The Australian workplace is remasculinising. Young men, and alarmingly young women, are abandoning the progress in gender equity achieved over the past 40 years in favour of androcentrism. Androcentrism is an ugly word with an ugly meaning: it is the practice, conscious or otherwise, of placing men or the masculine point of view at the centre of one’s view of the world and its culture and history.
Even 4,000 years ago in a Sumerian kingdom, Law Number 7 mandated that married women who seduced other men were to be killed. While the male lover was to be fully exonerated, death awaited any wife who dared be unfaithful to her husband. Does this sound like a barbaric chapter in ancient history?
Under English law right up until 5 years ago infidelity was a widely accepted defence for a man killing his wife. A United Nations report in 2002 found that honour killings – the so-called right of a husband or father to kill a woman who engages in sexual relations outside the marriage – occurred in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Yemen and other Mediterranean and Persian Gulf countries, as well as in France, Germany and the UK among migrant communities.
Androcentrism may first have been recorded more than 4,000 years ago but it is the social wound that will not heal – then and now.
We like to believe we live in a more tolerant time and in a more equitable society, but we know that little has changed. In first-world Western societies the majority of men don’t murder women, but tragically, all men contribute to or participate in the social death of Woman. When I use the term Woman, it has an uppercase W, and refers to the collective feminine, the experiential, existential feminine, a powerful symbolism for women in everyday life.
But I’m digressing – we’ll come back to the social death of Woman a little later. For now let’s focus on the workplace which is filled with inequity, professional inequality and the exclusion of women.
The politics of indifference and the language of exclusion are everywhere in the workplaces of developed countries like Australia, the US, Canada, the UK and they cast a shadow over everyone in the gender equity struggle. That said, in the boardroom and the workplace, more light is shone on gender inequity than in the streets and kitchens. However, while discrimination is increasingly recognised in the workplace, the response typically is for boards and C-level executives to set quotas, goals and rules for directors and staff to comply with.
Identifying discrimination and gender inequity in the workplace illuminates the problem…not the solution. And rules and compliance are not the answer.
While goals and rules may change behaviour, the underlying cause of gender inequity is not behaviour. Let me repeat that, because the conventional wisdom is ‘ change behaviour and you fix the problem.’ The cause of gender inequity is not behaviour. It is attitudes and values. It is the internalised mindset of every director and employee in an organisation – not the externalised rules – that shape and deliver gender equity.
It’s how we think and feel that determines how we behave. If we think and feel it’s OK to behave inappropriately or in a discriminatory way, we’ll find ways to get around the rules.
I’ve spent twenty years as a social researcher analysing attitudes and behaviour and the relationship between them, and I can confirm, having analysed data from 800,000 respondents across three continents, that it is attitudes that determine behaviour; that behaviour doesn’t fundamentally change without attitudes changing. So why do we focus on the output – on behavioural responses like rules, quotas and compliance – when its attitudes that are the root cause of poor behaviour?
Another paradox of the gender equity battle is that most gender discrimination is focused on women: on the data of discrimination; on the risks to women; on the struggle for equal pay; on the proportion of women on boards or in executive positions. This is entirely valid. It is totally appropriate and necessary. But it is not sufficient.
Women are not the problem. Women recognise the problem. Women live the problem.
It’s the attitudes of men that need to shift. And all the behavioural rules in the world won’t make that happen. Men are not blind – they can see the problem as clearly as women. But why would they surrender unearned advantage if they don’t have to? Rules certainly won’t make them do it.
This is why at the Centre for Gender Equity, for example, we focus on changing the attitudes of men – and yes, women as well – but predominantly men. It’s why we’re measuring and mapping the attitudes of men in the workplace and in society.
It is only through illuminating the problem and then setting about shifting attitudes that progress is made – progress to stem the tide of inappropriate sexual behaviour; role discrimination; stereotyping; recruitment inequity; remuneration and reward inequity; leadership barriers; and boardroom discrimination against women.
