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LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE IQ Episode 13 | Are we seeing a new gender equality revolution?
00:38:09
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to lseiq, a podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where we ask leading social scientists and other experts to answer an intelligent question about economics, politics, or society. Harvey Weinstein, MeToo the gender pay gap, the President's Club dinner, the Oxheim sexual exploitation scandal. Gender politics has dominated the news over the past year. It has been pivotal in highlighting the obstacles that women still encounter in, in both their personal and professional lives. But will this new focus truly bring about change for women? Or is it just another false start? In this episode of lseiq, Joanna Bell asked, are we seeing a new gender equality revolution?
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B
Okay, let's take a very quick look at the top 100 companies in the London Stock Exchange in 2016. Top 100 companies. How many women running them?
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A
Seven.
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B
Okay, seven is all right, I suppose, until you realize that 17 are run by men called John. There are more men called John running FTSE 100 companies than there are women. There are 14 run by men called Dave. Now, I'm sure Dave and John doing a bang up job. Okay, why does it matter? Well, it's that pesky business of the gender pay gap.
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C
Okay?
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B
Nowhere in the world do women earn the same as men. And that is never going to change unless we have more women at the top in the boardroom with plenty of laws. The Equal Pay act in Britain was passed in 1960. Nevertheless, there are still many, many women who from early November until the end of the year, by comparison to their male colleagues, are effectively working for free. In fact, the World Economic Forum estimates that women will finally get equal pay in 2133.
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A
Yeah.
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B
That'S a terrible figure. And here's the thing. The day before I came out to give my talk, the World Economic Forum revised it. So that's good, right? Because That's a terrible 2133. Do you know what they revised it to? 2186. Yeah. Another 53 years. Okay. We are not going to get equal pay in my grandchildren's grandchildren's lives under the current state. And I have waited long enough. I've waited long enough in my own business. In 2016, I became the very first woman on British television to host a primetime panel show. Isn't that great? Wonderful. I'm thrilled. But 2016, the first television's been around for 80 years. Okay, so maybe television's not so important, but it's kind of symptomatic, isn't it?
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D
That was the broadcaster, writer and comedian Sandy ToxFig giving a Ted Talk in 2016 as she told the story of how she helped start a new political party in Britain, the Women's Equality Party, with the express purpose of campaigning for gender equality. Since then, issues of gender, feminism and sexual politics have taken centre stage around the world, fuelled by the MeToo movement on social media. Global consciousness was well and truly raised after millions of women shared their stories of sexual violence and harassment following revelations about the disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein. The Time's up movement followed with a focus on policy change and practical support. Its co founder, Reese Witherspoon, reported recently that it raised $20 million in 10 days and has so far helped 1,500 women with harassment suits against their employers. I asked Professor Beverly Skeggs, a leading feminist, sociologist and academic director of the Atlantic fellows program at LSE's International Inequalities Institute, why she thinks MeToo has had such an impact.
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E
Because of the sheer scale of it. And I mean, almost paradoxically, the women who've been involved are irresistible to tabloid journalism and mainstream media. So they do want to cover and pay attention to these cases because they are kind of almost tabloid type cases, which is both horrible, but actually enables the campaign to get a presence, a global presence. So I think it's the global scale. I also think it's the fact that it's so many different industries, you know, from Hollywood, media, charities, education, everything. Really everything. You know, everywhere we work, every workplace we inhabit, it's like, yeah, it's exposed it.
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D
I mean, you've studied inequality in terms of social media and traditional media. Do you think obviously the social media is a big angle as well?
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E
Yeah, I think social media is absolutely key to this. Again, it's never straightforward for both good and bad reasons. So as we saw with the Caroline Criado Perez case, it's like it has very, very horrific social media effects.
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D
Caroline Criardo Perez is the feminist activist and writer who successfully campaigned to have Jane Austen feature on 10 pound notes and for a statue of the suffragette Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square. These campaigns prompted an avalanche of misogynistic abuse on Twitter, including threats of rape and murder.
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E
You know, all the hatred is unearthed, but that also means the hatred almost keeps the campaign alive.
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F
So.
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E
So it has a very, very contradictory effect that isn't. I mean, it's horrific for Caroline, who's experiencing it, and for all the other people who experience hate, and we all do, it's horrific. But it also keeps the item on the news, and that's really, really, really important, or keeps the item on the agenda for Me the really critical thing is the way institutions cannot deny what's going on. And so they instigate a form of accountability to protect themselves. And so what we see is a lot of the energy going into attempts to stop reputational damage. But actually what it does is keep the campaign connected, keep the personal connected to the political, keep the personal connected to institutions, keep the personal experience connected to the huge scale of sexual harassment that goes on.
