Women Being Bullied in the Office
Article by Jonathan Weimers
Women’s month has come and gone and has been a wonderful time to highlight key issues concerning women in the world, especially closer to home, in the South African context.
These key issues pertain to things such as gender based violence (which poses an ongoing threat to women in South Africa), rape culture, women’s physical and mental health and so many more things that women face on a societal level.
From a women in the workplace perspective, key issues that may have come up would be the gender pay comparison, women in leadership and the “glass ceiling” for women; all reflected in stats and figures publicly available and pulled together by the Department of Labour and StatsSA.
For example, in the 19th CEE Annual Report by the Department of Labour, the percentage of females in the private sector at top management level is 22%. Considering how many female graduates with excellent qualifications are produced annually and the sheer numbers of women in corporate South Africa, how is this the case?
Thankfully, these are topics that are receiving more and more attention, scrutiny and action. However, there is something that may not necessarily receive the amount of attention that it should. This issue pertains to the bullying of women in the workplace. I specifically wanted to address this topic because I’ve witnessed first hand women being targeted for things such as how they dress or how much they weigh and I think that the more we talk about it, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, the more we can understand this issue and the better we might be at coming up with a solution.
I’m going to highlight two ways I have seen professional women bullied in the workplace and then speak a little about the context that might cause this.
1. “Gossip Groups”I have seen highly productive, competent women being the victims of what I am going to call “Gossip Groups” which are groups of women (and sometimes men) who gang up on a target by openly spreading rumours and embarrassing or humiliating their target. Women are targeted for reasons such as how they are dressed or their weight. These gossip groups openly belittle, mock and say degrading things about the targeted woman in an attempt to reduce her confidence and composure.
2. Authority FiguresAnother way in which women are bullied is evident through scenarios where an older woman in a position of authority will harshly chastise younger women in the workplace about their appearance. A shirt untucked, for example, seems to be a major offense if done by a woman yet men are not getting anywhere near the same level of chastising for the same thing (if any at all). Like with the Gossip Groups, I have seen these done openly in very public ways to put down the woman on the receiving end and elevate the woman doing the judging.
The dynamic of this being a person in a position of authority creates an uneven power relationship where the women being picked on have almost no opportunity to speak up as there could be consequences for that person’s job and working environment if they do. The result is bullying and no real opportunity to oppose it.
ContextWomen are also often fighting an uphill battle where they often need to prove their competence twice as much as men. Women also tend to be dismissed harder than men if a senior manager does not approve of their work or agree with their approach or stance. This is again something I have seen too much of in the workplace.
Often these behaviours are perpetrated by women toward women. We see waves and waves of women empowering each other, but there’s still a widespread element of women demeaning each other. In a world where women are already battling patriarchy and all that comes with it, why do we still see such widespread girl-on-girl offences?
One explanation for this could relate to internalised sexism. Internalised sexism is basically sexist behaviours and attitudes enacted by women toward themselves or to other women. One type of internalised sexism is internalised misogyny. Women who experience internalised misogyny may express it through minimizing the value of women, distrusting women, and believing gender bias in favour of men. Women, after observing societal beliefs which demean the value and skills of women repeatedly, eventually internalise those misogynistic beliefs and apply them to themselves and other women. More often than not this is all done unconsciously, so maybe one way to combat this is to make people more aware of these kinds of things and make people more aware of this very large societal issue that make us form unconscious biases that tend to disadvantage women especially.
I’m not pretending to have any solutions to this problem and I’m also not pretending to be any sort of authority on the topic, but if we want to empower women, we also have to be brave enough to speak out against women being bullied, even if it is by other women.