Corporate Australia is a man’s world. If we look at the country’s top 200 ASX companies, 85% of directors are men. Men in charge say everyone should be subject to a merit test – that the best person, regardless of gender, should get the job, or the promotion, or the raise, or the seat on the board.
But women are half the population, so why are they so under-represented? According to Roy Morgan Research, 26% of women and 27% of men have university degrees – so it’s not a matter of qualifications.
What about experience? The most common source of company directors is the ranks of CFOs or CEOs. But company directors appoint CEOs, and 95% of the top 200 ASX CEOs are men. It is a psychological and sociological truism that we are self-selecting in life. So is it just that men are selecting more men? Are men practising self-selection?
Let’s begin with a few definitions:
What is gender equality?
Gender equality in a nutshell is a non-discriminatory allocation of social, political and economic resources.
However, power, privilege, and status have rarely, if ever been shared by women and men on an equal basis. Most companies proclaim a commitment to equality and yet few, if any, truly deliver it to women. We don’t hear male CEOs saying, ‘Yes, we have gender inequality here and want it. We’re entitled to it and enjoy it.’ You don’t have them saying it; but, purely on statistics, you almost always have them doing it.
Equality does NOT mean women are equal to men. That’s one of the great dangers of the term. Women and men are entirely different. Woman does not equal Man. And Man does not equal Woman. Each represents two different worlds. Or more accurately two versions of the same world that remain irreducibly distinct.
In the workplace however, difference is often invoked to unfavourably compare women to men, with men as the standard against which women are considered lesser beings or non-men.
Gender equality does not therefore acknowledge or attempt to reverse women’s status as non-men. It recognises that women differ from men rather than seeing them as the opposites of men.
Gender equality means social, legal, economic, political, professional equality for each gender. When we talk about equality in the gender context therefore, we should always preface the word ‘equality’ with social, legal, economic, political, professional… and not just leave the word hanging out there inviting misinterpretation.
NEXT…
What is gender equity?
Gender equity embraces fairness and justice. It is the provision of equal opportunity.
Gender equity conceptually recognises that men and women are different; that they have different life experiences and expectations.
Gender equity policies ensure appropriate opportunities are allocated to women and men according to their differing needs.
Gender equity strategies recognise and deliver different social, economic and political opportunities for men and women. Over the next decade gender inequity, both in the boardroom and workplace, will be a material concern for board committees covering risk management, due diligence, remuneration, and human resources.
So what is happening in the Australian workplace?
As we just heard, women are running neck and neck with their male counterparts in Australia’s universities. And they are dominating important professional categories. That’s two ticks for the merit argument. But when it comes to remuneration, the merit propaganda seems to disintegrate.
Let’s look first at the professions …
While the proportion of men and women in the Australian workforce has barely changed over the past decade, women are advancing on the professional roles historically dominated by men. The number of Australian men in the workforce in 2002 was 66%, compared to 67% ten years later. For women it was 51% in 2002 and 53% a decade later: virtually no change in either gender over the decade.
Across the same ten years however, the percentage of women in professional roles increased while the proportion of women in ‘home duties’ dropped from 17% in 2002 to 11.7% in 2012.
According to a review of the 2011 Census by my former colleague at KPMG, demographer Bernard Salt, there are more than 10 million Australians in the workforce with some interesting gender splits in occupational categories.
For example, virtually all (99%) of Australia’s 14,105 midwives are women. And half (49%) of the 1,170 gynaecologists and obstetricians are women (up from 39% in the 2006 Census).
More than half (55%) of all veterinarians are women (up from 45% in 2006), 58% of pathologists are women (up from 48%), and 53% of paediatricians are women (up from 45%).
The law however is still dominated by men despite an increase from 22% to 29% of women barristers.
The good news stops there. Women are dramatically underrepresented, not only on boards and in senior executive roles, but also in higher income levels.