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D
Winnie Lee is an award winning author and activist who is researching social media and rape for an LSE PhD in the Department of Media and Communications. Her recently published novel Dark Chapter is a fictionalized account of events surrounding her real life rape by a stranger as she went for a walk on a bright afternoon in a Belfast park while attending a conference. Before that life changing incident, she had been enjoying a successful career as a film producer. Working in the film industry. Were you aware of the kind of macho sexual harassment that goes on? The Harvey Weinsteins and other sort of big names that were quite clearly exploiting women and assaulting women and even raping women. Was that something that you were experiencing, aware of or heard rumors about?
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C
Yeah, I mean I was certainly aware of that macho culture. I mean I'd never myself experienced any outright intimidation and I wasn't myself aware of specific cases of I suppose, rape that had happened. I mean I'd met Harvey Weinstein at the pre Oscar party but it was completely, you know, he just said hi, welcome to my party and then moved on. Right. So it was pretty much a non event for me, but for the most part, yeah. I mean that culture is pervasive in that industry and lots of other industries. And I mean we're talking about an industry where I mean it's like 90% of directors are men. Right. And which begs the question, okay, why is that even the case? You know, it's very much an industry where to get into positions that you want, you have to really be pushing yourself and promoting yourself and you have the self confidence to think, yeah, like my artistic vision is valid and I deserve to be a director. And I think, you know, men and boys are more socialized to have that confidence in women. And also, you know, so I ran into a number of situations where I would be working with male directors. I did work with one or two female directors, but predominantly it was male directors. And you know, just I would be reading scripts where the representation of women was just so objectifying and they weren't ever given a personality or anything interesting to see. Say there's a lot of on screen objectification of women. I certainly had to cast page three models for a few different roles where that involved bringing up the agent of the Page 3 model and saying, we're looking for a girl who kind of fits this description and what is her breast size? Right. And that was stuff I was having to do kind of just as my job. And yeah, certainly I was propositioned loads of times because it's an industry where there's a lot of. I mean, even, I mean, I wasn't even trying to be an actor, right? I was a producer, so I was behind the scenes. So it's probably even worse for people who are trying to be actors. But, you know, if you're, if you're not young actress, you're quite likely very good looking and, you know, very young. And then you're in these situations where potentially to get the role that you want, you're in an audition room where there's, there's lots of older men and not even audition rooms. You then end up at parties where there's lots of older men. There's alcohol, there's, there's all these kinds of factors that lead you to think, okay, if I really want to succeed in this industry, if I want that part, then I need to be friendly to these people that have all the power, right? Which are inevitably men. So I didn't obviously have to deal with that because I wasn't trying to get an acting part or anything like that. But certainly as an intern and then as an assistant, I was always having to kind of cater towards the demands of male directors. I mean, that never got personally dangerous for me. But like, certainly at the Cannes Film Festival, I was propositioned loads of times by much older male film executives I had just met. And there was just a sense that, like, oh, no, that's okay. Because this is all, this is all in the guise of an industry where, you know, we party and that's how we make our connections and that's how you can maybe get, you know, into the good graces of someone that could finance your next film or into the good graces of a film distributor who's looking for interesting content and they might be helpful to you. So, you know, I never really gave in to any of those propositions, but it was just, it was pervasive. I think as any woman working in the film industry, that behavior is pervasive and it's annoying. And that's one of the reasons I never went back in after my own assault, because I was just like, I don't want to have to deal with such a misogynistic industry where, you know, men for some reason have all this power. But it's not like they're necessarily that much more talented than women, certainly as film directors. And it's not necessarily like men are working hard or anything. They just happen to get the opportunities because it's a culture where those opportunities come more easily to men.
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D
Jennifer Brown is a visiting professor of criminology and co director of the Mannheim center for Criminology at lse. She is an expert on workplace sexual harassment in the British police. She told me how her research has given her a unique insight into how attitudes to women in the workplace have barely changed over the last 30 years. So Jennifer, you're a forensic psychologist. Tell me about your research into sexual harassment in the police force. I mean, it's quite a macho male dominated environment, so I imagine it was quite interesting and there was quite a lot of data there to analyze.
