Women on boards: Do they only exist in stock photos?

So the glossy, smiley, Photoshopped, flawless world of stock photography seems to have a thing for corporate shots involving women participating next to men in meetings.
Sadly, it seems to be the only place where women are represented equally on boards. Currently, women only make up 8.3% of directors of the top 200 companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, and there’s growing support for enforced quotas that would see more board positions occupied by women.

The idea of forcing a company to promote a certain number of women to a senior management level seems like an easy solution, but I think it will raise more problems than it solves. Here’s why.

In mixed-gender PE classes, the teacher will sometimes instigate a rule during ball sports that means a team can’t score a goal without the ball first being handled by at least two girls. Sounds like a great way of getting everyone into the game, but instead what happens is that the boys will stop playing as they were, and with a dramatic roll of the eyes pass the football/basketball/puck to the nearest girl, only to have it immediately returned. Do the girls get to touch the ball? Yes. Do they feel valued, appreciated, and like they’ve made a worthy contribution to the team? No. They feel patronised and stupid, made to perform as part of a token gesture.

I’m not saying that women don’t belong on boards, or that if they were forcibly elected that they wouldn’t do a damn fine job. I just think that having a quota is going to inspire resentment in the males who should have been more respectful in the first place and potentially self-doubt in women who may feel as though they’ve only been included to avoid a spanking From Higher Up.

Other ways to include women in companies could be:

• Encouraging women to apply for management positions so they feel as though they have a chance of achieving the role
• A policy that sees all resumes handed in contain no gender-identifying features such as a first name or title
• Catered meetings during lunchtime instead of having them after-hours when women may be occupied with their family
• Maternity and paternity leave to encourage a men to take on domestic responsibilities as well as their partners
• Fostering a culture of acceptance instead of enforcing rigid gender roles

Then again, progress is slow. In the 1992 government report ‘Half Way to Equal’, the recommendation for ‘action strategies’ to redress gender imbalances in senior positions was supported. It’s almost 20 years later, and I can’t see much evidence of things changing.

Maybe people will only see that women are capable of playing the game if they have to pass them the ball. Maybe it’s just going to take a much longer time than we were hoping for. Either way, if women and men could get on board with this, we could all kick a lot more goals.

White Ribbon Day

When it’s dark, I walk down the middle of the road rather than the footpath. It’s something that I’ve done for years, and only recently a male friend of mine who was walking with me asked why. “So I can hear a rapist running towards me,” I replied. He had a bit of a giggle at how dramatic I was being, but I was dead serious.

In a piece by Australian Football League CEO Andrew Demetriou, he remembers an exercise he did at the AFL that highlighted men’s ignorance of violence against women.

A group of men were asked what they did on a daily basis to counter violence and sexual harassment against themselves. He suspected that the answer for most men is nothing – they do nothing, because it rarely if ever happens to them.

But, Demetriou said, ask women what they do and you’ll get a very different response. In fact you’ll get a range of responses because they have to do a range of things. They have to be careful about the way they dress. They have to think about where they walk and what time they go out. They have to think about whether they drive or catch public transport. They even have to think about what they say.

And I do. I think about those things every single day. I’m 22 years old and my parents still pick me up from the train station after dark because they can’t stand the thought of me walking home alone.

Mercifully, I’ve never been a victim of rape. I have been honked at in the street, been yelled at by strangers to “show us your tits”, had a man steal my cardigan and take it into the toilet with him, seen a man expose his penis to me in a pub without my consent, been called a slut and had my buttocks and breasts groped in public places. And I consider myself to be extremely lucky that’s the worst I’ve had to put up with.

One of the best campaigns that I’ve seen highlighting violence against women runs along the lines of: “One in every four women will be sexually abused in her life. Will it be your mother, your sister, your wife or your daughter?”
Today is White Ribbon Day. If you’ve been looking for a good cause to chuck some money at, you can do it here.  But more importantly, think about it yourself.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop walking down the middle of the street at night, because violence against women isn’t only the incidence of brutal beatings or rape.  It’s in our advertisements showing women stripped, bound and humiliated. It’s in our sexist jokes, our high-fiving of boys who sleep around and branding of girls who do it as whores, news reports showing women as victims instead of experts and rating women’s body parts out of 10.

Violence against women is in our culture and our attitude and that’s what has to change.

