Let’s stop blaming women for systemic workplace sexism— morning meditation
What is a morning meditation? To help me build a habit of daily writing, I’m publishing a few thoughts here every morning about ideas that interest and inspire me, mostly drawn from ordinary life. I hope you enjoy them.
When I was a wee young corporette, I prided myself on being “one of the guys”. I considered myself above the character defects of “other women” — defects like cattiness, backstabbing, moodiness, and shallow interests — and happily proclaimed that given the choice, I would prefer a male boss. “Less drama,” I reasoned.
It was emotionally satisfying to believe this. It made me feel as if I were better, more enlightened, more worthy of success than other women. It was a way to explain away office sexism and the glass ceiling. Most of all, it was a way to pretend that I wouldn’t be affected by the systemic biases — conscious and unconscious — that hold women back at work and in society.
I’ve since seen the error of my ways. Looking back now, most of the so-called drama I perceived was heavily filtered through the lens of broad patriarchal norms, prevailing ideas about leadership, behavior, and even taste that favored men, and last but not least, my own unconscious bias toward women.
So you can imagine my frustration when The Atlantic published an article titled, Why Do Women Bully Each Other at Work?. It’s a title laden with assumptions, clearly designed for clicks and sensationalism. In all fairness, the article itself concludes that “women aren’t the villains of this story.” But this sentence is buried 23 — yes, 23 — paragraphs in (and that’s not even halfway through the article). To find it, you must first read through multiple stomach-turning anecdotes about female bullying, clearly designed to confirm your worst suspicions. How many readers will actually get that far? How many more likely stopped at the anecdotes, comfortably reaffirmed in their belief that women really are to blame for all their problems?
Toward the very end of the article, which was so long and banner-ad-laden that it crashed my browser multiple times before I could finally finish it (again, this doesn’t bode well for the likelihood that others made it this far), the author states:
“In general, research shows men are more biased against women at work than women themselves are.”
Then why devote thousands of words to the even smaller subset of women who aren’t merely biased toward other women but actually bully them? Because clicks, that’s why. Because society can’t get enough of the bitchy corporate woman narrative. Because framing a real issue (and workplace bullying definitely is) in terms of familiar sexist tropes makes a far more effective headline than, “Research confirms both men and women are biased against women at work, and that under certain conditions, sometimes this leads to female bullying, but overall, male bias and patriarchal office norms are the bigger problems holding women back.”
I guess I took the bait, too. But this one touched a very personal nerve, and knowing how many people would read this article — and how few would likely stick with it to the end — I couldn’t stay silent.
Is there female bullying at work? Sure. Does it hold individual women back from achieving more? Almost certainly. But let’s not pretend this is a “woman problem.” Bullying at work is a problem for everyone. Bias is a problem at work for everyone. Both men and women are guilty of it. Both men and women suffer greatly from it. To zero in on stereotypes of the office “queen bee” only flatters existing biases and implies that women are largely to blame for any problems they face.
The onus is not on women alone to pull themselves up and defeat workplace sexism one toppled queen bee at a time. The solution is not telling women to be nicer to each other or to own their success and be more confident, as the article advises us to do at the end.
Maybe we can start by acknowledging that systemic sexism isn’t a “woman problem”; it’s a human problem that is very real and very harmful to both men and women. It traps everyone in a web of norms and expectations that leads to homogenous echo chambers, entrenched ways of doing things, and toxic coping mechanisms that quash our potential and feed our cynicism.
Maybe we can start by questioning those norms. By examining our own frustrations and cynicisms and being honest about our biases.
And maybe we can stop blaming women for their own oppression. Maybe, just maybe, we can be better than that.