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F
Yeah. I first went to work for the police in 1985. I have to say my first day was a bit of a shock to the system. Having come from a university environment to see kind of Pirelli calendars on the wall and being shouted at because I'd parked in the wrong place wasn't exactly the most warm of welcomes. And I was shown around by a woman sergeant and I did say, don't you mind seeing all this stuff and hearing these comments? Because she was a very young, attractive woman and even though she was showing a visit around and they didn't really know who I was, made these kind of quite overt sexist comments. And she said what? And I got the impression she didn't notice it anymore because it was all part of the ambient environment, the wallpaper, the that she just accepted as the world in which she worked. So it took me a few years. I have to say. It was probably in 1990 that I decided I wanted to do a survey of sexual harassment. And it was on the back of really a lot of work that had gone on in Europe about recognising sexual harassment as a problem. So if you like, alongside the women's movement and recognising sexual violence, sexual violation in the workplace in the form of sexual harassment was coming to the fore. And so I did that first survey in the 1990s which profoundly shocked the police service because they were terribly complacent. We'd had the Sex Discrimination act in 75. They were obligated to integrate men and women into a unitary service because prior to that There'd been a separate police women's department and they had done nothing to actually facilitate that transition. So I had done a seminar at Bram's Hill, the then police college, to a group of very senior officers and I remember vividly a lawyer who also gave a presentation saying, well, gentlemen, and I used the agenda advisedly because at that time there were no senior police chief officers. All I can say is, if half of this has just been described by Jennifer has gone on, then just get your checkbooks out because you have no defence, no defence in law at all. Sexual harassment is illegal. So fast forward to the present day. I've just completed a survey of the civilian staff who work in the police and I'm finding similar levels of sexual harassment.
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D
So nothing's changed.
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F
So things have changed. I mean, in the sense that there have been attempts to introduce grievance procedures to become more aware and certainly the hmic, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, have done a number of reviews over the years and yes, so there is a greater level of awareness. There are processes and procedures, but many of the old hindrances, women are very nervous about coming forward because it's career limiting. They feel very intimidated. So the number of people who actually make formal use of the available grievance processes is miniscule.
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D
Do you think that's a typical workplace, then? Or is there something peculiar about the police?
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F
I think it's more general, I think, across the workforce. I mean, there have been recent surveys by the TUC which suggest something like half the women in the workplace are experiencing some form of sexual harassment, but the levels of reporting are still quite low. I think in part that's due to. Firstly, as I had found when I first went to work for the police, women enter the workplace and accept the environment in which they find. So we now know more of this is going on in the media, certainly in the hazards of Parliament. So the degree to which you can challenge the prevailing culture is terribly difficult. And labeling it as sexual harassment is also difficult. The mechanisms are still quite difficult to access and it puts your life on hold. If you make a formal complaint, then the wheels grind exceeding slow. It's an incredibly divisive issue. So you will find half your workmates applaud you and support you, and the other half deride you for being disloyal and bringing the particular organisation into disrepute.
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D
Critics of MeToo say it's wrong to conflate mild sexual harassment with serious sexual violence. I asked Winnie Lee, as a rape survivor, if she agreed she references Johnny, the character in her book, who is based on her real life attacker.
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C
And Obviously, you know, MeToo wasn't just for direct, you know, sexual violence and sexual assault. It was also forms of sexual misconduct. And it has gotten some criticism because, you know, I've spoken to rape survivors who say, like, well, I find it insulting that a woman who, you know, was tapped, you know, maybe on her hip by a Boss is using MeToo when I've been raped at gunpoint. Right. And I could see that under. I could see that argument. But I think we also need to understand that we're operating in a spectrum of different kinds of misogynistic behavior. So. And it's a spectrum that works both ways. So again, like I said with Johnny and my real life perpetrator, you know, he probably just didn't start by violently raping a woman. Me, he, I mean, he'd even said to me during the assault there were other women, but most likely for that behavior to have evolved, he would have actually developed different forms of misogynistic behavior and not been called out. So on the perpetrator point of view, sorry, from the perpetrator's perspective, certainly there's a spectrum of if you start by making comments to a woman and then touching her here and there and you never get called out on, maybe there's a sense that you can come to push further and maybe that might lead to other forms of assault. So I think if behavior isn't being called out, if it's not being held accountable, then that enables worse behavior to happen. Right. And then from the, I guess if you want to say victim, from the victim perspective, you know, I wasn't just the victim of, you know, that one rape. I mean, I don't know if I use the word victim in terms of the other stuff I've experienced, but I've certainly been on the receiving end of other forms of misogyny. The constant propositions when I was working in the film industry, other scenarios where, you know, it was an outright violence, but there was a sense of coercion. And I think most women have been through some experiences like that. So I think the spectrum of behavior that we're finding that we're Learning about through MeToo makes us, enables us to kind of connect the dots and realize that it's not just rape that we're talking about. It's not just sexual harassment in the workplace. It's a whole world out there of different forms of misogynistic behaviour that we have to be on the Receiving end of sometimes.
