Once upon a time in a little country called England, women were timid creatures and men were sexual beasts. Women thought this was very unfair but most of them kept quiet because it was normal, and they thought they were being over-sensitive for making a fuss about it.
-insert social change here-
We have progressed. Women are no longer the shy kittens of the 1900s, they are sexual forces to be reckoned with. This is both a positive and a negative thing. Positive because we're no longer pretending that only men want sex, women can sleep with whoever they want, whenever they want, divorce, remarry, all those empowering things.
Did I say empowering? Yes, being able to make those decision in your own life is certainly empowering, compared to the good ol' days. But there are two, rather disempowering negatives:
The first, as I'm sure you're all aware, are the negative connotations of a promiscuous woman. She's a slut, a hussy, a whore, a slag, a slapper, a tart etc. A promiscuous man is just having a good time. I personally think we've seen progress on this issue. While women are still being referred to by all these terms, the terms themselves aren't necessarily derogatory. A lot of men want a 'slut', and a lot of women are happy to be of assistance. Rather than sexist slurs, these terms have taken on a whole positive connotation - because men want hussies and we want to be them! How empowering.
The second negative aspect of women being able to express their sexuality, has pretty much caused 'slut' to take on it's more attractive connotation. Not so very long ago, strip clubs and lap dancing lounges were considered to be extremely seedy places. Even models wouldn't want to be seen dead in them. But now women are so sexual, (WAHAAAY GUYS!) it's OK to go to a strip club. Those women want to work there, it's their choice! Can't argue with that logic can ya? Now that women like going out on a Saturday night with their tits out, we can justifiably fill our lad mags with that very thing. Women are for sex. Women want to be for sex. And just so women don't think we're only interested in their body, let's stick an occasional pretty face on too. (1)
And women, seeing what men want, seek to be that person (what a choice, eh?) Our culture has exceeded women and men meeting in the bedroom on equal terms, and has become hypersexual. Short of women walking out naked in the middle of the day, with a bag over their heads, there's not a lot further we can push it.
- insert reality here -
If that's the case, if this is what we all want and why it's doing so well, how do you explain one particularly interesting aspect of men being chosen over women in the work place? Ladies and gentleman, I give you: XXX-clusion
Legal scholar Michael Selmi suggests that 'our perceptions of discrimination may have changed more than the reality, and there is certainly strong reason to believe that intentional and overt discrimination remains a substantial barrier to workplace equality for women'. His conclusion is based on a review of class-action employment cases, from the nineties to the early years of this century. (2)
So on the subject of discrimination, it's not ground-breaking to suggest that gender stereotypes contribute to claims that 'women want dead-end jobs'. It's not alien to hear the newspapers say, 'women start out very keen but by their mid-twenties they just want to have kids and settle down, they don't want a job on the top rungs.' It's not difficult to see how these conscious decisions on behalf of other people are having a knock-on effect on women looking for work; assumptions are made long before women have the chance to decide for themselves. This is not what I want to talk about however, there are enough studies and workforce reviews that prove this is going on. You don't need me to spell it out.
Beyond gender stereotypes, there is something far less obvious happening in our society. 'Homophily' (a psychological tendency captured by the adage 'birds of a feather flock together') is creating barriers against minority workers. Wall street professionals revealed that organisations made-up primarily of white men, prefer to deal with other white men, and that they were taking this for granted. Can you imagine a client organisation employing predominantly white men, having a business meeting with a client organisation made-up of physically disabled workers, or workers from an ethnic minority, or women? It doesn't happen very often. Wall street revealed that women and nonwhite men were 'concentrated in jobs without client contact and in client-contact jobs that generate less revenue'.(3)
Social exclusion is holding women back in a large range of domains. The Athena Report found that women in corporate SET jobs were missing out on important insider information required to get ahead. A major player in the technology industry gave herself a male alias and discovered that emails sent to her male alias 'Finn' received the 'scoop', while 'Josephine' received completely different e-mails, consisting of essentially useless information. The Athena Report also revealed that men were failing to respect working women and didn't know how to communicated with them: 'One focus group participant described a recent uncomfortable experience. A male colleague walked up to a group where she was the only female. The man shook the hand of every man but avoided contact with her. "I could feel his anxiety in assessing how to handle greeting me," she noted. "But he also didn't think I was important. So in the end he just chose not to deal with me." (4)
Unfortunately social exclusion does not begin and end in the office. In fact, it's getting worse rather than better. I would hazard a guess that most of you have never considered how much a game of golf and a trip to the local lap-dancing club have in common. One is an old-man, sock wearing sport, while the other involves naked women rubbing their genitalia against male nether-regions. Furthermore if you're as young as I am and have yet to enter the corporate world, you may not be aware that out-of-office socialising is key to developing a good personal relationship with the client in business-to-business sales, and that golf courses and strip clubs are the two most popular client-entertaining venues.
