Sexual misogyny in the workplace

A friend and I were chatting the other day, and we realised that neither of us had worked in an office and not met with some degree of sexual misogyny. Now, in all fairness, I am still at a fairly early stage in my career, and have only managed to clock up five years in an office environment so far. That’s five years, four different offices, countless occasions where I have felt that my being a woman has put me at a disadvantage.

In my first-ever job after university, I went into a meeting with the CEO and found myself having to ask him to remove his hand from my leg. It came out of absolutely nowhere; one minute we were discussing the financial implications of customer relationship management software, the next I was moving my chair away and apologising, as if it were my fault. He told me that I had given him misleading signals, and I believed him, until I thought about it later and realised that I had done no such thing.

In my second job, I was being shown around on my first day and was introduced to a colleague who promptly said: ‘It’ll be great to finally have a woman on the team: we need someone to flirt with!’. The individual showing me around the asked me if I had a boyfriend. I attempted to change the subject but the two men asked if I was ‘frigid’. I was beginning to think that I was in the habit of applying to the wrong jobs, but these were impressive corporate giants that I was working in, not small, local businesses in the back and beyond.

In my most recent position at a company voted into the ‘top 100 employers to work for’, I prepared a presentation about a design for an invitation to a corporate event. During the presentation, one of the audience asked me why we couldn’t just use an image of a woman’s breasts for the cover design of the invitation, since ‘that would make anyone want to go to the event’. The audience applauded, and I kept quiet, along with the other two women in the room full of men. When I left that position to work as a freelancer, my employer asked why I was leaving. I explained that I felt my sex was a negative issue for my colleagues, and that I felt that I would not be able to progress up the ranks within the company as a result. His response? ‘We only hired you because we thought that you were easy anyway’.