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D
Jennifer Brown's research shows that a tolerance of workplace banter can result in more extreme forms of behaviour.
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F
Apologists will say low levels of sexual joking commentary is just the stuff of grown up workplaces and that these are jokes and they don't mean anything. My research absolutely showed that actually not only do people mind this low level stuff if they are the target of it, if you are a witness, a bystander to it, you don't like it either. And that if the organization tolerates the lower level stuff then it is more likely to morph into the more serious. So it is a predictor that actually unwanted physical contact and unwanted physical propositioning is more likely to take place.
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D
Beverley Skeggs agrees that sexual harassment is linked to a wide spectrum of misogynistic attitudes and behaviour.
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E
Well, I think what's been really important is how the MeToo has connected sexual harassment to much, much wider issues of objectification. You know, the idea that the president's to club or you know, lots of industries or the president, you know, can just actually access women whenever they want. The fact that women's bodies are just seen to be there to be used by anybody for whatever purposes, you know, and that women have to subject themselves to that just to live in some cases, as we saw with, you know, Oxfam in Haiti. So for me it's that connection because sexual harassment is almost like the, the one part of the continuum through a whole range of phenomenal. It leads into, you know, sexual violence of the most extreme kinds. But it also is just that everyday objectification where you just see women's bodies on display naked all the time and the ubiquity or the normalization of, yeah, just exploitation of women's bodies.
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D
As part of the research for her novel, Winnie Lee tried to get more of an insight into why men commit rape.
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C
I originally started to do a bit more research into my actual real life perpetrator who was as in the book, he was 15 years old, he was an Irish traveler and he was a complete stranger. So I don't know anything about him in reality except a few facts, just that he was that young, he was actually literate at the time and he came from a broken family. But beyond that I tried to do more research into his life and I kept on running into these problems with the police who kept on saying, well, he's got a right to privacy, which I understand. So eventually I was like, well, I'm running this as fiction anyway, so it doesn't matter. And for me it was more about trying to understand sort of the human and the emotional experience that he was going through that had led him to behave that way. So I ended up meeting and interviewing a number of social workers who work with juvenile sex offenders and then also with forensic media, social psychologists to try to understand, okay, what is the mentality, what is the thinking behind that kind of behavior, especially at such a young age.
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D
And what did you deduce from your interviews with them?
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C
One of the most useful things that I learned was obviously perpetrators don't just go from zero to violently raping a stranger that they see. There would have been a series of kind of increasing or escalating assaults of different forms. So maybe it would have started off as something not as violent and it would have started off as something a little bit. Yeah, a little bit less obvious or intrusive. And then if that behavior kind of is allowed to escalate because no one's being held accountable for it, then that might progress to something as violent as, you know, as what I unfortunately became a victim of. So then that makes you think about, like, okay, what was this person's situation that we're growing up in? What was the attitudes that people were having towards him and towards the way that he was acting towards. Towards women and girls? So, yeah, that was an interesting insight and it just made me realize, if somebody is capable of that kind of behavior at 15, then actually we need to start addressing these issues much earlier on in somebody's lives. I mean, it stems from kind of the attitude towards women and girls that they're exposed to, even as children.
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D
I suppose some critics of the MeToo movement dismiss it as a campaign dominated by privileged, glamorous women. Beverly Skeggs says there also needs to be a continued focus on the organised abuse of thousands of vulnerable young working class women and girls by predominantly aging gangs in towns like Telford, Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Newcastle.
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E
I think trying to keep a focus on the Newcastle and the Rotherham cases and why nobody cared, you know, well, that's not true because there were some really good people who tried to keep pushing these issues forward. But again, why? Institutions just wanted to turn a blind eye. It was too difficult to deal with. It could compromise. And so, you know, on the one hand we've got the Harvey Weinsteins of this world and then on the other hand we have the Rochdale cases and I think they're very, very different. But we need to keep focusing on those that cannot get the tabloid coverage for being glamorous victims. The research that I've done with young working class women has charted this history of their symbolic abuse in the media. How over the last 30 years we see them depicted more and more as valueless. So then we get. It kind of culminates in reality TV and the attempts to. To represent them all as pathetic and useless and pointless. And we get lots of commentators talking about them as surplus populations, as irrelevant or as abject or as a drain on the nation. So we see that happening. And so it's therefore not surprising that all these institutions just think they're worthless and valueless too, and there isn't a politics anymore, I think, to understand why they're represented in such a way. Why is there so much profit to be made from depicting working class women in such a horrific way? So I think the people who work in the institutions probably think, well, this is what they're like. That's the only representations they have. And of course, it's powerful institutions like the police that do not want to deal with these things. I think you've got to look at the institutions, the people involved, their investment in being a particular sort of person. So I think what we saw from some of the transcripts, some people were much more prepared to appear to be multicultural than they were to protect the rape of young women. And that to me is really problematic. We have to ask why that happened.