To this day, people still think there is something unnatural about women playing golf at the same time, or alongside, men. This is further amplified through different tee boxes so that even when women and men can play together, these gender divided tee boxes succeed at keeping them somewhat separate. 'Many women reported that men used the different tee boxes to leave them behind on the course or to require them to ride in a different golf cart... In essence, they used the different tees as a way to exclude women even when playing with them', University of Michigan, sociologists L Morgan and K Martin studying the experiences of female sales professionals. (5)
Morgan and Martin found, unsurprisingly I think, another popular entertainment venue creating 'enormous challenges' for women. That's right, strip clubs. Mind blowingly, male colleagues and clients are reluctant to have woman from the office at such venues. Women are expected to go home, where they can't possibly remind men that a woman is more than a body for them to look at. In this study, saleswomen 'described over and over again being told not to come, not being invited, and even being deceived as the men snuck out to the strip club'. This male reluctance strikes me as odd if we are to believe that our modern hypersexual culture is so acceptable, desirable and all about 'choice'. If the women are so keen to accompany the men on these business outings (for the sake of their careers), surely men are admitting that their behaviour is not universally appealing and acceptable by disallowing women from doing so. What's more, women who were able to accompany the men described it as extremely awkward for them ('they felt different, out of place, and embarassed'). (6)
Don't worry, I haven't forgotten lap-dancing clubs. A UK survey revealed that it is 'increasingly normal', expected even, for clients to be entertained at these kinds of venues. A leading businessman reasoned that if a city has 'aspirations to be a major business area, then it has to have a quality adult entertainment area, and that would include a lap-dancing club'. (7) In the scathing words of Cordelia Fine, 'how on earth did men ever manage to get business done in the days before establishments where they can pay to have their penises massaged by the genitalia of a naked women?' (8)
Stringfellows clubs, renowned for their 'world famous nude dancing clubs', has a webpage
devoted to corporate entertaining: 'OK so you've just done the big deal, or you're about to do the deal but they need that little extra push. So tell me, where are you going to take them to clinch the deal???' Promptly followed by a picture of 'your perfect private party table'. The said table has a pole rising up from its centre, rather than more conventional tables. It is to the delight of all female investment bankers I think, that they can conveniently prepurchase with their company credit cards Stringfellows Heavenly Money (depicting a nude woman clasping a pole) to tuck into the garter of the naked woman gyrating between the salt and pepper pots. She can network with important clients, all the while enjoying the view of some other woman's genitals. Perfect. What woman didn't spend years at business school, studying for this? (9)
Whether you're for or against strip clubs, it is clear that using them as corporate entertainment serves to exclude women. A saleswoman working in the sector said, 'they will never have a woman work in that group because part of their entertainment is to take people to these topless bars'. Approximately 80% of male city finance workers are visiting strip clubs for work, 'woman in the world of business... are confronting a new glass ceiling created by their male colleagues'. Lap-dancing establishments don't ban women, they simply intimidate them. (10)
I could go on, but I want to reach my final example of female exclusion in the workplace before this blogpost turns into a book. Sexual harassment is as rife today as it was in 1869, and it's manifesting itself in ever more extreme forms. Whereas women in 1869 faced opposition in the form of paper missiles, tinfoil and tobacco juice, women of the 20th Century find their backsides are repeatedly fondled, they are obliged to network clients in strip clubs, or even have their clothes masturbated upon by male colleagues. By comparison, a bit of tinfoil in the hair seems almost gentlemanly. (11)
