by Laura Bates
Collectively dealing with the needs of pregnancy and parenthood should be built into the very fabric of our workplaces, businesses and societal ideas about careers, not bolted on as an afterthought. The experience of pregnancy and new parenthood shouldn’t be treated as something shameful that women feel they have to hide in order to be seen as competent. For those who choose to stay in work it should simply be assumed that necessary support during and after pregnancy – such as flexible working hours, shared parental leave and on-site crèches – will be provided. It should be a national scandal that over 50,000 women a year lose their jobs as a result of maternity discrimination.
3. Am I making assumptions about the reasons for a woman’s choices?
Is a mother who returns to work quickly really a selfish career-obsessive? In fact, she might just be passionate about her job, have a partner more readily able to take on childcare or not be able to afford more time off.
Is the woman who chooses to stay at home really a feminist failure, yummy mummy or dropout? Or might she have made a careful decision about what’s right for her and her family? Might she have exercised precisely the kind of choice that feminists want women to have? Might prohibitive childcare costs have made the decision for her?
4. Would I say this to the father?
Worried that sleepless nights, nappy changes and general emotional exhaustion will take their toll on a new mum? They might, to an extent. In much the same way that illness, bad break-ups and family bereavements sometimes take a toll on all of us. But we don’t suggest that people dealing with these problems should be sacked, do we? Sleepless nights are a natural part of life as a new parent. But fathers aren’t deaf to babies’ night-time screams.
They, too, are experiencing major life upheaval and the emotional roller coaster of early parenthood. Why is it that we don’t discuss the impact a new baby will have on a man’s work life?
5. Have I considered the impact that publicly debating this woman’s fitness to work might have on her?
We should be so far beyond the indecency of creating a public ‘debate’ about someone’s career competency on the basis of procreation. What kind of impact might it have on a person to see their work called into question by the comment police when they’re continuing to kick ass in the workplace, even while lugging around the weight of a sack of potatoes, creating a new life and constantly battling the urge to pee?
In Reeves’s case, as for other high-profile figures, the point is particularly pertinent, given the impact such chatter could have on voters’ impressions of her performance.
6. Have I considered the fact that women may experience pregnancy differently?
#NotAllPregnancies wants to prevent women from being able to continue working. If you think pregnancy is by default a completely debilitating condition, check out Olympic athlete Alysia Montaño, who competed in the 800 m while in her third trimester; Amy Poehler, who brought the house down with a rap about Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live while nine months pregnant; and Marissa Mayer, who took over Yahoo while twenty-eight weeks pregnant.
What’s important is that we offer whatever help and support a woman needs, instead of making our own assumptions about what she will or won’t be able to handle.
7. Am I expecting this woman to represent all women?
It is neither Rachel Reeves’s nor any other woman’s responsibility to represent all women in her life choices. We all have different needs and priorities – including single parents, same sex couples and adoptive parents – and different situations.
Choosing to continue working doesn’t ‘denigrate’ or cheapen motherhood. Choosing to leave work to raise children doesn’t fly in the face of feminism or let down other women. Continuing to hold a high-profile political position while pregnant doesn’t fail the country. What does hold women back is acting as if we are a homogenous group, ignoring our right to make our own individual choices and asking stupid questions when we do.
Originally published 13 March 2015
HOW NOT TO TALK TO FEMALE NASA ASTRONAUTS
When Nasa astronaut and comparative physiologist Jessica Meir tweeted about entering the ‘space equivalent zone, where water spontaneously boils’ last week, one man, whose Twitter bio said he had once been to space camp, responded as follows: ‘Wouldn’t say it’s spontaneous. The pressure in the room got below the vapor pressure of the water at room temp. Simple thermo.’
Naturally, Twitter responded magnificently, with other users queuing up to congratulate him on his expertise and asking him to ‘please explain science in more detail to the tweeting astronaut’.
He wasn’t alone. In recent months, there has been a spate of men stepping up to foist their own, less informed perspectives on far more qualified women. At a rally last week, Donald Trump got in on the act. When former aviation operations specialist and US Marine Corps veteran Rachel Fredericks, who suffers from PTSD, asked Trump what action he would take to ‘stop twenty veterans a day from killing themselves’, Trump’s immediate response was: ‘Actually, it’s twenty-two.’ Fredericks was left shaking her head as Trump cited statistics less up-to-date than her own.
This came only a month after astrophysicist Katherine J. Mack tweeted her distress about the damage being caused by climate change, only for a male blogger to suggest: ‘Maybe you should learn some actual SCIENCE then.’ Luckily, Mack had the perfect response: ‘I dunno, man, I already went and got a PhD in astrophysics. Seems like more than that would be overkill at this point.’
But even her excellent retort wasn’t allowed to go unchallenged. The man, not knowing when to quit, delete his Twitter account and reconsider his life choices, replied: ‘Then you should ask for a refund because they failed to teach you the most basics of science.’ When Mack fired back with further proof of her credentials, another male tweeter stepped in to instruct her: ‘Katie, as much as its hilarious, let’s not entertain the trolls.’ Because it would have been too much to let the incredibly intelligent and qualified astrophysicist choose her own method of dealing with the problem.