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D
I asked our three experts to imagine they were prime minister for the day. Which single policy change would they implement to try to change attitudes and tackle gender inequality?
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F
Jennifer Brown not come out of Europe. And I say that not just as a joke, because actually much of our domestic legislation was reliant on European initiatives and directives. So much of the equal opportunities legislation was actually not exactly forced on us, but we were required to introduce it into domestic law when we had actually been dragging our feet. So we have a lot to be thankful to the European, our engagement with Europe in terms of thinking about working time, directives, quality of the working environment, that domestically we hadn't been taking the initiative about.
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E
Beverly Skeggs for me, one single thing that would make the difference would be decent wages for decent work with decent conditions, so that people didn't have to sell themselves in particular ways, you know, even making themselves kind of nice for a business lunch or something like that. Do you remember the case of the women in the city who had to wear high heels? You know, those ridiculous things that actually would hamper somebody's. A woman's ability to work, they encourage. It's just really odd. So for me, if women didn't have to be. If women weren't assumed to be exploitable so easily, that would make a huge difference. That wouldn't make a great deal of difference to sexual harassment. So you'd have to have really powerful systems of accountability in place so that when men did do the sexual harassment that they do, they can't get away with it anymore. And what's really clear in a lot of the cases of sexual harassment, they do it because they can just get away with it and they know they can.
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C
Winnie Lee There needs to be actual gender parity on boards and companies. There needs to be actual gender parity in Parliament. If these kinds of, you know, what some people might call affirmative action, if these kinds of policies can be put in place, then I think at least that would have a lasting impact on the way a lot of things are governed. It needs to be gender equal, because I think that would, better than that, would reflect a better understanding of the experiences that men and women have to go through and then decisions we made differently.
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D
I asked Jennifer Brown if she thought we are now seeing a seismic shift.
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F
What's striking about the flurry of interest is, if you like, its sine wave. When I was looking at that in the 1990s, I was reading a paper only this morning, dated 1992, alerting us to the problem of sexual harassment, saying how serious it was, saying more research needed to be done, that we needed to be interested in putting together packages of training, of procedures and so on. So this has been cyclical, so I don't see it as a new revolution. I think it just is bringing our attention back to an existing problem that has prevailed and for whatever reason, has attracted a great deal of media interest. But it's always been there. Actually, it's kind of wearying that I looked at a commentary made by a woman officer who was a black woman, took the Metropolitan Police to an industrial tribunal in 92. There was another one, another young black woman who took the Met to an employment tribunal in 2014. I looked at their experiences and the language and you could not have distinguished which case it was referring to.
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D
Jennifer is referring here to the case of Carol Howard, a former firearms officer whose portrait was used to promote the met during the 2012 Olympics. She left the force in 2015 with a £37,000 settlement after winning her case of racial discrimination.
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F
So in terms of lessons learnt, it's depressing that actually successive generations of officers who might see the light, actually, it's not been institutionalised and the work I'm doing now is Looking at the police culture, I asked women officers to characterise the occupational culture of the police and they are still saying that it is racist and sexist and homophobic and cynical and suspicious. On the one hand, there are others who say, yes, there is progression in that. There are more caring, more academically interested and if you like a reforming culture, but unless those elements are evident in the police force, then you're still getting very high levels of sexual harassment.
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D
Beverly Skeggs is more optimistic.
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E
Was an older feminist who was involved in sexual harassment campaigns in the late 1980s. It always felt like one small step forward and two large steps back half the time, and you'd win in one area and lose in another. So, both in terms of time and space, what I think the MeToo's captured is an incredible range and scope and it's absolutely inspirational, I think.
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D
Yeah. And do you think it will change for anything? Very much. I mean, some people say, oh, well, these things are cyclical. You know, things come, things go and nothing much changes. Or do you think it is something that is really going to have a big effect?