The Athena Factor report found that 56% of woman in corporate science jobs, and 69% of women in engineering, had experienced sexual harassment, (12) and almost all of the 99 female medical residents at Southern University interviewed by sociologist Susan Hinze reported experiencing 'sexual harassment that makes the workplace intimidating, hostile, or offensive'. (13) Surgery, the most prestigious branch of medicine, offered by far the most hostile environment to women. Yet the recurring theme of Hinze's interviews was not that these women were victims, but whether or not they were being too sensitive to this sexist and demeaning treatment. One surgery resident described the experience of discovering in the restrooms an explicit cartoon of herself, bent over, and her mentor engaged in sexual intercourse. Another resident had added an arrow and the comment that he wished he could be in the latter's position. The woman recalled to Hinze:
I thought, this just really sums up... my position in the department of [name removed] surgery, something I've worked for, for a lot of years, not my whole life, but a lot of years, and they reduced all my hard work and all my sacrifice and my brains and my technical abilities and everything that I've done to this, you know, like this is how they perceive, you know. Me. [R. becomes visibly upset and begins crying]. (14)
She, like countless women before who have experienced sexual harassment, did not register a complaint. Instead she looked to herself to adapt to this hostile environment. Hinze's report included accounts of female surgeons finding their behinds patted repeatedly by physicians and wondering whether their discomfort was a sign of them being too sensitive. These experiences are not anomalies. Women are finding themselves the victim of sexual harassment all too frequently, and blaming themselves for feeling degraded. I personally have been subject to sexual harassment and have ignored it rather than dealt with it appropriately. I understand completely what it's like to blame yourself, rather than the person who's touching you/referring to you etc. inappropriately. Because surely, if it were considered unacceptable behaviour, they wouldn't be doing it? (15)
(1) Dave Read, Neon Management
(2) Selmi 2005, pp. 41 and 25
(3) Roth 2004, p.630
(4) Hewlett, Servon et al., 2008, pp. 7 and 8
(5) Morgan and Martin, 2006, p. 121
(6) Morgan and Martin, 2006, p. 116, 117, 118
(7) Quoted in D. Valler, Business visitors expect this on the agenda. Coventry Evening Telegraph, Nov 9, 2005, p. 8
(8) Fine, 2010
(9) Barnyard & Lewis, 2009
(10) According to the court testimony of one London financial executive, cited by Lynn, 2006
(11) Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Nov 8, 1869. Quoted in Morantz-Sanchez, 1985, p. 9
(12) Hewlett et al., 2008, p.7
(13) Hinze 2004, p. 105, referring to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission definition of a hostile environment
(14) Hinze 2004, pp. 114-115
(15) Hinze 2004, p. 111
-insert social change here-
We have progressed. Women are no longer the shy kittens of the 1900s, they are sexual forces to be reckoned with. This is both a positive and a negative thing. Positive because we're no longer pretending that only men want sex, women can sleep with whoever they want, whenever they want, divorce, remarry, all those empowering things.
Did I say empowering? Yes, being able to make those decision in your own life is certainly empowering, compared to the good ol' days. But there are two, rather disempowering negatives:
The first, as I'm sure you're all aware, are the negative connotations of a promiscuous woman. She's a slut, a hussy, a whore, a slag, a slapper, a tart etc. A promiscuous man is just having a good time. I personally think we've seen progress on this issue. While women are still being referred to by all these terms, the terms themselves aren't necessarily derogatory. A lot of men want a 'slut', and a lot of women are happy to be of assistance. Rather than sexist slurs, these terms have taken on a whole positive connotation - because men want hussies and we want to be them! How empowering.
The second negative aspect of women being able to express their sexuality, has pretty much caused 'slut' to take on it's more attractive connotation. Not so very long ago, strip clubs and lap dancing lounges were considered to be extremely seedy places. Even models wouldn't want to be seen dead in them. But now women are so sexual, (WAHAAAY GUYS!) it's OK to go to a strip club. Those women want to work there, it's their choice! Can't argue with that logic can ya? Now that women like going out on a Saturday night with their tits out, we can justifiably fill our lad mags with that very thing. Women are for sex. Women want to be for sex. And just so women don't think we're only interested in their body, let's stick an occasional pretty face on too. (1)
And women, seeing what men want, seek to be that person (what a choice, eh?) Our culture has exceeded women and men meeting in the bedroom on equal terms, and has become hypersexual. Short of women walking out naked in the middle of the day, with a bag over their heads, there's not a lot further we can push it.
