[2] Let's talk about: women's issues in the work place

[ByGrabtharsHammarWhatASaving]

There are so many different facets to this:

• The kind of work women are more likely to do (with the associated pay and risks)
• More likely to be on zero hour contracts, PT work etc
• Maternity discrimination at work
• Childcare issues preventing women from working
• Time out of work for caring reasons making it harder for women to find work
• Work place harassment
• A general lack of confidence and lower expectations (less likely to apply for promotions or advocate for pay rises)

In my life I've had to leave 2 jobs due to sexual harassment by my boss at one, and attempted sexual assault by my colleague at another. I've always done "women's work" - care assistant, primary school TA etc - and have therefore never worked for more than minimum wage. I left uni when I found out I was pregnant with my oldest and haven't worked since. I'm trying to retrain atm to go back to work when my youngest is a bit older but am restricted by childcare and funding issues.

What kind of issues have you all faced in the workplace?

One thing I would love to know is how much workplace discrimination is covered up by non-disclosure agreements.

A few years back I was part of a "class action" to get equal pay. We won, and got a hefty settlement, but part of that was an NDA.

Hence not being able to talk about actual amounts (approx 10% of take home - made a huge difference to my life as a single parent, which is why I get so bloody annoyed when people dismiss this as a "middle class feminist issue" - it's actually precisely the women who don't have a lot of slack in the system with their take home pay who get screwed over worst by pay discrimination). Or name the actual employer (in fairness it was cock up rather than conspiracy - an unintended consequence of overly long pay-scales with women given a default "satisfactory" mark on their annual review when on maternity leave - the sort of structural inequality which is very common).

But whenever I see that tired old "there is no pay discrimination any more, that's just a myth" crap, I always wonder how many of us there are out there, gagged by NDAs and unable to talk about how, 50 plus years after the equal pay act, we still had to take our employers to court to get equal pay (which is a course of action only available to the average woman if she's in a union, because as an individual, she couldn't afford the legal costs).

I was asked how much my husband earned during negotiations about a payrise
It was suggested i wear a frock
I have been groped
Our staff meeting that was always on a monday, mysteriously moved to my day off when i requested part time. Then reverted back to a monday
And actually the biggest impact was my husbands boss saying 'thats what wives are for' when he requested flexible working.
When i worked for a LA about 20 years ago they started a process to do a job parity thing they discovered that a lot of the 'female' roles were underpaid compared to 'male' roles of similar nature. They quietly dropped the project as being too complex as they realised they couldnt afford the change required. I now work for the same LA sgain and they finally implemented it this year. I went up 2 grades as did all the other women foung my job (havent met a male one yet)

When i worked for a LA about 20 years ago they started a process to do a job parity thing they discovered that a lot of the 'female' roles were underpaid compared to 'male' roles of similar nature.

I work for a local authority that went through this process. At the end of it my, female dominated, sector got a pay rise. Whoo!

Except we also lost our shift allowance, and our anti-social hours allowance, so as I am in a promoted position I gained a whopping £60 per year. My unpromoted colleagues ended up worse off than when we started.

Still the high heid yins got a fat rise so that's OK.

I DIslike working in otherwise all Male teams. Tendency to revert to banter , tendency to use Male postering in meetings ,hierarchy, tendency to exclude me. Which given the vast majority of my mates are Male I suspect says more about the guys at work than me.

Why do I get Male capitalised for me everytim?

I am relieved to say I think I am now too old to be attractive. At one time people used to come and just to stare in at the renowned office with more than one techy female in it.

On a large campus, and every bloke knew my name. Some even looked disappointed when it was revealed I didn’t have a clue who they were.

Also got a 10% pay rise on year

Missed out on promotion for about 15 years being a mother. WHat was galling about that time is that the local management team , every appraisal time , had to be reminded I was a lower grade than they thought.

Whilst working part time but remotely seconded come appraisal time my manager was surprised to discover I was part time only. Because I got the work done.

I'm one of the 50,000 women a year that was sacked while pregnant.

I've had a string of insecure, low paid jobs. I've been sexually harassed or assaulted in most of them.

I took evening classes for several years to gain some qualifications, but it hasn't helped. I do well in interviews and as an intern, but the main problem is that decent jobs want you to work hours that I couldn't manage as a single parent with no support network. You just can't work as and when, you need a fixed hour, fixed pay contract. And managers just don't want to hear that.

Moving for career progression on one partner ... I wonder if there's any stats on that, ie which sex is most usually the 'follower' and what that does to their career and earnings

Why do I get Male capitalised for me everytim??

Just autocorrect deciding 'male' is likeliest to be the capital of the Maldives (which is Malé)

Like Arnold my pay was upgraded by the LA regrading. And, like Arnold again, I lost money - over 12% a year - because they then made the job term time only.