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E
I think this one has the best chance of having a very powerful effect, more so than any others I've seen.
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D
Winnie Lee is also hopeful that for the first time, women are finding strength in numbers.
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C
I think it's certainly a tipping point that we're at, you know, watershed moment, whatever fancy phrase you want to use. But, yeah, I mean, certainly MeToo, and just the sheer number of times it was being used, even within the first week, just made people realize how prevalent these experiences are. There's certainly a trend towards more people coming forward. I mean, you saw that with MeToo, and I think a lot of it is. It is kind of strength in numbers, as you mentioned before, and that sense of solidarity and that sense of, I'm not alone in this. So, I mean, you know, again, for me, it was. It's incredibly isolating and incredibly lonely to be a victim of sexual violence because you think, okay, I'm going through hell and, like, nobody else knows what I'm going through. Right. And actually, in reality, when you realize that there are so many other people out there who understand what you're going through, then you realize actually you're not alone. And, fine, it doesn't. Doesn't mitigate things entirely, but it does make you realize that there are so many of us with this experience out there, so if we were only to share it and have, I suppose, the world realize how prevalent it is, then maybe things can change. So, yeah, I Think there's definitely a trend forward. It's also. There's just generational differences in terms of how people talk about it. So in general, you know, younger women, partially because they're so ensconced in social media, might be more willing to speak and almost speak immediately about these experiences, whereas a lot of older women, I know, it's, you know, having grown up in a culture where these stories are more repressed, it's a much longer process of speaking publicly about it, or a decision not to speak publicly publicly at all, but to still engage with the stories that are out there. As a reader, do you think it's.
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D
All coincidental with, you know, MeToo happening and BBC pay happening and all that kind of thing? Or do you think it's part of a sort of a movement by. By women to sort of basically fight more for their. For their rights? Do you think that's.
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C
No. I mean, it's all connected. Yeah. I mean, certainly. I mean, if you think about, like, 100 years ago, we literally just got the vote, you know, so that was sort of the beginning of a very long process of being able to be more politically engaged and being recognized as people that could bring something to the table politically. I suppose MeToo wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for, I think, Donald Trump being president in some ways, right. The Women's March was a direct reaction to Donald Trump being elected president. And then, so last year, in 2017, you start off the year with the Women's March, and then there's. There's this growing anger at having somebody like Trump as president. And then when the Harvey Weinstein case breaks in early October, then suddenly there's a figure that is, you know, it's not similar to Trump, but there are some similarities. Right. A very powerful man who's been accused of assault multiple times, and then he has his downfall. And there is a certain kind of, I think, satisfaction at seeing the downfall of a somewhat unlikable, powerful man. Right. But then, you know, that was in some ways just the beginning, because then there's all these other cases of other Hollywood, you know, men, Kevin Spacey or, you know, James Toback and lots of others who. Those cases start coming up. Right. So. And then, you know, MeToo trends just a few weeks after the Weinstein case break. So, yeah, I think all these stories about, you know, gender parody, the celebration of, you know, 100 years of voting and the gender pay gap, they're all connected because there is just a realization that kind of, as women, we're sort of fed up at the stuff we have to deal with and the fact that it's the early, you know, it's the 21st century now. And yet there still is such a big gap between, you know, what I would earn and what a man with my experience might earn if I were in a certain kind of job like that. There still is such a gap between just our, our bodily safety moving around the world. We're still so kind of under, sort of underestimated in terms of our skills and kind of underappreciated in terms of what we bring to a company that, yeah, I think there's, there's a huge amount of anger about that. So I don't think it's things might revert. I'm sure there's going to be a backlash of some form. But I mean, for me it's always like, okay, can we convert all this outpouring of stories and this kind of anger, can we convert that into changes in policy in some ways?
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This episode of LSEIQ was brought to you by Joanna Bell, Shay Forbes Taylor, Natalie Abbott, Tom Williams and James Rittee. It was based in part on the following formations of class and gender Becoming Respectable by Beverly Skeggs Sexual harassment experienced by police staff serving in England, Wales and Scotland a Descriptive exploration of Incidents, Antecedents and Harm by Jennifer Brown, Joanna Gassetti and Chris Fife Shaw Art, Activism and Addressing Sexual Assault in the UK A Case Study by Winnie Lee and Dark Chapter by Winnie Lee. For more episodes of this podcast and to subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Soundcloud, please visit lse.ac.ukiq or search for lseiq in your favourite podcast app. Join us next time when we ask how do you win an argument.