According to Roy Morgan Research, of all Australians who earn in excess of $80,000 a year, three-quarters (74%) are men and only a quarter (26%) are women. While that represents an improvement for women over the past decade (up from only 15% in 2002), it remains deeply inequitous.
The gains made by women in the past decade are remarkable. But why is inequity so entrenched in the workplace?
We know that the proportion of women CEOs in Australia’s top 200 ASX companies has remained below 5% for the past decade. And remember, boards – company directors – appoint CEOs and 85% of ASX 200 board directors are men. It’s not a glass ceiling; it’s looking like a masculine faultline.
Men create gender inequity. You don’t have women saying, ‘let’s create systemic disadvantage that will impact every aspect of our lives.’
Unearned privilege, the advantage of being male, is a difficult prize for men to voluntarily abandon. The social subordination of women has long been and remains the life’s work of men, regardless of how fair they think they’re being, of men subscribing to a social, economic and political system that devalues the worth of women; diminishing their value to society. It places women in a subordinate role forever.
Regardless of how sensitive to social injustice some men are, they do nothing to change the system of dominance, to redress the widespread disadvantage women experience throughout their lives. I’m reminded of the famous quote, attributed, probably incorrectly to Edmund Burke and more likely paraphrased from something John Stuart Mill, that, ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’
It is easier to understand why some women would want to get ahead in the male system even at the cost of leaving other women behind, than it is to understand why some men would want to jettison the privileges of male pre-eminence. This inability or unwillingness to disadvantage themselves by dismantling systemic advantage quarantines men from needing to confront the truth that they enjoy vast privilege that is unearned.
Lawyer and academic Catharine MacKinnon believes that men in power simply fail to grasp the paradox of the merit argument and therefore fail to undo the unthinkable: disadvantage themselves by eliminating unmerited advantage.
MacKinnon believes society so comprehensively fails to recognise the hierarchies that have subordinated women for so long they have become perceived as natural. The dominance of men over women has been, she says, accomplished socially as well as economically prior to the operation of law, as everyday life.
Is it any wonder then that despite the gains being hard-won by women themselves, the system resists their advancement; uses the merit argument as a smokescreen for dominant and dominative masculinities.
But it does more than that. Recall the beginning of this short talk when I spoke of the social death of Woman. What does that mean? Katherine McKinnon says that,
If we measure the reality of women’s situation in all its variety against the guarantees of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not only do women not have the rights it guarantees…but it is hard to see, in its vision of humanity, a woman’s face. Women need full human status in social reality. For this, the Declaration of Human Rights must see the ways women distinctively are deprived of human rights as a deprivation of humanity (ibid).
Women, made unequal by men through a unique deprivation of human rights, are deprived of humanity, not allowed to be human – at the hand of Man, made not human, made nothing. For the metaphysical figure of Woman – symbolic of the collective feminine – the deprivation of humanity and the political, the social and economic exclusion therefore goes beyond dispossession: it is genocide.
Contemporary scholars argue that the main objective of genocidal destruction is the transformation of the victims into nothing … that is, their social death.
Social death is a concept so central to the harm of genocide it is at least as important as mass physical murder in characterising evil.
So, where does this evil spring from? Is the privileged rank enjoyed by men, and the evil they impose on women, a consequence of evolutionary biology, of natural animalistic male competition and aggression within and between species? Are male humans simply one sex of one species of the animal world subject to the same evolutionary drives and hierarchical structures as other primates?
To be human is to transcend biological classification. We are sentient beings with a self-awareness that enables us to make choices – every day. But still men invoke the TV show they saw on chimpanzees where the male was dominant and the females lamely followed his lead. Where male chimps fought over females and roles of power and importance.
It’s true that humans are animals, but we are not just animals. The battles of chimpanzees have nothing to do with the wars of men. Biology provides no predictive link between human and non-human animal behaviour. Nor can it explain or be used to excuse the behaviour of men.
