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At a time when a tiny percentage of the population are offended by whether they are being asked to tick male or female on a form and are actually taken seriously, it is shameful that the extent to which women are marginalised and excluded through sexual harassment and sexually harassing cultures is only just now being revealed.

As a young City analyst in the eighties I was warned about a number of business leaders that I should avoid being on my own with, particularly in social settings. One well known retail CEO tried to get in a lift with me late one Friday night and was stopped by one of his colleagues. The annual Investment Analysts’ dinner should have remained a male only event, such was the eye opening behaviour of many of the men there at the end of the evening.  In those days it came with the territory and you learned to deal with it, or left.

My experience as a consultant advising on culture and gender, is that it is still the case that wherever a workplace is predominantly male, women can be made to feel unwelcome in a myriad of ways.  Individual sexual harassment and more importantly a culture which condones it is one such way.

In the late nineties and early 2000’s many large organisations introduced codes of conduct around behaviours at work,  including sexual harassment. But in many less regulated and less centralised workplaces, insisting on respectful behaviour has been more difficult and employees working in those environments often have had no recourse to support. They rely on having a good boss and if he is the problem, tough.

The emphasis on behaviours has lessened in recent times as attention turned to the more intangible barriers to women’s progress at work. Sexual harassment fits uneasily into the diversity discourse where notions of discrimination and power are absent.  My survey on gendered organisational cultures has a section on sexuality including asking about unwanted sexual attention. Clients have often asked me to remove this section, perhaps fearful of the results.

When an issue is not acknowledged, it is not discussed but it does not go away. It remains underground until such time as its existence is revealed and is legitimised as wrongdoing – usually by the male dominated establishment. Until this point women’s experiences and even complaints can be dismissed or passed off as individual misfortunes. Now that the establishment is no longer colluding with but condemning sexual harassment, women now feel more confident in speaking out. This explains why the floodgates have opened. Surely the business world is next.

Gosh, a lot is being written about the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein!  He has always been described as someone who made stars and now the world knows what some of them had to suffer to ‘succeed’. Sexual   favours are still a currency in the entertainment industry and his behaviour is at the extreme end of a continuum familiar with women there.   Most women in the entertainment industry have experienced  attempts of sexual coercion, in one form or another, subtle or not so subtle, so the collective shock of the great and the good is a little hard to believe. At least Ryan Gosling said he was disappointed in himself. As we know,  sexual harassment and particularly this type of individualised behaviour is not confined to one or two superstar movie moguls nor to the glossy backdrop of Beverley Hills.

Its disclosure was timely for me for a purely personal point of view.  I was digging out a research study on sexual harassment in the UK armed services that I conducted with my colleagues Robin Schneider and Alexis Walmsley at Schneider Ross in 2006 because the topic was back in the news and I wondered why our research was no longer referred to. Diversity consultants get used to our reports being put in that proverbial desk drawer but this one was big, cost a lot of taxpayers money and if I do say so myself shed a lot of light on the behaviour of men towards women in the workplace and so relevant to other industries.  It can be found buried in the archives of the MOD website! A version of the survey was done by them internally in 2015 but because of changes they made and a different sample comparisons could not really be made with our findings.

In our study the majority of individualised incidents were perpetrated by senior men over junior women. Inappropriate sexualised behaviour has a number of different purposes. In some male dominated industries it is a way of warning women off male territory or of reminding them of their inferiority.

We found a lot of the individualised sexual harassment was really a form of bullying.  As many, many of us have insisted over the years this really isn’t about sex or desire at all, because if men want sex they can usually find it even if it means paying for it. No, this is about humiliation, deference , submission and the pleasure some men get from forcing women to submit in whatever way that means to them.  But as Hollywood continues to be dominated by a male power elite and films are made almost entirely  from a male perspective with perhaps an occasional  nod to female emancipation,  this furore may be the catalyst for an in depth debate about the entertainment industry and the subjection of women within it, that is long overdue.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31691061

There are many of us -academics, feminists, social workers and others who are not shocked at the exposure of child abuse on a mass scale in this country. Is it too much to ask that we address the problems that men have with issues of sexuality? I have not seen any politician or professional ask the key question – why do men abuse young girls? Let’s at least have an open and honest discussion about it. Like other troubling aspects of largely male behaviour (domestic violence and rape) the problem is filtered through the channel of individual aberration of the normal healthy male adult. But when we see the scale of the problems surely we should be addressing the attitudes and behaviour of a large percentage of male adults in this country. I am old enough to remember the Cleveland abuse scandal. There was absolute outrage throughout the country and fiercely expressed through the media about the suggestion by some professionals that child abuse was taking place within families as well as outside them on a vast scale. Like many of the youngsters that sought help in the recent cases, they were just not believed. Labour have criticised the government for missing an opportunity by not imposing tougher sanctions and making child abuse a separate criminal offence. But I criticise the government and other professionals involved in this area for missing an opportunity to explore the real issue – the abusive and exploitative abhorrent sexuality that is expressed by too many men in our supposed ‘civilised’ society. We know that sexual abusers are not confined to one race, one class but are to be found in all parts of society albeit the types of crimes they commit will vary enormously. The one issue that all must have in common is the dehumanisation of the child they are abusing.

