experienced enough to be asked to talk publicly on the radio about this subject don’t call it out, then what hope is there for the twenty-one-year-old trainee surveyor or admin assistant?
We’ve all got to be prepared to start speaking up as much as we can in our day-to-day lives.
‘But I can’t take on centuries of patriarchy and fix it!’ I hear you cry, as you shuffle off towards the TV remote. ‘What can I do about all this?’
Well, nothing changes until people start saying they’ve had enough, does it?
Men didn’t hand women the vote politely. We protested for it. Black Americans weren’t suddenly welcomed into the fold of equal rights. They marched and advocated to demand them. Gay men and women drove a profound shift in public attitudes to sexuality by refusing to hide any more – just as trans men and women are doing today.
There’s no magic wand. None of these issues has been completely solved. But we’ve got to see them in the sweep of history and recognize how much has already been done to create change. And then consider going a step further and thinking about how we can together help to drive more of it.
People can create movements, and even individual actions can spark seismic change.
Teresa Shook was incensed when a man who had bragged about grabbing women by the ‘pussy’ went on to be elected the most powerful politician on the planet. So, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to US president in November 2016, she posted a simple message on the Facebook page of a political group: ‘I think we should march.’146
This single post would morph into arguably the biggest public protest we’ve seen for decades: the Women’s March. It lit a wildfire of support for protest that ultimately saw millions go out onto the streets in more than fifty countries to protest Trump’s election and demand social change.
(It also revealed just how funny women can be when we’re given a marker pen, a placard and a public platform. My highlights? ‘We shall overcomb’ with a picture of Trump’s hairdo underneath; a placard with ‘In England, Trump is another word for fart’; and the older woman who summed it all up in eleven words, ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this fucking shit.’)
Not so long ago we didn’t have such an appetite for protest. If I’d written this book even just a few years back I suspect many of you might have wondered why I was making such a fuss. Being bored of gender inequality was about as popular as saying Crocs weren’t so bad. Things had moved on, hadn’t they? Women could vote and get mortgages, have sex as much as any man, were doing well at school and, between the Queen and Theresa May, we Brits had a good line going in female leadership, thanks very much.
Feminism wasn’t needed any more.
But stories of women’s persistent inequality and sexual harassment exploded again into public consciousness in a way they hadn’t in decades when Harvey Weinstein hit the headlines in late 2017. The scandal reverberated internationally, and it became clear that it wasn’t just one rogue film producer at fault but also a system that had allowed him to go unchecked for so long.
It wasn’t just a Hollywood thing. As the story spread, it was as if a collective trauma was being uncovered. Stories about harassment, abuse and plain old bad behaviour did not just surface on social media, they flooded it.
And the stories of many women – and men – shared a common thread of people working in organizations and industries that had not just failed to deal with what was happening but arguably perpetuated it by sheer complacency.
When asked about Weinstein on BBC’s Newsnight, actor Emma Thompson said: ‘What I find extraordinary is this man is at the top of a very particular iceberg. He’s at the top of the ladder of a system of harassment and belittling and bullying and interference. This has been part of our world, women’s world, since time immemorial so what we need to start talking about is the crisis in masculinity, the crisis of extreme masculinity, which is this sort of behaviour.’147
Bravo, Emma.
Suddenly women from all areas of work, from politics to the hospitality and charity sectors, started talking about their experience of people – often with power – taking advantage of those with less because of their age, status or seniority at work.
Until the Hollywood story broke, it seemed as if we had all been sleepwalking through it. We heard stories from our friends, many of us had experienced harassment ourselves, and yet it was so common, so much part of everyday life, that we were silently accepting. Then Harvey Weinstein was brought down and sexual harassment became part of the national conversation.
Following the scandal, the Equality and Human Rights Commission published the results of research they’d done. The report revealed that women were overwhelmingly the targets of sexual harassment at work and the most common perpetrators were senior colleagues.148 It criticized ‘corrosive cultures which silence individuals and normalize harassment’, as well as ‘a lack of consistent, effective action on the part of too many employers’.149
Interestingly, two types of women at opposite ends of the spectrum are among the most likely to experience sexual harassment: those under twenty-eight, and women directors or board members, the weakest and the strongest in the professional power pyramid.150 Presumably one is an easy target and the other needs to be taken down a peg or two.
Then there is the significant problem of workplace bullying – encouraged by our all-too-often aggressive and combative workplace culture. It often stays hidden because victims are unwilling to report what is happening. Afraid that they will end up being penalized if they speak out, they have very real fears about raising concerns and coming off worse.
Of course the Weinstein story got massive attention, due to the involvement of celebrity actresses, and there was cynicism about the Time’s Up campaign, soon launched by three hundred women from across the entertainment industry calling for an end to sexual assault, harassment and inequality. It was also backed by some of America’s most invisible women workers. In an open letter to Time’s Up, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, which represents 700,000 female agricultural workers from across the US, wrote:
Even though we work in very different environments, we share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security.
