New to the forum! Being a warrior at work for my female colleagues!

[Tivara43]

Hello

Well, mumsnet regular lurker for years and only just discovered the feminism threads. Where have you been all my life?!

I'm a feminist. Quite honestly, I feel like society is riven with sexism, I see it everyday. From an acquaintance calling a woman a slut. To leering from white van men on my walk to work. To entrenched institutional sexism both direct and indirect in my workplace.

I challenge it every single time. I have been told I'm strident and difficult for this. LOL!!!! Even by my own father.

But I don't care. I'm actually softly spoken not that this matters.

So here's my latest battle ladies.

My office has a promotion system whereby employees are assessed against certain criteria to win the promotion.

When I started work all those years ago, there were 12 in my "intake". Roughly 50:50 male to female split. Most woman have now left, there are three of us remaining with one being on maternity leave. Formidable women, brilliant at their jobs. Hard working. None of us have been promoted. All of the men have.

The scoring against the criteria is shrouded in a veil of secrecy. I asked to see these "criteria". Objective and quantifiable... Errrrrrr no. Things like how many business development events do you attend? Well not many.... Because they are rugby matches and cricket matches and all day drinking and when we asked to do something different we were told there was no budget! Do you smell a male bias here?

So.....

I have brought a grievance about this and will resign if affirmative action isn't taken. I cannot wait. And hopefully it will change things for the positive for the next gen of female employees.

Will update you.

Wow! go you!! Brilliant.

And there's abso-bluddy-lutely no doubt that rugby and cricket games out of work hours are both directly and indirectly discriminatory. Are there events organised around all-female activities, in the same way that a rugby match is an all-male activity?

And that promotion against criteria which are not made available and transparent to those being assessed is v bad management. Not only bad management but it sounds as though its at least indirectly (if not directly) discriminatory. If all/majority of the men have been promoted and none of the women, there's prima facie evidence of clear sexist bias.

It's interesting to swap around events & activities & outcomes. What if all the women had been promoted & none of the men? What if all the promotional/networking activities were at events which were stereotyped as "female"? The men would feel put upon etc etc. It's worth informally raising those scenarios ...

I once (as the manager) had to sign off an application for a colleague for a training course. One of the reasons that he wrote down for wanting to go on the course was that he was the only man in a "female-dominated workplace" -- and this is in a profession where it's still nowhere near 50/50 and certainly not at the senior levels (more like 25/75 female/male employees). It's amazing how sensitive men can be about things that are utterly normal (unfortunately) for most women.

How in the world is a rugby match an all-male activity? I love rugby and many females I know do as well.

Sorry to do this but can I just sound a word of caution ?

Is resigning not a bit hasty ? Don't you think that plays right into their hands and the discrimination will simply continue long after your departure ?

It may be that they have genuinely never assessed their diversity policies sufficiently and this might be a fabulous opportunity to work with them to make substantive and lasting change. One of the things that we've noticed when doing consultancy work is that many companies simply don't see the discrimination that is inherent in so many of their structures. I found that in order to make changes work, you had to approach it cautiously and list the benefits that would come from a different approach. Evidence based was the best way to do it, pointing out ratios, turnover etc and finding a way to show that there was a cost and reputational impact on being perceived as discriminatory.

Of course, they might just be sexist sods, in which case, fuck em.