- insert reality here -
If that's the case, if this is what we all want and why it's doing so well, how do you explain one particularly interesting aspect of men being chosen over women in the work place? Ladies and gentleman, I give you: XXX-clusion
Legal scholar Michael Selmi suggests that 'our perceptions of discrimination may have changed more than the reality, and there is certainly strong reason to believe that intentional and overt discrimination remains a substantial barrier to workplace equality for women'. His conclusion is based on a review of class-action employment cases, from the nineties to the early years of this century. (2)
So on the subject of discrimination, it's not ground-breaking to suggest that gender stereotypes contribute to claims that 'women want dead-end jobs'. It's not alien to hear the newspapers say, 'women start out very keen but by their mid-twenties they just want to have kids and settle down, they don't want a job on the top rungs.' It's not difficult to see how these conscious decisions on behalf of other people are having a knock-on effect on women looking for work; assumptions are made long before women have the chance to decide for themselves. This is not what I want to talk about however, there are enough studies and workforce reviews that prove this is going on. You don't need me to spell it out.
Beyond gender stereotypes, there is something far less obvious happening in our society. 'Homophily' (a psychological tendency captured by the adage 'birds of a feather flock together') is creating barriers against minority workers. Wall street professionals revealed that organisations made-up primarily of white men, prefer to deal with other white men, and that they were taking this for granted. Can you imagine a client organisation employing predominantly white men, having a business meeting with a client organisation made-up of physically disabled workers, or workers from an ethnic minority, or women? It doesn't happen very often. Wall street revealed that women and nonwhite men were 'concentrated in jobs without client contact and in client-contact jobs that generate less revenue'.(3)
Social exclusion is holding women back in a large range of domains. The Athena Report found that women in corporate SET jobs were missing out on important insider information required to get ahead. A major player in the technology industry gave herself a male alias and discovered that emails sent to her male alias 'Finn' received the 'scoop', while 'Josephine' received completely different e-mails, consisting of essentially useless information. The Athena Report also revealed that men were failing to respect working women and didn't know how to communicated with them: 'One focus group participant described a recent uncomfortable experience. A male colleague walked up to a group where she was the only female. The man shook the hand of every man but avoided contact with her. "I could feel his anxiety in assessing how to handle greeting me," she noted. "But he also didn't think I was important. So in the end he just chose not to deal with me." (4)
Unfortunately social exclusion does not begin and end in the office. In fact, it's getting worse rather than better. I would hazard a guess that most of you have never considered how much a game of golf and a trip to the local lap-dancing club have in common. One is an old-man, sock wearing sport, while the other involves naked women rubbing their genitalia against male nether-regions. Furthermore if you're as young as I am and have yet to enter the corporate world, you may not be aware that out-of-office socialising is key to developing a good personal relationship with the client in business-to-business sales, and that golf courses and strip clubs are the two most popular client-entertaining venues.
To this day, people still think there is something unnatural about women playing golf at the same time, or alongside, men. This is further amplified through different tee boxes so that even when women and men can play together, these gender divided tee boxes succeed at keeping them somewhat separate. 'Many women reported that men used the different tee boxes to leave them behind on the course or to require them to ride in a different golf cart... In essence, they used the different tees as a way to exclude women even when playing with them', University of Michigan, sociologists L Morgan and K Martin studying the experiences of female sales professionals. (5)
Morgan and Martin found, unsurprisingly I think, another popular entertainment venue creating 'enormous challenges' for women. That's right, strip clubs. Mind blowingly, male colleagues and clients are reluctant to have woman from the office at such venues. Women are expected to go home, where they can't possibly remind men that a woman is more than a body for them to look at. In this study, saleswomen 'described over and over again being told not to come, not being invited, and even being deceived as the men snuck out to the strip club'. This male reluctance strikes me as odd if we are to believe that our modern hypersexual culture is so acceptable, desirable and all about 'choice'. If the women are so keen to accompany the men on these business outings (for the sake of their careers), surely men are admitting that their behaviour is not universally appealing and acceptable by disallowing women from doing so. What's more, women who were able to accompany the men described it as extremely awkward for them ('they felt different, out of place, and embarassed'). (6)