I used to work for a large bank where whenever we used to recruit for a new position, my boss quite openly binned CVs from women because 'taking on mothers is too much trouble'.
This was in the last few years.

My firm made any kind of part time working (which in my industry includes 9-5) virtually impossible. So many talented, driven women left for the sake of maybe a couple of years flexibility when their kids were very young.

Senior women disproportionately didn't have children.

Lots of talking the talk, official mentoring schemes, health and wellness support etc but very little actually changing on the ground.

Childcare issues preventing women from working

I'm a Grandmother and my anecdotal evidence is that childcare issues are worse now than I ever remember them being when my children were young despite there being many more childcare providers.

Reasons for this include;

Some jobs require 100% flexibility from the employee with rotas only available a week or two in advance (This is the case for one daughter who works at a supermarket) It makes it impossible to use child minders who usually insist on the same set days each week and even with the rarer more flexible childcare, you have to hope they are not fully booked when you need it and no childcare provider is available when the employee is required to work at a weekend.

Jobs that require the employee to work long shifts outside of childcare provider hours. (Another daughter, a nurse works 13 hour shifts in the local hospital) This hospital does not offer shorter shifts to any nursing staff.

The change in how society feel children need protecting. At my grandchildren's schools in a quiet, rural location, no child under 11 is allowed to leave the premises without an adult, I'm not sure if this is now the norm but I know I walked home from school at about 5-6 years old and my children did at about 7-8. It would then not be unusual for the child to stay with an older teenager or a neighbour for the odd half hour until the parent arrived home. Having to be present at the school gates at 3.15pm severally restricts availability to work.

Finally, the expectation of the schools for parental involvement. Hardly a week goes by without parents being expected to support the child's learning by doing an afternoon activity or watching a performance or sports event. Yes these are not compulsory but when every other child in the class has a parent there, the pressure is on the parents to attend.

Then there is always the need for child care when the child is ill or during school holidays.

My daughters solution to these difficulties are for Grandma (me) to be around for the grandchildren. I now work very few hours in order to be able to give them that availability despite being being in an insecure financial position myself.

I'm not complaining because I do love my grandchildren but I honestly don't know how other parents cope if they haven't got a second adult prepared to take up the slack when needed.

Mysteriously made redundant, twice, whilst on maternity leave.

Overlooked for promotion that inevitably went to the blue eyed boy that reminded the boss of his younger self.

Found out a man I was managing was being paid more (actually got a huge pay rise from this bit, still).

Having to feign interest in sport because it is all my male dominated team and the CEO talk about.

Thingybob - yes, seems that one 'solution' is to shift employment issues up a generation.
I don't think I know any mother who works full time who doesn't have family living nearby who do a lot of childcare. And it's mostly (though not exclusively) the older women rather than the men.

That was a great post Thingybob. Lots to think about.

Many of my friends have glittering careers because their mum (never dad) have dropped work to help out.

I'm gagged by an NDA and happen to know I'm not the only woman from my old workplace who is.

I have been made redundant twice whilst on mat leave.

However 20 years later I am now the boss and we have a really good flexible working policy. I routinely promote women who are pregnant just to make the point. My leadership team is now 60% female and the majority of them have young children. It is now completely OK for people in our business to leave meetings to pick up the kids and interestingly the men in the team also do this as they know it is OK to do so.

If there is one thing that I aim to do it is to retire leaving my workplace a better place than it was when I started in the 80's.

Childcare issues for me have lasted a long time.

As the mother to a child with SN and persistent school refusal the secondary school years have been much harder to the point where I had to leave work due to the disruption.

There's a tendency to think that it's only mothers of young children that struggle but I've found the pre teen/teen years harder.

Obviously not everyone with teens is in the same situation as me but I think the idea that your career will flourish post primary years is not true for many women. Even older children without SN can need a lot of support and if like me you have no family/local backup it's not always easy.

That was a great post Thingybob. Lots to think about.

Thank you Joyce

Many of my friends have glittering careers because their mum (never dad) have dropped work to help out

The problem as I see it going forward though is fewer Grandmothers will be able to afford to give up work. There are many more of us older people who have found ourselves unexpectedly single in our old age and the state pension age will soon be 67.

There's a tendency to think that it's only mothers of young children that struggle but I've found the pre teen/teen years harder.

I know a lot of women who've said that. I'm just entering those years now - and the wrap-around child care dries up, just at an age when you don't want them hanging around the park on their own and falling into bad company!

Very true Fermats. My DS has ASD so he's vulnerable whilst still being very much a teenager. He is as much work as a toddler still, in different ways of course but it still amounts to me being currently out of the workplace.

Things are getting better slowly (I think) and I hope to return to work soonish but I never imagined my forties would be like this.

