Delusions of Gender (13 page)

—William T. Sedgwick, professor of biology and public health at MIT (1914)
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U
nlike many of his contemporaries (who, as we will see, made pessimistic predictions such as voting-induced insanity or ovaries shrivelled from overeducation) Sedgwick was actually onto something. This threatening passage offers women a choice between the carrot and the stick, or what social psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske refer to as benevolent and hostile sexism, respectively. So long as women stick to their traditional caring roles, they can bask in the stereotype of the ‘wonderful’ woman – caring, nurturing, supportive and the needful recipients of men’s knightly chivalry – without whom no man is complete. But the woman who seeks nontraditional high-status and high-power roles risks triggering the hostile sexism that ‘views women
as adversaries in a power struggle’.
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Hostile discrimination against women in the workplace is intentionally and consciously done. It can involve ‘segregation, exclusion, demeaning comments, harassment, and attack.’
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It’s still with us.

Professor Sedgwick, it should be said, probably did not anticipate that such hostilities would still be being directed at women a century later. Not because this would seem to be time enough for everyone to get used to the idea of women asking for a share of the jobs that men had allocated to themselves. Rather, because he predicted that men would soon call a halt to the whole feminist endeavour ‘and, putting the women back in their homes, say: “That is where you belong. Now stay there.”’
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While we might think this kind of explicitly held attitude a relic of the past, legal scholar Michael Selmi argues that a ‘lingering bias’ towards precisely this point of view – that women are caregivers and men are breadwinners – can manifest itself in workplace discrimination. He suggests that ‘our perceptions of discrimination may have changed more than its reality, and there is certainly strong reason to believe that intentional and overt discrimination remains a substantial barrier to workplace equality for women.’
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He bases this conclusion on a review of class-action employment discrimination cases, especially in the securities and grocery industries, from the nineties to the early years of this century (the wheels of justice, as we all know, turn slowly). A common theme in these cases (all of which settled), Selmi argues, is the exclusion of women from higher-paying positions with greater promotional opportunities; and these discriminatory decisions were based on unexamined, stereotyped assumptions about female employees’ work preferences. Women
prefer
those kinds of dead-end jobs because they fit better with their family commitments, the companies typically claimed in their defence when their happily fulfilled female employees filed lawsuits against them.

Yet as Selmi points out, the companies had no evidence that this was the case. Indeed, the aggressive, ambitious women working in the securities industry, in particular, ‘should have provided
an important counterweight to the underlying stereotypes’.
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Those on the top rungs were not unconsciously seeing women as slightly less qualified for better roles. They were
consciously
deciding, without giving women a chance to decide for themselves, that these more generously remunerated (and, ironically, possibly more-flexible) jobs were for men. Several large retailers in other industries have been hit with similar allegations, Selmi notes.

Beyond gender stereotypes, homophily (a psychological tendency captured by the old adage that ‘birds of a feather flock together’) can often create barriers for minority workers. A recent interview study of current and former Wall Street professionals revealed that they took it for granted that client organisations made up primarily of white men will prefer to deal with other white men. This meant that women and nonwhite professionals were excluded from the most lucrative jobs in the securities industry and were instead ‘concentrated in jobs without client contact and in client-contact jobs that generate less revenue.’
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Social exclusion may also hold back women who work in other traditionally male domains. The Athena Factor report mentioned earlier found that women in corporate SET jobs were being denied the sort of insider information that they needed to get ahead. One Silicon Valley participant, a major player in the technology industry, gave herself a male alias and discovered that the emails that ‘Finn’ received were completely different from those sent to ‘Josephine’. Finn got the scoops and Josephine got the ‘pap’. The report authors also describe ‘alpha male techies’ as combining poor social skills with an arrogant sense of male superiority. ‘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.”’
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This anecdote suggests a workplace environment that tolerates a deep disrespect for women. No intellectually functioning adult, however meanly endowed with
social skills, can have failed to learn the social rule that it is rude to shake hands with every single person in a group except one. No less remarkably rude is the behaviour of a surgeon remembered by Kerin Fielding, one of Australia’s few female orthopaedic surgeons. She recalls having had ‘many battles’ during her training, including one particular surgeon who refused to work with her. When Fielding met the same man years later he condescendingly enquired whether she had many patients, insultingly adding, ‘It’s just toes, fingers, I suppose.’
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Unfortunately, the problem for women of being excluded does not end when they leave the office. Depressingly, it is still the case that in many industries it gets worse. At first glance, a round of golf and a trip to the local lap-dancing club may seem to have little in common. They are both leisure activities, it’s true, but one is conservative, traditional and may even entail the wearing of Argyle socks, while the other involves naked women rubbing their genitalia against the fly region of a man’s pants. What they share, however, is an environment that provides ample scope for excluding women from valuable client networking opportunities.