Like you, there are few positions available to us and reporting any kind of harm or injustice committed against us doesn’t seem like a viable option.
Complaining about anything – even sexual harassment – seems unthinkable because too much is at risk, including the ability to feed our families and preserve our reputations.151
I can relate to why they daren’t speak out. When I was starting at Harrods, one of my bosses invited me for supper ‘to talk about how you’re getting on’. It soon became clear there was only one thing he wanted me to get on when he exposed himself in his car. I made my excuses and ran for a tube. But after telling some of the girls at work about what had happened, I found out he’d done the same to them.
I didn’t confront him about his behaviour or report it. I needed my wage to survive so I had to ignore what he’d done. Just as, at other times, I had to brush off the inappropriate jokes or being sworn at in a way male colleagues never were.
Critics of Time’s Up questioned whether actresses walking the red carpet with activists was the ‘right’ kind of feminism. Certainly for me the most radical protest was seeing Frances McDormand stepping up onto the Oscar podium to accept her best actress award amid a sea of women who looked as if they’d been sleeping in a cryotherapy chamber for weeks. She wore almost nonexistent make-up, her hair looked as if she’d cut it herself, and she was fabulous.
Cannibalizing ourselves about the right way to protest is missing the point: sexual harassment is an issue that affects many women at work, and just by talking about it we’re sending a message that it’s unacceptable. The Weinstein story revealed fatal flaws in alpha culture: namely, a power structure that leaves those at the bottom of it voiceless and a lack of action by leaders to solve the problem.
The mandatory reporting of the UK’s gender pay gap in 2018 revealed similar themes. There was huge debate; critics called the whole thing a meaningless exercise in arbitrary data collection. But it was undoubtedly a watershed moment in the discussion about women and work.
There it was in black and white. Just how much less women earn on average in relation to men because of all the reasons we’ve covered – taking breaks to care for children, doing more low-paid work, and just common-or-garden discrimination. Barely one in ten UK women earn equal to or more on average than their male colleagues.152
Keep that stat in your head. Barely one in ten of us.
Amid all the soul-searching, a piece by the BBC journalist Sarah Montague in the Sunday Times stood out for me. She described how she’d worked as a presenter on the Today programme for almost twenty years before discovering she was being paid less than her male colleagues when the BBC was forced to disclose the names of its highest-earning stars. ‘I felt a sap,’ she wrote. ‘For years I had been subsidizing other people’s lifestyles.’153
I’d say a lot of women are feeling like this: from cleaners and care workers to lawyers and CEOs. And it’s not just about the money they earn. It’s about feeling their trust has been systematically abused.
I have no idea how the events of 2018 will play out. Will the momentum be sustained? Or will it tail off as we turn our attention to the next big thing?
I hope not.
I’d like to see this conversation carry on in any way it can: in newspapers and magazines, on television and radio, through formal and informal channels at work, in Parliament and business organizations, between all of us on social media.
And while #metoo and #timesup focus on sexual harassment, and #genderpaygap tackles what we earn, maybe it’s time for #WorkLikeAWoman to talk about equality at work.
We can use it to come together to talk about everything from bullying to unequal pay, being passed over for promotion, doing jobs that are not economically valued, and not getting enough say at the top of organizations about how to drive change.
And elsewhere, within our own workplaces and personal lives too, we can make changes, however small. Have some tough conversations with your partner about who is going to care for children, if you haven’t yet had them, or how things might change, if you already have.
Talk to other women in your office about what is happening with them, the inequalities they see, and come up with some small but significant suggestions about how your workplace might better operate. Then take them to your manager together.
Don’t book the meeting room, sort out the coffee or take the notes. It’s not ‘your’ work. Support other women in meetings to get their points across, and back them up if they are being sidelined.
Change is not happening fast enough. We’ve got to get more vocal and play a part in creating it. It’s more than possible to radically shift attitudes to what previously seemed ‘normal’.
Not so long ago, we were chucking anything and everything in the bin, drinking takeaway coffees in plastic-lined cups, and wouldn’t be seen dead with a hessian shopping bag in place of a plastic bag. Now, after seeing the devastation wreaked on marine life by single-use plastics in Blue Planet 2, many of us have vowed to never use them again.
The issue got to the top of the political and business agenda because people had had enough. In response, UK supermarkets have pledged to ban all but essential single-use plastics by 2025.
We have profoundly shifted the way we think about the environment. Surely now it’s time to do the same for driving change in the way we work.
Joining forces with other people (men as well as women because I’ve hopefully convinced you that all this will benefit them as much as us) collectively to create change will be the most powerful starting point. And you can do this anywhere from a shop floor to a boardroom.
You don’t have to be wealthy or famous – just supremely pissed off.
Here’s your new motto: JFDI. Just fucking do it.