I think it is about power.
As we know the power dynamic in institutions is very patriarchal. The board might be made up of 84% of women including the chair but I bet you the 16% of men still hold easy power.
These power dynamics are largely invisible but in every occasion a single man’s opinion will carry more weight than 84 women.
This also has the effect of pitting women against women which we also know from patriarchy. Some like to stand next to the man to assume some of his power. As soon as she steps a few feet away that is lost.
Some like to police other women on behalf of patriarchy and they will find themselves rewarded for that.
They will be trusted, praised, brought into closed circles but only on the very outside ring, perhaps even only the next room.
The NHS is institutional hierarchically misogynistic. Male doctors are at the top of the food chain, well above the board, and they use clothes to demonstrate this. Women doctors also use clothes to demonstrate they are above nurses. White coats will not be necessary.
Dr Upton, for example, would not have been wearing scrubs unless he was going into surgery or his clothes had been spoiled by some accident.
Women in medicine have had to use manipulation to get up that food chain. Expertise is not sufficient on its own. That manipulation, barring a few exceptions of course, becomes a habit. They use praise and flattery to position other people. ‘Really she’s so good at doing the dishes it’s amazing’ puts someone lower down the food chain automatically.
People don’t pay attention to the fact that the woman being seemingly praised has also designed and built the house containing the kitchen with the dishes. She might also have made the furniture. But if you praise her for doing the dishes so well folk dont see what you’re doing, that you are removing her powers
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placing yourself above her in the food chain even if you have none of the achievements she has.
When you try and criticise that person for not giving you your due you will come across as petty — but she is always punctilious in her praise of you etc
The Stonewall champions scheme provided opportunities to circumnavigate the usual power structures.
DU is using that framing to escalate himself up the food chain of male doctors which would normally take a lot of time and professional investment. He is using SP to position himself — or was trying to.
Kate Searle is using DU to assert seniority — she is in a senior role but as explained above behind the scenes and with her peers her views will carry much less weight than the menz — through the Stonewall door which is so effective.
It is also the reason why Stonewallism is so alive in professional services and admin staff — at last they have the means of putting themselves above the doctors in the food chain.
Nurses are trained to follow procedure and if they don’t follow the hospital processes there will be consequences. It is again about asserting power and building a class system. It would be almost impossible to not come on board with the Stonewallism. Equally within nursing class people
have power struggles. Stonewallism allows the less able nurse to move up the nursing food chain as much as anywhere else.
Feminism has not yet defeated the patriarchy, far from it given current issues, and the patriarchy has always needed women to be the police and managers of it for it to work.
Even on here we see folk accepting Upton’s account of the Xmas encounter without question and assuming that SP was heated at the very least. Her account says she was calm as was DU. Why do so many automatically ignore her account to comment on how she could have handled it better and let things ‘calm down’.
I have been all over everything on this tribunal. TT, Foran, newspapers, SM and all I see is a wall of folk reacting to DUs account of that encounter as it it was the truth. Almost no one comments that SP’s account says they were dalm
and it was a reasonable discussion but DU made no concessions to her disco as a result of it.
I know that it’s partly because it doesn’t make sense that all this would come about because of a calm and reasonable conversation but it still represents the patriarchical favouring of men’s accounts. I could go on and on!