By way of example, in April 2012 Max Tomlinson, the then media adviser to Liberal National Party Senator Ian Macdonald, wrote to Dr Carole Ford in response to her opinion piece in a Brisbane newspaper about the need for more women in parliament.
In his email, Mr Tomlinson tells Dr Ford:
Dear Carole,
I have just read your pathetic piece in the Courier-Mail. While I generally ignore the bleatings of sourpusses like you, your piece was so depressing and negative that I was moved to find your email address and simply say: Get a life.
The world would be a better place if people like you stood for political preselection and learned the hard way that ability is not measured by chromosomes.
Question: Why don’t you have a go? Answer: Like most women, you probably don’t possess the necessary drive, determination and decisiveness that men innately possess. It’s not a personal criticism; it’s a fact of biology. Where, for example, are the great female explorers, mountaineers, warriors, inventors, chefs? Blokes dominate most areas of human endeavour because Nature equipped them with something called testosterone. That was part of Nature’s grand design to enable men to be stronger, more fearless and more determined than their sisters. Sorry, Carole, fact not fiction.
The anti-male world of conspiracy theories in which you and the Sisterhood inhabit is the complete antithesis of the world in which positive women thrive. Women who can’t cut it in – what did you call it?, the boys’ club – can easily cover their inadequacies by claiming bias, sexism, misogyny, chauvinism etc. etc. ad infinitum. It’s so tiring to read such twaddle.
Face reality, my dear. Smell the coffee. Try to turn your sour, negative, anti-male view of the world into something more positive and productive. Demonising men may be your life’s quest but fewer and fewer people are listening.
I repeat: GET A LIFE.
Kind regards,
Max
Why Tomlinson was forced to resign probably remains a mystery to him – after all, what did he do wrong? His deeply felt belief that men dominate most areas of human endeavour because Nature equipped them with ‘something called testosterone’; that it was all part of ‘Nature’s grand design’ to enable men to be smarter, stronger, more fearless and more determined than women; is entirely consistent with the views of Charles Darwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the great philosopher Hegel.
The writings of the great thinkers serve to establish and reinforce stereotypical social values disadvantageous to women; they make a contribution to the belief system that stops men facing the reality that their privilege is unearned, unreal and inequitable.
‘Fact not fiction,’ Mr Tomlinson wrote in his email to Dr Ford, and if he and other biological determinists, including Darwin, Rousseau and Hegel were right they would be on safe ground. The question is, does their certainty about Nature’s grand design privileging men have any basis in fact? Research on infants and young children debunks the belief that gender advantage emerging at a young age must have a biological basis. In fact, research between girls and boys, in abilities and dispositional traits, has found evidence of few differences before late childhood and adolescence. Of all assumed gender role differences in children, only aggression in boys appears to emerge at preschool ages. The destructive stereotypes of gender, even at early ages, are therefore not based on fact, and certainly not on biology.
But the behaviour is everywhere… so much so it is considered normal, even natural.
One night during the 2012 London Olympics where young swimmers, girls as young as 14 away from their parents for the first time, were trying to get a good night’s sleep before their big events, Australian swimmer Michael Cowley and other men on the swimming team caused a major disruption. Later interviewed for a newspaper Cowley said:
I know the night, there’s no denying that stuff happened in the hotel: we’d been out on a movie night. We went and saw the new Batman movie – all the boys together, just hanging out and just being boys, being dumb.
I’m being truthful. We were just being boys. Just prank calling in the hotel and stuff and door-knocking the girls’ doors, but it was all harmless fun.
Cowley and his friends considered being boys, and consequently being dumb, as a perfectly reasonable explanation for their behaviour. Although only young they had already lost their ability to be moved by ordinary conditions, sights and events; they were indifferent to the needs of the young women; and in the men’s eyes their disruptive behaviour was acceptable because it had been normal from childhood to treat girls as non-men. To the young men it was harmless fun; they were just kidding around; it was just a joke. The usual response of men caught in the spotlight of sexism, that surface infection of entrenched discrimination, is “get over it, it was just a bit of fun,” or “I was just joking,” or “move on, it’s no big deal: what’s your problem.”
