Why women need to stop putting up with sexism in the workplace

WHEN Anna chalked up a big win at work, her boss’s first reaction wasn’t to congratulate her - it was to ask an insulting question.

WOMEN often explain away their career success as luck. It’s not. You’ve earned your position — and have sometimes had to fight even harder than men.

Following is an extract from Jamila Rizvi’s new book Not Just Lucky, highlighting just how horrible workplaces can be for women and why we all have to stand up and fight to make it better.

Six stories in 60 seconds

ALICE was 24 when she started working for a man who, over time and quite deliberately, transformed a team of young women staff into a sycophantic posse. Those who don’t conform are ostracised, socially humiliated and in constant fear or firing. The boss begins inviting Alice to after-work drinks, rewarding her with titbits of workplace gossip and information that makes her feel special and included. In a matter of weeks, what was a slightly over-friendly working relationship descends into incessant, menacing and sexualised messaging outside of office hours. When Alice and a colleague who experience similar treatment find the courage to fight back, they are shunned in the office and accused of being ‘obsessed’ with their boss.

Marta is a doctor and was one of the top students in her graduating class. She’s applied and been selected for training to become a surgeon. If you’ve watched as much Grey’s Anatomy as I have, you’ll know that means she’s the best of the best. While technically brilliant, Marta finds the emotional side of her job taxing. Watching people die is part of the gig. When called in for a meeting with superiors to discuss her ‘lack of resilience’, Marta can’t help but tear up. She is sitting across the table from fully qualified surgeons when she drops her face downwards and begins crying. Once she has composed herself, she looks up to see one surgeon filming on his iPhone. He’s smirking. Within a week, the whole hospital has seen the ‘hilarious’ video of Marta ‘being a sook’.

Anna is a marketing executive whose job includes servicing existing clients, but also, importantly, winning new business for her firm. After leading a team that successfully pitches and wins a major piece of business, Anna is feeling rather chuffed. The new client is so impressed with Anna’s work that they request she personally head up their account. They don’t want to work with anyone else, their inform Anna’s boss’s boss, the CEO. The CEO later asks Anna — who has delivered an enormous financial windfall for his company — how she won the new client over. ‘Did you show him your tits or something?’ he queries.

Yasmin is an adviser to government. She’s walking rapidly down a corridor one day when she trips and drops paperwork all over the floor. She bends over to start pulling the mess of folders and paperclips and pages back together. As she stands up, she notices a close colleague is facing her and can’t stop laughing. He’s guffawing, covering his mouth. She smiles at him, perplexed and hurt that he found her fall so spectacularly hilarious. Then she realises another colleague is standing behind her, thrusting vigorously with his pelvis as if he is screwing her. Yasmin fixes her gaze straight ahead and keeps walking down the corridor. The blokes never mention what happened.

Beth is an engineer, far more comfortable on a construction site than she is in a boardroom. Every few weeks, however, she has to be in her company’s head office for meetings. She hates it, says her feet get itchy. ‘I build stuff, I don’t talk about it,’ she tells me. The worst part is the men she meets with. These are men who aren’t engineers, men who have no technical experience with what Beth does. They treat the boardroom like their kingdom. Those meetings are unbearable. Beth is interrupted far more often than anyone else. When she makes a reasonable point, she’s belittled and dismissed. When she makes a particularly salient point the conversation moves on until one of the men makes that same point and everyone congratulates him on his cleverness. When the tea and biscuits arrive, everyone looks to Beth to do the serving.

Qian-Qian is an event manager who has worked with some of the biggest companies in Australia. Her organisational skills are legendary and she boasts some of the best contacts in the industry. Once she turned forty, however, Qian-Qian decided she wanted a change. She was sick of the corporate world and thought she’d take her considerable expertise and head to the not-for-profit sector. She wanted to do some good. Her first call was to a charitable organisation, which put her in a room with one of the senior managers within a week of her phone call. They didn’t have a job for her, but they’d create one. Her boss-to-be noted that charities cannot afford to pay the way big business does. Did Qian-Qian have a high-earning husband? That would make the pay cut easier to manage, presumably.

Six women. Six jobs. The same sexist story.

It’s the same story as Jo, an electrician, who was asked when another woman was employed at her company how she felt about ‘no longer being the only hot girl in the room’. Or Tahlia, a pint-sized radio host, who was told she needed to lose weight before the new billboards were produced. Her co-host was morbidly obese but nobody has a ‘talk’ with him. Or Sari, a senior lawyer who had a paralegal tell her that she was his ‘favourite’ masturbation fantasy. Of Salima, who complained about having to be reimbursed for company expenses, rather than being given a credit card, and was told, ‘You spend all your money on clothes and shoes anyway.’

The same story, over and over and over again.

Women in a huge variety of workplaces have to put up with sexist behaviour from their colleagues. Picture: The Wrong Girl / Channel 10

Why we all need to start being ‘that girl’

These are stories of unquestionably illegal behaviour that the victim worries are too ‘trivial’ to be worthy of complaint. They are stories of women who have been made to feel small, unimportant and worthless. They are stories of men taking advantage, taking liberties, and taking women’s dignity and self-respect. Stories that most of us are too scared to report or protest about or push back against because we fear being labelled as ‘that girl’ …

That Girl is the one who calls out a mate at the footy over a sexist remark about a player’s wife. She objects to being affectionately called ‘sweetie’ or ‘darling’ by her boss. She follows the sexual harassment procedures when a colleague sticks his hand up her skirt at Friday night drinks. That Girl isn’t a girl at all — she’s a woman. A woman who wants to be treated fairly as a colleague, a boss, an employee … as a human being.

You never want to be That Girl. That Girl can’t take a joke. She’s no fun. She’s — insert eye roll — politically correct. She’s boring. She should just learn to be cool. Learn to be a team player. You know? Why does she have to suck the humour out of everything? She should stop playing the victim. How come she doesn’t get that the boys were only kidding around? The boys were just being boys.

I’ve been That Girl, but you know what I’ve been far more times?

I’ve been Not Her.

I’ve let things go. I’ve smiled politely, prettily, and avoided having an argument. I’ve even laughed along with the joke when I know it’s wrong, and it makes my skin crawl to pretend I wasn’t bothered. Often it was because I felt exhausted by always being the one to say something. Or I let it go because it didn’t seem like a big enough deal to call out and make a ‘thing’ over. There have been times when I simply didn’t know how to handle a situation and felt out of my depth. There are occasions when I’ve watched someone else be treated badly, be humiliated, or unfairly criticised, and known she would have been cut more slack if she was a man. Sometimes I’ve still stayed silent. Sometimes I’ve been scared. Because being That Girl is really, really hard.

But there comes a point when you have to do what is right even when it is hard. There comes a point when you have to say it out loud. If not for yourself, say it out loud for the benefit of other women. Say it so that other women don’t feel alone. Say it so other women know it wasn’t their fault. So the young women who answered that Cosmopolitan survey know what happened to them is not okay and they don’t have to put up with it. So that good men know the truth of what others do in their name and that standing silently watching it go on makes them complicit.

Say it so it stops being normal. And report it so it doesn’t go unchecked.

Be That Girl.

Because That Girl is a hero.

Jamila’s new book Not Just Lucky is available now.

Extract from Not Just Lucky by Jamila Rizvi, published by Penguin Random House Australia, RRP $35 and available now.