Sex and power in the workplace by Jeremy (JB) Bentham
I find it very awkward to talk seriously with others about relations between the sexes in the workplace. Don’t you?
But we should talk about it. It is a minefield that we need to navigate better.
In fact, ignoring this is helping to perpetuate one of history’s great injustices — the harassment and suppression of women and the prolonging of patriarchal attitudes.
As a man, my late appreciation of how pervasive this problem still is, and how all our futures are diminished as a result, is covered in the recent article “Want a healthy planet? Unleash women”.
More recently, I know of a troubling workplace situation that has deeply damaged a wonderful organisation and some of the people involved.
In the aftermath, many people clearly feel hurt and angry, unfairly treated or unfairly maligned, and even betrayed not only as a result of this particular situation but also as it surfaced other questions about behaviour, trust, vindictiveness and the exercise of power in the organisation.
The significant organisational damage triggered me to want to understand such situations more generally. What I am learning is that these issues are not only minefields but that they are much more complicated and widespread than I realised. Both male and female behaviours are called into question.
Probably I have been naïve all this time but, if so, this also reflects a major gap in my education and experience.
Without sharing any specific details, I have been in correspondence with an independent group of women I respect. Each one has felt safe enough to reveal situations where they have been personally abused or sexually harassed in workplace situations or workplace relationships. Each and every one.
A common theme was deep confusion and remaining silent for fear of being considered over-sensitive, or being criticised for seemingly over-reacting, or simply raising issues that “nice people” don’t talk about.
Even though I have tried to be even-handed, aspects of my own correspondence were challenged as reflecting status quo paternalistic attitudes, such as my use of the word “sensitive” or the urge to let emotions “calm down” before proceeding. These seemed to imply the tired and unfair narrative of hysterical or unreasonable women upsetting the apple cart.
On the other hand, a female HR professional also alerted me to women manipulating situations and taking advantage of both pervasive male naivety and also the organisational protocols for dealing with issues.
It seems that the potential for intimate relations between people in organisations can bring out the very worst, as well as presumably the best, in people.
Nevertheless, our correspondence pointed to a few practical ways forward in addressing this issue, which is clearly more pervasive than many leaders like to recognise.
Firstly, we need to better socialise all young people, but particularly young men, in some basic moral truths so these become deeply embedded in their attitudes and a source of positive peer pressure. A sound-bite can be powerful in this, such as the wisdom of Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax — “wickedness is treating people like things”.
They need to be made explicitly alert to the importance of this truth in gender relationships.
In fact, everybody needs to be educated more generally about the significance of power and power differentials between people — positional power, cultural power, gender power, economic power, aesthetic power, patronage power, intellectual power, sexual power, or whatever.
Socialisation begins in the family and at school, but is also happening in workplaces. However, in all my years in organisations that invest in personal or leadership development, I have never come across a programme that covered the nitty-gritty of individual power, inter-personal relations and sexual behaviour in the workplace. Not even in my executive MBA studies.
So, secondly, we need reinforcing organisational programmes that direct explicit attention to personal power and the pervasive, though sometimes concealed, impacts of both power inequity and also the resentments these can generate.
By definition, power is powerful whether we realise it or not, and can be well-used or abused. My own record is not unblemished in this regard, and this has often been more through encultured ignorance than intention.
Leaders are privileged and expected to be role models, but if they are not alert to these matters then all kinds of things can, and do, go wrong.
At the very least, we need to ask ourselves what any given situation could look like if spread across the pages of a publicity-seeking tabloid newspaper.
We can not solve all society’s ills in the workplace, but we can address them and move the needle.
Talking about them is a good place to start. What do you think? Should standard HR leadership development toolkits include programmes explicitly addressing these uncomfortable matters?
