by Emilie Pine
I thought about this question when a student came to my office to ask about the end-of-term essay for my course. We had a lively conversation about the module and her ideas. She was smart and insightful and articulate. Yet in eight weeks I’d never heard her express an opinion during a seminar. ‘Would you make these points next week in class?’ I asked her. She mutely shook her head. ‘You’re really good,’ I said. She looked surprised. And my heart sank. I knew this young woman was being quiet for a very particular reason: she is a girl and girls are taught to be quiet, taught that they are not good enough to be heard. The exceptional ones who risk saying something – anything – also risk being perceived as brash or arrogant. They were not born with these fears. They were not born feeling inferior. They were taught it. I know this because I was also taught it.
When I was twelve, I took entrance exams for a local school and I was awarded a scholarship. But when my mum read the school prospectus in detail, she realised that female pupils had to take a compulsory home economics course, whereas male pupils got extra maths lessons. The option for extra maths was not open to girls at all. My mother was unimpressed, so I did not go to that school. But the school I did end up going to discriminated against girls too. At the end of first year, weirdly, I scored 99% in two exams. Precociously, I asked both teachers what I had lost the 1% for. In each case, the teacher paused before answering. Then each said, as if scripted, that another pupil had done equally well but that only one of us could get 100%. They did not specify why I was not the ‘one’ but, in both cases, the other pupil was a boy. I got the message.
And in my job now I see the results of that message week after week, in class after class. Female students are so much more reticent than male students, because they are so much more likely to underestimate the worth of their contribution. At least, they usually are. That young woman, the quiet one with all the great ideas, was back in my class the following week. I began the discussion by asking the group for their general opinions on the play – had they liked it? There was a pause. Then she answered. She spoke once in that seminar, then two or three times in each seminar after that. And I admired her so much. Not because speaking out is hard. But because she was afraid and she did it anyway.
I WORK IN A PROFESSION still very much dominated at the top by men. I myself have never been refused promotion, or sexually harassed at work, so in the main I’m doing fine. But the fact that the absence of these things makes me feel fortunate tells its own story. And the other side of that story is just how often I encounter casual sexism, which for all its superficiality, can be bruising. I have been talked down to and talked over and sometimes just ignored, all because I am female. I have been shouted at in meetings by senior male colleagues who rely on me not speaking back because I am junior and female. I have been called a ‘feminazi’. Faced with these kinds of situations, what do other women do? What swift mental calculations do they perform? Do they challenge the shouting man? Do they laugh along at the sexist joke? Or do they, like me, side-step?
It was a photographer who called me a ‘feminazi’. He was taking shots at a conference and directed me to cosy up to two male colleagues. When I hesitated, he let the insult fly. Beside me, the men laughed, nervously. Had either of them said anything, he would have been a feminist hero. If I’d said anything, I would have been a bitch. Though it was a man who had made the situation hostile, I was the woman, so I was expected to smooth it over, to smile for the camera, to be silent. And, heart-sinkingly, that’s what I did.
Usually sexist comments in the workplace don’t involve references to genocide, and this can make them easier to live with but also easier to miss. I have lost count of the number of times men, both older and younger than me, have told me that I look young. They act like it’s a compliment, but it is so not a compliment. Women are meant to be flattered by being told we look young because, for a woman, looks are the most important thing, and youth is the best look of all. But in informing me that I look youthful, or that I don’t understand because I’m too naive, or asking me if I’m a student when I am clearly a tenured lecturer, these men strip from me more than a decade of professional experience and expertise. The so-called compliment is, in fact, an instant demotion.
If you are female, if you are young, if you are subordinate, you do not have to be listened to. I only appreciated this fully late last year when I travelled overseas to give a guest lecture at another university. It was not a particularly cheerful lecture. I discussed several plays in which women testify about their experience of being raped. I talked about the difficulties that women have in speaking publicly about rape, and the taboos against women speaking publicly at all within certain cultures. I said that theatres are important spaces for women to find their voices and share their stories. After I finished there was a brief silence. Sometimes I forget, when I get passionate about a subject, that even in an academic context the word ‘rape’ is rarely heard. I said I was happy to take questions.
The first comment came from a man who had earlier been introduced to me as the Chair of the Faculty. Starting slowly, he shook his head, and said that he wasn’t sure how to respond. I’m used to this – when it comes to this difficult subject matter, I’m not always sure how to respond myself. I smiled to put him at his ease. Then he said, ‘I find it hard to reconcile how you look and your manner with your subject matter. I mean you look … I don’t want to use the word “cute” but …’ He trailed off. He waved his hands towards me. Though he went on to ask a question, which I dutifully answered, he had set the tone for the discussion that followed. I was not to be taken seriously. Later that evening I described the event to a friend. Then, as an afterthought, I recalled the Faculty Chair. ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘this guy said the weirdest thing, he called me “cute.”’ My friend shuddered. And it was only then that I admitted to myself how angry I was at being judged on what I looked like, not on what I said. But then, as my anger died, a new emotion replaced it: shame. I had not objected.