Liking the abuse

I was furious the first time I heard ‘Love the Way You Lie’ by Eminem and Rhianna. Coming out not long after the pop star was violently abused by then partner Chris Brown, I couldn’t believe that she was prettily singing, “Just gonna stand there and watch me burn, well that’s alright because I like the way it hurts”.

It’s not alright, I seethed. That Rhianna, supporting domestic abuse again. First she doesn’t leave Brown after he beats her up, and now she’s glamourising it? What a terrible role model!

Rihanna after being assaulted by Chris Brown

Psychiatrist Dr Michael J. Gerson agreed with my first reaction when he said, “It chills me to think that young people could easily embrace this song as a model for love and desire. I see abused children, spouses, partners and students carry the emotional scars that punctuate their life stories and define their self-concepts”. Right on!

Just recently though, I caught myself happily singing along to ‘Self-Esteem’ by the Offspring, with its chorus of “I know I’m being used, but that’s okay because I like the abuse”.

I love this song, I thought. It’s hilarious. Then I realised I’d put myself in a very hypocritical position. Why am I so outraged about Rhianna appearing to condone abuse, but I find it amusing when Dexter Holland says exactly the same thing?

The messages behind the songs are very similar – both artists here are commenting on the nature of an abusive relationship by seemingly glorifying it. Holland in ‘Self-Esteem’ is really just as provocative as Rihanna on the issue, singing, “the more you suffer, the more it shows you really care – right?”

When I listen to Rihanna singing that chorus, I hear her saying domestic abuse is okay. When Holland sings ‘Self-Esteem’, I hear a satire of the issue. Then again, I could take Holland more seriously. He had a close friend who was sexually abused when he was in high school, and given that most violence against men goes unreported it could be that Holland is using his position as a celebrity to draw attention to the issue. And who am I to say that Rihanna isn’t doing just the same thing?

Still from the 'Love the Way You Lie' video clip

Maybe both Rihanna and Holland are speaking out against domestic violence. Maybe neither of them are because they’re manufactured celebrities who would just say anything as long as it sells. Rihanna is releasing a sequel to the song in November, and maybe I’ll change my mind again when it comes out.

But as someone who likes to say she believes in equality for men and women, I’m starting to think I shouldn’t have two sets of judgements for the same message.

No

There’s another story about a prominent footballer being involved in a sexual assault case doing the rounds today.

Nothing has been proven yet, but it’s certainly not the first time a footballer has been accused of sexual misconduct.

Spida Everitt has thrown in his own comments by tweeting “Girls!! When will you learn! At 3am when you are blind drunk & you decide to go home with a guy ITS NOT FOR A CUP OF MILO! Allegedly……” It’s this sort of blatant disrespect for women that really makes me angry. For a woman to interpret a man’s flirtatious behaviour in a romantic way and assume he wants a committed relationship with her is seen as inappropriate, so why do some men seem to think being sexually suggestive entitles them to sex?

I think this ad, from a current UK campaign against rape, hits the point home – it shows a woman out shopping for a skirt, trying to decide which one she’ll buy. When the saleswoman asks if she needs any help, she says, “Yeah, I’m going out tonight, and I want to get raped. I need a skirt that will encourage a guy to have sex with me against my will”. The idea that dressing or behaving in a certain manner obliges women to follow through with sexual activity is just ridiculous.

Okay, sometimes circumstances must get confusing for footballers. Yes, they’re young, male and revered as celebrities in Melbourne. Yes, they would regularly have admiring women throw themselves at them. But this is no excuse for forcing women into sexual acts that they’re not comfortable with. Sports clubs – and I’d argue, the rest of the community as well – clearly need more guidance and more respect.

The AFL does have a Respect and Responsibility program that advocates the use of ‘education programs’ across the entire organisation, and a statement from CEO Andrew Demetriou claiming, “we find any form of violence towards women abhorrent… creating safe and supportive environments for women is a shared responsibility”. Trouble is, the policy seems to have been last updated in 2005. Since then there have been numerous allegations that football players have acted inappropriately towards women. Some incidents have reached the media – I’d be willing to bet that a number of them have been hushed up.

I didn’t find anything in the AFL’s report that spoke of a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment of women, which I think would send a much clearer message to players, employees and the wider community.

In a recent blog about violence against women by Sam deBrito, he refused to excuse harassment on any level, writing: “We all choose our actions, no matter how drunk, stoned, depressed or angry we are and to assert otherwise provides abusers with a dangerous escape clause.”

No means no. There isn’t any other excuse.