Women in a wide variety of fields can encounter this problem, as Olympic cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten discovered when she had a serious crash during the women’s road race in Rio. Tweeter Martin Betancourt offered her this generous advice: ‘First lesson in bicycling, keep your bike steady . . . whether fast or slow.’
Being corrected by less qualified men is a phenomenon reported by many women, particularly those with expertise in a male-dominated area. At the Everyday Sexism Project, we’ve heard from an IT worker whose less experienced male colleagues outlined basic computer functions to her in meetings, an engineer who had a man try to explain solar panels to her and a woman who dealt with a customer slowly spelling out her own company policies to her while calling her ‘honey’.
There is a serious underlying issue here. These interactions are the visible manifestation of societal assumptions about women’s inferiority in intellectual and professional situations. They represent the same ingrained stereotypes that lead to women being less frequently promoted or hired for certain jobs. The same issues are at play when women find themselves being spoken over in the workplace, when a client directs every question to a junior male colleague or when a woman makes a suggestion in a meeting and is ignored, only for the same idea to be voiced by a male colleague to loud agreement moments later. It is what writer Soraya Chemaly has described as ‘good old-fashioned sexism expressed in gendered socialization and a default cultural preference for institutionalized male domination of public life’.
However, as Chemaly points out, the way to fix it isn’t simply to suggest that women need to be more assertive, as we are often told. The problem doesn’t spring from hesitant women wringing their hands and dithering until a heroic man rides in and provides an explanation. The aforementioned astronaut, astrophysicist, Marine Corp veteran and Olympic cyclist hardly fit that description.
No, it arises when men are brought up in a world that teaches them
that their knowledge and opinions are worth more than those of a far more qualified woman. It happens when some men act on these ingrained assumptions. And its impact, particularly in the workplace, can go far beyond the initial annoyance. The only way to stop it is to change the narrative that sets up male contributions as superior in the first place, not to ‘train’ women to deal with it later on.
In the meantime, here is a good rule of thumb for overenthusiastic men on Twitter to follow: if she’s wearing a Nasa spacesuit, take a minute to consider whether you really want to tell her how to do her job. Or, as one tweeter put it, ‘This lesson went well, I think. But you should have told her to smile more. Women love that.’
Originally published 13 September 2016
HARASSMENT VS FREE SPEECH VS BANTER
‘Freedom of speech’ is one of the most misused terms in modern discourse, wrongly used to excuse, cover up or defend abuse. Bandied about like a kind of magical shield that defends the user against criticism, argument or reasoned debate, the term is often used inaccurately.
Free speech is not limitless. It doesn’t enshrine anybody’s right to abuse, to incite hatred or to threaten and terrify others. The right to speech is not the same as the right to be heard, to be given a platform or an audience. It isn’t the right to force a woman to listen to and tacitly accept your misogynistic, bigoted slurs or your fantasies about raping or killing her.
Too often, the excuse is used as a carte blanche for social media platforms to shrug their shoulders and pretend their hands are tied. In reality, laws about freedom of speech don’t apply on a private platform like Twitter or Facebook. Such companies can and do decide which content to allow and disallow, and seem to have little difficulty policing posts about breastfeeding, mastectomies and menstruation. So there should be similar action taken against the small number of people who use these platforms to terrorize and abuse others or, as charities such as Women’s Aid have warned, in a worryingly increasing number of cases, to extend behaviours such as stalking and domestic violence.
Sadly, social media platforms’ policies seem to be fluid and evasive, with many moderation decisions suddenly reversed after a particular story hits the headlines or causes a public outcry. Strange, considering how often it is implied these decisions have been made for grand ethical reasons like ‘freedom of speech’, that they can be so quickly changed when the risk of reputational damage arises. This is particularly problematic because the nature and demographics of mainstream media outlets mean that the stories picked up and thrust into the limelight most frequently feature attractive, white, privileged women. So women of colour and LGBTQIA social media users, already likely to receive worse abuse and be bombarded with multiple forms of online prejudice, find themselves less likely to see their cases elevated to public attention and therefore speedily or satisfactorily resolved.
Nor should ‘freedom of speech’ only apply to those whose speech we actually hear. We ought to consider, too, the lost sound of those who don’t speak at all, because their voices are drowned out by the angry shouting of those demanding their own right to be heard. The teenage girls who disappear from social networks because it’s not worth the abuse. The activists who become too tired of putting their head above the parapet. The non-binary folk and people of colour for whom certain kinds of speech, especially online, might result in physical danger too great to risk. Next time you hear someone bellowing about ‘free speech’, ask whose speech we actually get to hear and why.