The stinging irony, of course, was that my entire talk was about the ways that women are intimidated into silence. And here I was, with a platform to speak, finding myself with the same difficulty. The Faculty Chair’s comment implied that I shouldn’t be talking about rape. It is more than just tedious, this women-should-be-seen-but-not-heard attitude. It is a way of telling women to get back to where they belong, back to being silent. I am gobsmacked that I still encounter this attitude in the university. And I am, most of all, weary of having to come up with something in response. I should have laughed outright at the Faculty Chairman. I should have called him on his misogyny. But in the moment that he said it, I did not even allow myself to think about the implications of his comment. I wanted to look professional. I wanted to seem strong. I wanted to move on. And so I side-stepped. Which is, of course, a kind of silence.
It’s funny to describe myself as silent because I’m actually pretty loud. I get asked to make announcements at events because I can be heard above the din. A friend of mine once told me I barely needed a mobile phone because I could just shout and be heard from miles away. And I’m loud in other ways too. I speak up at meetings, I contribute to discussions, and hey, get this, my job as a lecturer means that I talk for a living. But you can be silent and loud at the same time, it turns out.
Though I have no fear of speaking publicly, or of being perceived as ambitious, both of which are classic stumbling blocks for professional women, I am prey to an equally treacherous problem: I give away my power. In side-stepping, in not calling out the sexist remarks, I act as if they are in the right, I act as if women should not have voices, and I act as if I am not a feminist. And the truth is, I am tired of being a feminist. I am tired of it being women’s responsibility to identify and tackle and fix sexism. I am tired of it being so necessary and so difficult. And I am tired of my own acts of internalising, tired of my complicity, tired of playing the game.
LET ME TAKE ANOTHER SIDEWAYS STEP HERE and tell you something I
learned about myself this past year or so. Are you ready? I don’t care about your feelings. I don’t even know you, but I don’t care how you’re feeling, what you’re feeling, even if you have feelings at all. Why? Because, apparently, I lack empathy.
This may not come as a surprise to some but it came as one to me. It started after I did a test at work about empathetic listening and got alarming results. I did a different test. But the results were still terrible. So then I signed up for one-to-one personality testing. I sat in a small room with a HR consultant and a pile of flash cards. She asked me to imagine a series of scenarios and respond. If someone, say, told me their house was broken into, would I commiserate, make them a cup of tea, ask them how it happened, or advise them on locksmiths? Obviously, I said, the correct thing is to give them the number of a locksmith. ‘Hmm,’ she said. Time after time, I gave the non-empathetic answer. At the end of the session, the HR consultant told me that I have an admirable approach – I try to solve problems, ask logical questions, ascertain the facts. But I do not, she broke it gently, have empathy. ‘Well, of course not,’ I said defensively, ‘I’m at work. I’m not meant to be empathetic at work.’
The consultant smiled, in a practised, non-judgemental way, and asked me why I thought feelings had no place at work. She said vulnerability could be a kind of strength. I felt a hurricane in my brain. I was remembering a few years ago when I had desperately wanted to share my feelings at work, but had silenced myself.
I had been asked to present during my department’s research day, to talk about my current work. I didn’t think I should give a presentation, because I hadn’t done anything spectacular, but the organiser said people would be interested, and he reiterated the request. So I said yes. I regretted saying yes in the lead-up to speaking. I regretted it during, and afterwards too. I regretted it because even though the project I was working on was good, I was a mess. It was nearly Christmas. I had recently moved house. I had unrelenting insomnia. And I had just had a miscarriage. I’d told no one at work about the pregnancy, save my boss. I was tired and I was numb. So I gave a vague and unimpressive talk, extolling the benefits of ‘putting our research out there’. But all I really wanted to say was that I felt sad.
I see now that saying I felt sad would have been a worthwhile contribution. Not because my sadness warranted attention, but because, though we were all close colleagues, none of us was discussing the emotions we bring to our jobs, and the emotions we generate through our work. Instead we were busy impressing each other with our professionalism and our ambitions and our achievements. And looking back, I think that was dishonest. Yes, it might have been weird for me to say I felt sad – and that’s precisely why I didn’t do it – but it might also have enabled us to talk about how teaching and research can give us something else, different emotions, can make us feel capable, valuable, and meaningful. That range of feeling was worth claiming, worth talking about. But I didn’t claim it, and I didn’t talk about it, for one reason. Because to say I felt sad would have been dangerously feminine.
When I examine my antipathy to emotion at work, I realise that I think feelings – having them, showing them, talking about them – are not just a sign of femininity, but a sign of weakness. I have internalised the idea that to be taken seriously as an intellectual, I have to deny all those feelings, all that femininity, all that weakness. I think this in spite of myself, and in spite of my feminism – and all the women on my reading lists, and all the women-forward events I organise, and all my research on women speaking out, and all my criticism of ‘manels’, and all the posters on my office door advertising marches for reproductive rights. Because, it turns out, I am sexist too.