I echo the above poster. Despite having worked in a predominantly male environment the discrimination from which my NDA arose was from a woman. Not my case but she gave a talk at a he for she event where she said that she worked every hour she could to get promoted and her now teenage children told her they couldn't really remember seeing her growing up. She was very proud of this and expected it from women working for her.

Thanks for all the replies. Seriously depressing reading what some of you have been through. It's utterly ridiculous that we are still having to beg for equal bloody pay, or just to be treated decently and taken seriously at work.

I know lots of people who have changed career paths because they were dominated by obnoxious men. My friend who studied engineering was so put off by her male student peers that she completely retrained, and most of my female friends from medical school decided against becoming surgeons after being bullied and intimidated on a daily basis during their surgical placement. And many more women I know have deliberately chosen jobs that allow for part time or "family friendly" hours. But jobs with a culture of being aggressive, masculine, "old boys clubs" definitely put women off even bothering to apply.

You've all given me so much to think about, but the things that really jumped out at me was the passing on of child care problems to older women (grand mothers) who increasingly won't be able to reduce their working hours to provide this care. Or if they do will take a pension cut on account of it. Also the fact that childcare issues don't stop in the toddler years, especially for parents with children who have SEN/ disabilities.

The point about non disclosures is very very interesting. I wonder how you would go about changing that?

And as to tyrannical women making life hell at work, I think that's a good example of "gender" rather than "sex" being relevant at work. Often it's masculinity, as much as actual men, who are rewarded at work. Women who perform aggressive, masculine behaviours, either because that's just their personality or because they want to fit in with the men, are definitely part of the problem. It doesn't matter how many women get elected as PM, if they're all like Maggie Thatcher then we'll never get anywhere. My partner works with a woman who always makes a big deal about how feminism is bollocks because if she can make it to the top then anyone should be able to and the fact more women haven't is proof that they're mostly just weak/ dumb/ lazy etc etc. His company are also very proud of having an equal ratio of men and women working there but it only recently occurred to anyone to check how that labour was actually divided. Turns out all the women are employed in the social welfare roles and all the men are employed in the hard sciencey role. They're trying to even things up but aren't having much luck. They've even started phrasing the job adverts to try and make it sound like the hard science jobs have a social welfare aspect.

And the last thing (sorry for such a long post) is that I saw a few people on a different thread asking why that matters. Why does it matter if women are over represented in some areas and men over represented in others? Maybe that difference is just down to a natural separation of interests and aptitudes between men and women? And to that I'd say, even if it's true, I still think it's important that women are represented in "male" fields because often those are the areas that affect us! The lack of women in data science/ medical research is responsible for the data gap in these areas, the lack of women in IT is responsible for the rise of some incredibly sexist AI technology. We need female perspectives helping to shape these areas or we are going to find ourselves on the sharp end of it very very soon.

A very interesting and relevent piece of research is the UN report "I'd blush if I could: Closing the divide in digital skills through education". It's named that because "I'd blush if I could" is how Siri was originally programmed to reply when being sexually harassed by users. Not having women involved in designing technology like this is going to have real consequences for us in the years to come.

I've worked in technology for many years and signed an NDA as part of my departure from a recent job. In previous jobs with smaller companies and smaller teams it has generally been fine: a ratio of say, 5:1 male to female, working directly with a manager who has recruited you and who wants to support you, and lots of interesting things to do.
But more recently I've been getting approached by the big names (Amazon, Facebook, etc) who are all apparently out to recruit more women, and I read about the work environment in these places and they look incredibly off putting: long hours, competitive environments, very male dominated. And just attempting to recruit more women isn't in itself going to make any of that any better.

I’ve been play in the workplace myself, but as a union rep I tend to see really subtle discrimination that is really hard to do anything about. My employer is 2:1 male:female so the dominant culture is male, geeky rather than macho, but definitely some pockets of macho.

I see women clearly being judged by male standards, being expected to fit a certain confident mould that women are less likely to fit than men. I’ve also seen non-NT women being expected to fit an NT standard that’s less likely to be applied to men.

Two things going on there, I think. One is that non-NT men are often a bit more obvious, and we’re very proud of our neurodiversity, so they can get a bit of a free pass, whereas women’s behaviour is a bit subtler, so they’re less likely to get the pass. Added to that, women get judged more harshly than men for being blunt, not picking up social cues etc, because society expects women to just be ... nicer.

So we end up with situations where the individual sees discrimination, I’m inclined to agree, but proving it is really, really hard.

I also still hear the good old-fashioned statements like ‘no point in looking for promotion, you’ll probably be having another baby’ relayed to me. It’s incredibly frustrating, we have solid corporate commitment to diversity, and then people open their mouths and let that crap fall out.

There’s also a hard core of men who refuse to believe women have any kind of issues in the workplace, openly question any diversity initiatives aimed at women (they’re a bit more guarded about about other characteristics, having at least figured out that racism isn’t a good look), and generally derail.