Gender reveals itself to be a central organising metaphor for the human condition. Stereotyping and inequality act to subordinate women revealing that the construction of the difference between men and women is the political difference between freedom and subjection, and that sexual mastery is the major means through which men affirm their manhood.
It has been estimated that 96% of the workers of one gender would have to change job titles to equalise the distribution of the two genders across a workforce; and that perceptions about the suitability of women and men for different types of work are based largely on gender stereotypes that are inaccurate or untrue.
We have viewed gender discrimination stereotypes in the workplace, but do the new breed of young male managers offer any hope for a better, more equitable future?
Sadly no. In fact the opposite is true. The next wave of male managers is the porn generation. These are young men who as adolescent boys grew up with online pornography. Static porn, the porn of Playboy, Penthouse and other magazines has been with us for generations. But suddenly sex was being played out in full colour, seemingly as real life.
Women were, are, depicted as, at best, compliant, willing sexual objects and at worst victims of violent sexual acts. Universally, women are depicted as available to men.
Men see women, through the lens of pornography, as less than the sum of their sexual parts.
Alarmingly young men increasingly believe that women’s place is in the home. This attitude increased from 6.5% in 2008 to 11.6 in 2013. But it is the trend line that provides startling evidence that young men are becoming more misogynistic – over the past decade the percentage of young men believing women belong in the home has increased from 7 to 12 (rounded). That’s a 40% increase in just one decade. In the same period, the number of men over the age of 65 believing that women belong in the home has reduced from 21% to 13% – a 62% decrease.
In the workplace therefore, this porn generation as they take on supervisory or management roles have been taught to disrespect, even loathe, women they do not know – to see them as less than the sum of their sexual parts.
How then can they show respect for women who report to them? Women who are either viewed as sexual objects or aliens, non-men, non-human.
This poses a major challenge to management stakeholders as they promote young men. And any behavioural rules will fail. Unless we BELIEVE something is right or wrong, all the rules in the world won’t make a jot of difference.
Data from Roy Morgan Research shows that the world is re-masculinising. Looking at the population as a whole, over the twenty years between 1986 and 2006 the data shows a constant decrease in Australians believing that the role of women is in the home – a decrease from 17% to only 7%. Alarmingly however, from 2007 that trend has reversed. Today almost 10% of Australians believe women should just run the home.
It’s important to point out that 90% of Australians do not believe that women should just run the home.
So, we have mapped changing attitudes in society, but what is needed now is to map the attitudes of both men and women in the workplace and provide training that targets the attitudes not the behaviours. If the young up-and-coming male managers think women are nothing more than sexual objects or outsider, non-men, the workplace of the future promises to be an ugly place.
I have responded to this challenge by developing in partnership with Roy Morgan Research a diagnostic tool that surveys every employee in a company and delivers comprehensive social and gender equity scores. It compares those scores with the scores of competitor companies, with the expectations of society and with the benchmarked business sector as a whole. In this way we are able to identify precisely where and what attitudes need to be changed, using targeted training, to meet the changed expectations of shareholders, potential directors, current and future executives and employees – and their families.
So in conclusion, men and women are different. They see the same world through very different yet equally valid eyes. There is no and should never be gender equality; there is and should always be true, separate, gender difference. And within a celebration of that difference, gender equity. The merit argument only has purchase in a world of equal opportunity; in a world of gender equity.
But gender equity has to be fought for in a world of androcentrism – fought for by men and fought for by women. And the fight can only be won if the attitudes – those normal everyday attitudes – are made to change forever. The behavioural change will follow.
This is an edited extract of a paper being presented today at the Gender Economics Global Conference, University of NSW.