This lesson was driven home to me during a recent leadership course aimed at women working at universities in Ireland. We all met one February morning in an overheated basement conference room, to learn how to ‘get ahead’. One of the first exercises was for each participant to identify a role model. I thought about who I would pick, and what my choice would mean for the kind of person I wanted to be. I picked a female professor whose work I admire hugely and who is a great public intellectual and speaker. But in the next part of the task, discussing our role models within our small groups, I was amazed, as the discussion moved around the table, that the majority of women in my group had chosen their mothers. Their reasons all centred on the fortitude, moral strength, and selflessness of these women – they were the heroic qualities they wanted to emulate. I was angry about all these mothers. All I could think was that here we were at a professional event, aimed at helping women break down barriers in their career paths and yet all these women were saying they wanted to be like their mums. No wonder you can’t get promoted, I thought, meanly, if your role model stayed home.
Here’s the thing: my mother worked long hours out of the home. She taught me that the most important thing for a woman is to be financially independent. She taught me that women should be ambitious and take pride in their work. She taught me that work comes first and the domestic, with all its feelings, comes second. All these lessons conditioned me to think of working as the brave and necessary journey that women must take. So, ironically, I could have claimed my mother as my role model. But I would never have said ‘my mum’ when they asked about role models, because I couldn’t have put motherhood at the top of the hierarchy of achievements. Because the qualities I generally associate with motherhood – love and support, empathy and nurturing – are not those I associate with being successful at work. And there’s that internalised sexism again.
I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO BE LIKED. In this, I am no different to other women. Women want to be likeable. Women are supposed to be likeable. Women are judged when they are not likeable enough. But being likeable, for all its social desirability, held us back at work. We ended up so busy doing all the pastoral care, and all the boring paperwork, and all the millions of unwanted jobs, that we never seemed to have time to ask for recognition. And, if we did ask, we were held back again. We were told we should be less kind-hearted, less compromising, less nice. After all, nice girls don’t get the corner office. Men got promoted ahead of women because they, of course, were bold, daring, uncompromising; all those coded ways of saying that men didn’t need to bother about being likeable because they were too busy being powerful.
The ways things are now, though, everyone needs to be likeable, because these days the career ladder – for men as well as women – is indistinguishable from the esteem ladder, the how-much-your-employer-likes-you ladder. This ladder is hard to climb because the likeability goalposts keep moving. At my university, sometimes they want you to publish more. Sometimes they want you to teach more. Sometimes they want you to do more admin. If you want to be really liked, it’s all three. And, just as with all that niceness, there’s a hitch to all this likeability. The more we do, the more we are esteemed. But then the more we do, the more they want us to do. And then the more they want us ‘to improve performance and deliver success’. And ultimately, in a cash-strapped, do-more-with-less university, success means bringing in money.
I receive two emails a week on applying for funding. Two emails, that’s easy to ignore, right? But then there’s the third email. The weekly President’s Bulletin, which includes a list of all the people in the university who have been awarded external funding. This is how we all get the message. Yay for the overworkers! Yay for the financially successful few! Boo for the rest! I could try to shake it off, I could find other markers of esteem. But I want to be liked. So when I realised that only money got you really liked, I started to read the funding emails and I clicked on the links and I rethought the potential of my research to deliver grant cheques. And when I got a project funded I celebrated, because here was proof – I was likeable.
But this is not a humble brag, it is an instructive fable. When I applied for funding three years ago, I did not understand that I was, effectively, also applying for a new job. With the award came the responsibility to lead a project tea
m, to manage a budget of hundreds of thousands of euro, to produce ‘high-impact outputs’. I was not trained for this, but I rationalised, ‘I’m tough, I can rise to the challenge.’ Still, although the funding bought me out of teaching, I did not relinquish any of my other responsibilities. So now I had two jobs. And then I said yes to even more. I took on the editorship of a journal. I bargained my way into writing two books under contract, ignoring the fact that the due dates for both were in the same month. I signed up for international conferences. I organised three conferences myself. I travelled so much that I actually started to collect air miles. And I smiled when friends and colleagues asked me if I ever slept, because this – this – was what success looked like. But really, it was what being a workaholic looked like.
Why did I become a workaholic? The expectations for overwork were certainly management’s. But that can’t be the only reason. Because the expectations for perfection were mine. When I could not get pregnant again after my miscarriage, I told myself that I had failed at having children. I said it over and over, as if conception were an exam that I could have studied harder for. Unable to be a mother, I decided that I would define myself through my job instead. I can see in hindsight that this was a mistake, as instead of grieving I threw myself more and more into my work. But even in hindsight I can’t work out why it went quite so wrong, why trying to be good at my job led me to be so unkind to myself.