'I’m staring at your t*ts': why sexual harassment in the workplace continues

Lindy West feels the same way, thought employing even more caustic descriptions:

SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human - working hard, contributing to society ... and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car.

Another reviewer says “the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense”.

In regard to the treatment of women in the workplace, American Apparel seems to think it is fine to use models depicting its own employees in sexualised photo shoots. While it’s good the Advertising Standards Board has acted on it (case report here 0141/10) there is nothing said in the ASB report about how the ad works to normalise the sexualised treatment of women in the workplace.

Then there’s the Hooters Employment Handbook, which requires female employees to agree that sexual joking is all part of the job and they won’t complain because it’s to be expected in their workplace.

If sexual harassment and objectification of female employees is going to stop, women need to take up their lawful rights and speak out. And they need to be supported, not penalised for doing so.

Call this flexibility? Slave worker women

While we’re talking about women and work, here’s another item that caused me to do a double take.

In a piece titled “Women at Work” (The Weekend Australian, May, 2010) Lyndall Crisp interviews “diversity expert” Maureen Frank who calls for more flexibility and less tokenism in our corporate culture. She says women need to be courageous, think outside the square and “put together a compelling argument about how your flexible hours would work and then approach your boss”. So far so good. So how did she “buck the system”?

Almost 10 years ago, when she found herself a single mother of twin girls aged nine months, she had to reorganise her work schedule to spend more time with them. She’d arrive at the office at 4am, leave at 4pm and be working online at 7.30pm. The cost of a full-time nanny left her, often, with only $50 at the end of the month. But it was worth it.

So Franks is working at least a 12-hour day, with three hours off. Gosh, all that free time to play with the babies! She’s then working again at 7.30pm. This is the deal women should fight for? This is how we are to see flexibility? This is the kind of arrangement that will attract women to go for high level jobs? So that they can be slave worker women?

I don’t think so.