I was so pleased to see the newspapers widely reporting new research which shows there are no material differences between men’s and women’s brains.

I have been critical in the past over the endless regurgitation of this Men are from Mars  myth which seeks to explain  familiar generalised differences between men and women.  I write about it in the chapter on management style in my book, Women’s Work, Men’s Cultures.

It is a lazy way of thinking and popular because it implies there is nothing to change and the status quo i.e. women’s marginalisation in all positions of power is in some way to be expected. This is so much more palatable than addressing the thornier issues of domination and discrimination of women by men over centuries… no wonder firms have signed up to the ‘let’s recognise differences and value them’ style of gender training.

This plus the other favourite of rooting out ‘unconconcious bias’ combine to disguise and hide the ongoing ‘second sexing’ of women in most areas of the workforce today. Let’s start looking at how cultures are created in the interests of the dominant group which will use their resources to keep it that way and challenge and change those  instead.

When I first heard Sandi Toksvig  give her reason for leaving the Friday night News Quiz as setting up  the Women’s Equality Party my heart gave a little leap.  I have only ever been interested in politics a couple of times in my life… the first time when I discovered feminism at university and realised it made perfect sense in explaining the order of things in the world and the second time was ahead of the 1997 election when it looked like we would finally have a government that would take women and their lives seriously.  That was a honeymoon period which didn’t last. As a journalist I interviewed Glenys Kinnock about British politics and she said she could in no way join a Parliament which faced each other as enemies and was built around the politics of opposition. I totally agreed and still do.

Getting equal numbers is important but so is changing structures and cultures… it does not always happen automatically! Women and particularly women in the mainstream of business and politics where processes have been established around the lives and characteristics of men become immersed in the dominant culture rather than establish their own. This in no way blames women for being like men, they may well be or they may well learn to be – it may have to happen to progress.

So a group of really inspiring and brilliant women from the mainstream, let it be said, rather than the margins which is where my early feminist activities and beliefs were drawn from… are spelling it out. I only hope the complexities of gender relations imbued as they are with power and dominance get their just attention.

I have argued for years for quotas for women on boards and even in senior management in certain circumstances. During the Treasury Select Committee’s interviews and published in their Report into Women and the City  which I submitted evidence,

Sally Keeble– the only female member of the committee…noted that women had not gained one step of equality without the aid of legislation i.e. if  left to men over the years we would still be without property rights, rights over our children, barred from professions and education etc. etc.  We may look in aghast at Saudi Arabia where women’s second class status is enshrined in law but we have not got that big a headstart – what is a hundred years or so in history?

I hope the WE party are prepared for the inevitable backlash that may follow their formation. I know they are keen to engage with all political parties and urge them to adopt their policies but a note of caution – historically when women’s concerns have been politicised, mainstream parties have often co-opted their demands and made them their own, only to shuffle them further down the pack at a later date.

The time is right for women to make their own arguments and have their own party and hold out for the changes they want to make.

I celebrated International Women’s Day with thousands of others yesterday at the WOW festival on London’s Southbank. The particular draw this year for me was Salma Hayek’s premier showing of her animated film The Prophet, a version of the best -selling book by Kahlil Gibran, after which she gave a talk and did a Q & A session with the audience in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

There was something so refreshing to have a figure that is one of Hollywood’s most glamorous actresses talking about feminism and changing the world. I confess to not having known very much about Hayek and so did some research to discover that she started her own production company in order to provide films and TV shows together with roles that she felt the male dominated film world were denying women.  She is also responsible for Ugly Betty – the hit TV series. She spent eight years trying to get Freda made and another eight to complete The Prophet which features a little girl finding her voice, such is the resistance to ‘female centred’ films.  The film The Prophet is for all ages and charming yet she has failed to find a distributer for it in the UK. How depressing to think that all the public want is violence and action. She was told that a film about poetry and philosophy would not interest a young audience! Hayek also spoke passionately about the charity she is involved in called Chime for Change

Another Hollywood legend Jane Fonda stood up for feminism last week  too at the International Conference on Masculinity in New York stating that ‘the most intractable problem that humanity faces is the problem of patriarchy,’. Predictably both women’s important critiques and comments were overshadowed in the Daily Mail write up by descriptions of their appearance and clothing.

One problem that feminism in the past has had is trying to effect change from the margins so to have a number of powerful insider women with huge influence publicly demanding change and an end to patriarchy is cause for celebration. No more having to bite your lip!

We hear a lot about choice amidst the numerous debates about women and their position in society. Women choose to go to work or stay at home, women choose to work part time, women choose to work in the sex trade, women choose to wear a veil…. If we start to add in the less obvious choices..  some women choose the have the daughters’ genitalia mutilated, Chinese women chose to bind their daughters feet, women choose to turn a blind eye to their partners abuse of their daughters, women chose marriage over careers until a few years ago….. the use of the word choice becomes less and less appropriate. Of course women did not choose to hand over all their property to their husbands upon marriage. Of course women in Saudi Arabia do not choose not to drive…

We choose available options…  but the question is who makes them available and who and what determines the  cultural and social discourse of the time – this can be material and, more powerfully ideological. Please can we recognise the discourse of freedom of choice for what it is – limiting.