Don't worry, I haven't forgotten lap-dancing clubs. A UK survey revealed that it is 'increasingly normal', expected even, for clients to be entertained at these kinds of venues. A leading businessman reasoned that if a city has 'aspirations to be a major business area, then it has to have a quality adult entertainment area, and that would include a lap-dancing club'. (7) In the scathing words of Cordelia Fine, 'how on earth did men ever manage to get business done in the days before establishments where they can pay to have their penises massaged by the genitalia of a naked women?' (8)
Stringfellows clubs, renowned for their 'world famous nude dancing clubs', has a webpage
devoted to corporate entertaining: 'OK so you've just done the big deal, or you're about to do the deal but they need that little extra push. So tell me, where are you going to take them to clinch the deal???' Promptly followed by a picture of 'your perfect private party table'. The said table has a pole rising up from its centre, rather than more conventional tables. It is to the delight of all female investment bankers I think, that they can conveniently prepurchase with their company credit cards Stringfellows Heavenly Money (depicting a nude woman clasping a pole) to tuck into the garter of the naked woman gyrating between the salt and pepper pots. She can network with important clients, all the while enjoying the view of some other woman's genitals. Perfect. What woman didn't spend years at business school, studying for this? (9)
Whether you're for or against strip clubs, it is clear that using them as corporate entertainment serves to exclude women. A saleswoman working in the sector said, 'they will never have a woman work in that group because part of their entertainment is to take people to these topless bars'. Approximately 80% of male city finance workers are visiting strip clubs for work, 'woman in the world of business... are confronting a new glass ceiling created by their male colleagues'. Lap-dancing establishments don't ban women, they simply intimidate them. (10)
I could go on, but I want to reach my final example of female exclusion in the workplace before this blogpost turns into a book. Sexual harassment is as rife today as it was in 1869, and it's manifesting itself in ever more extreme forms. Whereas women in 1869 faced opposition in the form of paper missiles, tinfoil and tobacco juice, women of the 20th Century find their backsides are repeatedly fondled, they are obliged to network clients in strip clubs, or even have their clothes masturbated upon by male colleagues. By comparison, a bit of tinfoil in the hair seems almost gentlemanly. (11)
The Athena Factor report found that 56% of woman in corporate science jobs, and 69% of women in engineering, had experienced sexual harassment, (12) and almost all of the 99 female medical residents at Southern University interviewed by sociologist Susan Hinze reported experiencing 'sexual harassment that makes the workplace intimidating, hostile, or offensive'. (13) Surgery, the most prestigious branch of medicine, offered by far the most hostile environment to women. Yet the recurring theme of Hinze's interviews was not that these women were victims, but whether or not they were being too sensitive to this sexist and demeaning treatment. One surgery resident described the experience of discovering in the restrooms an explicit cartoon of herself, bent over, and her mentor engaged in sexual intercourse. Another resident had added an arrow and the comment that he wished he could be in the latter's position. The woman recalled to Hinze:
I thought, this just really sums up... my position in the department of [name removed] surgery, something I've worked for, for a lot of years, not my whole life, but a lot of years, and they reduced all my hard work and all my sacrifice and my brains and my technical abilities and everything that I've done to this, you know, like this is how they perceive, you know. Me. [R. becomes visibly upset and begins crying]. (14)
She, like countless women before who have experienced sexual harassment, did not register a complaint. Instead she looked to herself to adapt to this hostile environment. Hinze's report included accounts of female surgeons finding their behinds patted repeatedly by physicians and wondering whether their discomfort was a sign of them being too sensitive. These experiences are not anomalies. Women are finding themselves the victim of sexual harassment all too frequently, and blaming themselves for feeling degraded. I personally have been subject to sexual harassment and have ignored it rather than dealt with it appropriately. I understand completely what it's like to blame yourself, rather than the person who's touching you/referring to you etc. inappropriately. Because surely, if it were considered unacceptable behaviour, they wouldn't be doing it? (15)
(1) Dave Read, Neon Management
(2) Selmi 2005, pp. 41 and 25
(3) Roth 2004, p.630
(4) Hewlett, Servon et al., 2008, pp. 7 and 8
(5) Morgan and Martin, 2006, p. 121
(6) Morgan and Martin, 2006, p. 116, 117, 118
(7) Quoted in D. Valler, Business visitors expect this on the agenda. Coventry Evening Telegraph, Nov 9, 2005, p. 8
(8) Fine, 2010
(9) Barnyard & Lewis, 2009
(10) According to the court testimony of one London financial executive, cited by Lynn, 2006
(11) Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Nov 8, 1869. Quoted in Morantz-Sanchez, 1985, p. 9
(12) Hewlett et al., 2008, p.7
(13) Hinze 2004, p. 105, referring to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission definition of a hostile environment
(14) Hinze 2004, pp. 114-115
(15) Hinze 2004, p. 111
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