ONLINE ABUSE AGAINST WOMEN: ‘FREE SPEECH’ IS NO JUSTIFICATION
Just over a month ago, while doing research for a book about sexism, I opened an internet browser, typed ‘chat rooms for kids’ into Google and clicked on one of the first links that appeared. There was no registration process, no age check – I just typed in a made-up username, and immediately chat windows started appearing on my screen. Within seconds I had over ten messages, almost every one of them reading: ‘ASL?’ I wrote back: ‘What is ASL?’ The answer came quickly: ‘Age. Sex. Location.’ I replied, claiming to be a 12-year-old girl from the US. The responses were immediate:
‘Do you like sex?’
‘Can I teach you?’
‘Bra size?’
‘Do you want to earn some extra pocket money?’
‘Can I cu?’
While I hesitated, the messages quickly intensified: ‘My dick is long and hard’ . . . ‘I am so horny’ . . . ‘My wet dripping dick’. I closed the windows. The whole thing took less than three minutes.
In the course of my work around violence against women and the forms it takes online, I’ve learned that it can get far more complicated – one expert recently told me about scenarios where men have sent messages to girls in chat rooms claiming to have uploaded a virus on to their computer . . . but they’ll delete it on the condition of a video chat . . . if the girl does what she’s told.
This week a Dutch children’s charity carried out a very similar experiment on a much larger scale, using a computer-generated 10-year-old girl they named Sweetie. The results were chillingly similar, with 20,000 men contacting Sweetie over two months and 1,000 offering to pay her to carry out sex acts on a webcam. But the reaction of law enforcement agencies to the revelations has been notably muted – though the UK’s National Crime Agency has agreed to look at the information passed on by the charity, a spokesperson for European policing agency Europol told Reuters: ‘We believe that criminal investigations using intrusive surveillance measures should be the exclusive responsibility of law enforcement agencies.’ No promise of more concrete action has yet been forthcoming. This has only confirmed what we already knew – when it comes to online abuse, women and girls are on their own.
The internet is a fertile breeding ground for misogyny – you only have to look at the murky bottom waters of Reddit and 4Chan to see the true extent to which it allows violent attitudes towards women to proliferate. But, crucially, it also provides a conduit that enables many who hold those views to attack and abuse women and girls from what they rightly perceive to be an incredibly secure position. Meanwhile, the police seem near-powerless to take action, social media sites shrug their shoulders and women are left between a rock and a hard place – simply put up with the abuse as a part of online life, or get off the internet altogether.
These are not just nasty comments or harsh criticisms – they are extreme, detailed and vitriolic threats of rape, torture and death. I have received messages detailing exactly how I should be disembowelled, which weapons could be used to kill me and which parts of my body should be raped. When I ignored the threats, they intensified and proliferated, finding out information about my family members and threatening to rape them instead. They are the kind of messages that race around your head at night when you try to sleep, no matter how much you wrote them off as empty scare-mongering during the day. They make you hesitate to post online and change the way you use social media. And nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Of the three rape threats I reported to police in recent months, two cases have already been dropped because the police are unable to trace the perpetrators. When I went to the police last year with a pile of abusive messages, including rape and death threats, they said they were unable to trace the perpetrators, even though I was able to provide IP addresses. When I showed them a specific website where users were being encouraged to send me abuse and threats, the police said it was US-registered and therefore outside their jurisdiction.
Just like Sweetie and any other young girls her age venturing into shared online spaces, the answer seems to be an ambivalent shrug – this is just what happens to women online so you might as well get used to it. And woe betide you if you try to protest the apparent unfairness of that, because didn’t you know that you are threatening free speech? Except that it’s not a threat to free speech to suggest that once people have actually committed a crime (like threatening to rape or murder somebody, or trying to coerce a little girl into carrying out sex acts), they should be b
rought to justice for it. Threatening to rape somebody online is just as illegal as it is in a letter, or in person. Nobody is suggesting that the entirety of Reddit or 4Chan should be shut down, objectionable as some parts of them are.
But it’s also telling that in all this hand-wringing over free speech, nobody is talking about the free speech of the women and girls who, as long as this continues to go unacknowledged and unresolved, are effectively being driven out of online spaces altogether.
Originally published 8 November 2013
EIGHT THINGS NOT TO SAY TO SOMEONE FACING ONLINE ABUSE
The only thing nearly as demoralizing and frustrating as being bombarded with online abuse is listening to the things people repeatedly tell you when they find out you’re experiencing online abuse. It’s the reason that when The Guardian recently published its research into the tone and content of 70 million comments on its articles – and the methodology used – I couldn’t bring myself to read the responses ‘below the line’.
Sometimes, it’s well-meaning – when people reassure you that there’s no real risk, for example, they’re trying to make you feel more secure. But at its worst, the way in which we respond to those experiencing online harassment risks normalizing it, isolating them further or implicitly blaming them for the abuse. Here are some of the most common responses I’ve heard:
1. I hate it when people disagree with me, too
Online abuse is not an intellectual squabble. In fact, it’s marked by a total failure to engage with your argument. It’s often characterized by personal attacks, sexual comments, racism, homophobia or transphobia and threats of physical violence or rape – none of which have anything to do with disagreement.