In business-to-business sales, developing a good personal relationship with the client through out-of-office socialising is a vital part of the work. Unfortunately, two of the more popular venues for client entertaining – golf courses and strip clubs – both offer ample scope to keep women away from the networking action. Many golf courses are run around the principle that there would be something unnatural and absurd about women playing golf at the same time as men – or even at all. Even when women and men can play together, the different tee boxes used for the two sexes keep 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’, report University of Michigan sociologists Laurie Morgan and Karin Martin, who studied the experiences of female sales professionals.
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Another popular entertainment venue that creates ‘enormous challenges’ for professional saleswomen, Morgan and Martin found, is the strip club. Perhaps unsurprisingly, male colleagues and clients are reluctant to have a woman from the office at such venues, spoiling their fun by reminding them that women are more than simply bodies to be looked at. The saleswomen ‘described over and over again being told not to come, not being invited, and even being deceived as the men snuck out to a strip club.’ But these women were determined. Even though being there was often extremely awkward for them (‘they feel different, out of place, and embarrassed’), they went. They didn’t want to miss out on the valuable opportunity to socialise with important clients.
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And then there are the lap-dancing clubs. A survey by the UK Fawcett Society, based on anonymous testimony from city workers, found that it is ‘increasingly normal’ for clients to be entertained at these kinds of venues.
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Expected, even. Regarding the issuing of a licence to a lap-dancing club in Coventry, England, a ‘leading businessman’ argued to the council that ‘[i]f Coventry 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.’
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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 woman? ‘The City guys are a very large part of my market’, commented Peter Stringfellow, shortly after investment bank Morgan Stanley fired four U.S. employees for visiting a lap-dancing club while attending a work conference.
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The Web site for his eponymous ‘world famous nude dancing clubs’ has a Web page specifically devoted to corporate events, which describes the Stringfellows clubs as ‘perfect for your discreet corporate entertaining’. The copy excitedly asks, ‘OK so you’ve just done the big deal, or you’re about to do the deal but they need that extra little push. So tell me, where are you going to take them to clinch the deal???’ By way of answer, it displays a picture of ‘[y]our perfect private party table’. The said table differs from conventional ones in that a pole rises up from
its centre. No doubt any female investment banker attending the deal-clinching moment would be thrilled by the convenience of being able to prepurchase, with her company credit card, Stringfellows Heavenly Money (depicting a nude woman clasping a pole) to tuck into the garter of the naked woman gyrating between the soup bowls.
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How ‘perfect’ to be able to dine with her colleagues, network with important clients, and all while enjoying the view of another woman’s genitals. Or perhaps she’ll have a headache and stay home. Stringfellows is by no means unusual in accommodating the corporate market. The recent Corporate Sex
ism
report by the Fawcett Society found that 41 percent of the UK’s lap-dancing clubs specifically promote corporate entertainment on their Web sites, and 86 percent of the London clubs offer discreet receipts, which enable the cost of the evening’s activities to be claimed as a company expense.
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It’s not hard to see that – whatever your moral take on strip joints and lap-dancing clubs – using them as corporate entertainment serves to exclude women. Said one saleswoman working in the industrial sector, ‘they will never have a woman work in that group because part of their entertainment is to take people to these topless bars.’
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With perhaps as many as 80 percent of male city finance workers visiting strip clubs for work,
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‘women in the world of business … are confronting a new glass ceiling created by their male colleagues’ use of strip clubs’, points out political scientist Sheila Jeffreys.
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Or, as journalist Matthew Lynn put it:

In effect, just as their fathers might have taken clients to one of the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall, so brokers today take their business associates to see lap dancers. The old gentlemen’s clubs banned women – some still do – whereas the lap-dancing establishments merely intimidate them.
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And this brings us neatly to what is perhaps the most effective way to express hostility towards women in the workplace: sexual harassment. Michael Selmi also reviewed numerous sexual
harassment class-actions (all but one of which settled), focusing on cases in the automotive and mining industries where women sought access to some of the best-paying jobs in the area. He describes ‘an all too familiar litany of harassment – groping, grabbing, stalking, pressure for sex, use of sexual language and pornography, men exposing themselves and masturbating on women’s clothes.’ Nice. The sheer crudity of the behaviour suggests that these kinds of harassing behaviours stemmed not from the erotic charge of having women around, but rather provided a way of ‘creating an environment that conveyed express hostility to women’ and ‘disciplining women who sought to infiltrate previously all-male workplaces.’
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Nor are the environments of male-dominated white-collar professions necessarily ones that make women feel that they are welcomed as professionals worthy of equal respect. The securities industry lawsuits often included allegations of ‘pervasive sexual harassment’ (as well as the allegations of mistreatment of women in promotion, training, mentoring, and the assignment of lucrative accounts). While Selmi acknowledges that it’s tricky to draw conclusions from cases that have settled, which was the situation for all of the securities lawsuits he discusses, he argues that ‘it is equally clear that the allegations all appear to have been substantiated at least to some significant degree.’
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The Athena Factor report found that 56 percent of women in corporate science jobs, and 69 percent of women in engineering, had experienced sexual harassment. ‘Locker-room language and sexually explicit taunts are standard and hard to take.’
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And almost all of the ninety-nine female medical residents at Southern University interviewed by sociologist Susan Hinze reported experiencing ‘sexual harassment that makes the workplace intimidating, hostile, or offensive’.
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Surgery, the most prestigious branch of medicine, offered by far the most hostile environment to women. Yet the recurring theme in Hinze’s follow-up interviews with the residents was not anger, or even victimhood, but whether women were being overly sensitive to sexist and demeaning treatment. For
example, a woman who was repeatedly patted on the behind by an anaesthesiology-attending physician wondered whether the discomfort this caused her was a sign she was being too sensitive. She deliberated whether, if she mentioned it, her colleagues would say, ‘whooa, she’s a real bitch, she’s sure uptight, she’s sure sensitive …’ Another resident was furious when a male faculty member, seeing her shivering, said ‘Oh, I wish I could just take you on my lap like I would my little girl, and hold you tight and warm you up.’ As she angrily pointed out to the interviewer, ‘I’m not here to remind him of his daughter. I’ve gotten this far in life and I remind him of his little daughter?’ But other people reassured her that there was nothing objectionable about his comment. And female medical students offended by one surgeon’s habit of referring to them as ‘little girl’ were denounced as ‘hypersensitive’ by a male peer who suggested that women’s ‘nerve endings’ are ‘absolutely naked’ and thus primed to take offence.
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