2017 Women of the Year and their war against sexual harassment

Rajan Philips-December 30, 2017

"When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold," is a wisecrack attributed to Prince Metternich, the Austrian diplomat during Napoleon’s domination of Europe. In the 20th century, it was America’s turn to sneeze for the whole world to catch a cold. It is still early in the 21st century and with Donald Trump at the helm in Washington, the world is getting used to ignoring America. As was duly seriously noted in The Island of yesterday, the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) is not receiving the usual attention that past presidential NSS statements have received. Even the marked shift from the Obama years is not hugely exciting to Trump watchers. As some have suggested the American media is pre-occupied with sexual harassment and is bent on using the uprising against it to bring down Trump.

Some of the readers looking at my topic today for an year-end article may justifiably wonder if this another case of catching cold from the massive American media sneeze. To be frank, I did catch a rather bad cold in the US over Christmas holidays but this article has nothing to do with it and the question of sexual harassment of women is not only an American matter. With the hashtag #MeToo eliciting millions of sexual harassment experiences from women in nearly 100 countries, what began as a huge gender sneeze in the US became a global roar of protest and solidarity by women against sexual harassment.

Predictably, the Time magazine picked women ‘silence breakers’ against sexual harassment as its 2017 Person of the Year. Equally, several other national international journals and news agencies have also been providing year-end coverage and commentaries on this year’s historic social movement against sexual harassment. With impeccable timing, the World Policy Analysis Centre at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has produced a report providing New Data on 193 Countries and their legal mechanisms for Preventing Gender-Based Work Place Discrimination and Sexual Harassment. Globally, 75% of working-age men are in the labour force; but only 50% of working-age women are working. Women are also paid less – on average earning only 77% of a man’s wage; segregated into low-paying or part-time sectors such as service work and cleaning; and under-represented in supervisory and managerial roles.

A global problem

Discriminations and gender harassment prevent about a billion women from joining the labour force. At present, there are 1.35 billion women working worldwide, but the number is estimated to increase to 2.39 billion if there is no work place discrimination or sexual harassment. The discrimination and harassment of women are not only social problems, but they also carry huge economic costs. For example, it has been estimated that closing the gender gap in the US economy would add as much as $4.3 trillion to the GDP by 2025; almost a 25% increase to the $18.5 trillion American economy. Implications of closing the gender gap and ending sexual harassment may not be as huge for other countries and their economies, but proportionately they will be just as significant.

According to the UCLA report, 68 of the 193 UN Member countries do not have specific laws to protect women from work place sexual harassment, impacting 235 million women workers in those countries. Sri Lanka is among the 125 countries with legislation protecting women, as well as men, from work place sexual harassment. However, Sri Lanka is listed among a minority of countries that do not have specific laws in other areas such as prohibition of gender-based discrimination for job promotions, providing access to vocational training, and ensuring equal pay for equal work. Among the South Asian countries, India has legislative protection in all gender-gap areas, and so has China.

In India, providing legal protection against work place sexual harassment began with the 1997 Supreme Court ruling in the celebrated Vishakha case (Vishakha and others Vs the State of Rajasthan). The ruling gave rise to Vishakha Guidelines before parliament enacted legislation against sexual harassment in 2013. According to the Indian media, work place mechanisms and processes for identifying, investigating and addressing sexual harassments are yet to be set up in many Indian organizations and international companies working in India. Universities and post-secondary educational institutions have become notorious centres for sexual harassment involving female students and employees who are harassed by male academics and administrators.

Ragging in South Asian universities is also a rite of passage for sexual insults and innuendos targeting women. This is a spillover from what is euphemistically called ‘Eve Teasing’ that goes on in the general society. Women’s organizations have objected to the term ‘Eve teasing’ insofar it suggests that it is somehow Eve’s fault. Indian feminists consider Eve teasing to be "little rape." Technically, although it is not a legal term, Eve teasing is a form of sexual aggression that may involve sexually suggestive words, jokes, hooting and catcalls, and physical brushing and groping places. The incidence of physical brushing has been notorious enough in public transport to separate female and male passengers to exclusive sides in buses.

The 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women targeted violence occurring in three distinct spheres: the family, in the general community, and by state action. Violence against women in the general community - involving rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment or intimidation, encompasses all public spheres including streets, transport, universities and work places. Eve teasing in public is not a common phenomenon in Western societies. But work place sexual harassment, despite legislative protections against them in 125 of the 193 countries studied in the UCLA report, is a universal problem. What has happened in the US in 2017 is wholly unprecedented. The question is how far and wide will the avalanche that has been unleashed carry its momentum through? Will there be fundamental changes in work place codes of conduct and behaviour apart from the naming and shaming of high profile men?

Trump’s inadvertent catalysis

For the agenda against sexual harassment, it is a good thing that Hillary Clinton lost and Donald Trump won. A Hillary Clinton presidency would have provided the Republicans and the American alt-right the perfect excuse to launch a massive misogynistic counterattack; just as they launched the racial backlash against the Obama presidency. On the other hand, the Trump victory has given the American women the perfect cudgel to wreak their revenge against Trump on the one ground that disgusts all Americans –his vulgar and boastful obsession for groping women. Knocking an elected president off his official pedestal is a complicated political process, and is virtually impossible when the President’s ‘Party’ commands the majority in both Houses of the Congress. But they can knock everyone else on a charge of sexual harassment.

And that is what American women have been doing against their harassers in Hollywood, in the media, and even the US Senate and the House of Representatives. The power of exposure magnified by the exponential power of the social media has brought down hitherto unassailable grandees of the American establishment. Trump promised to drain the Washington swamp. It is his swamp that is being drained now, but the celebrity swamp is not where the bulk of the harassment problem lies.

American researchers on sexual harassment always point out the obvious fact that most harassment occurs at below-the radar work places, and the majority of the perpetrators are not celebrities but mostly nondescript men who under the system deny allegations and almost always walk away Scot free. The women who are victims in these circumstances hardly have the visibility or the resources like the victims of celebrities to challenge their harassers. Again, this is not something unique to America but part of the work place culture in most societies.

What the exposure of the celebrity harassers has done is to jolt all women and many men to no longer ignore sexual harassment or be silent about it, but to deal with it and eradicate it from all work places. It would be a shame if this opportunity is not used for a fundamental change in work place behaviour and culture. Much headway has been made in reducing violence against women in family situations, and there is no reason why similar advances should not be made in targeting and eliminating sexual harassment in work places.

The term ‘sexual harassment’ was first used in a 1973 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report for dealing with gender issues at the Institute. The term was also independently coined by a group of women activists at Cornell University a few years later. One could see in these efforts the head starts that American universities were making towards identifying and addressing sexual harassment. It would take nearly two decades before the term would resonate with the American public at large. The occasion was the 1991 dramatic testimony of Law Professor Anita Hill to the US Senate Judiciary Committee alleging sexual harassment by then Supreme Court nominee, and now Justice, Clarence Thomas, when Ms. Hill worked as a legal assistant to Mr. Thomas years ago. It was a sham of a hearing by a committee of all men that handicapped Professor Hill and did not want to block Thomas’s nomination.

But American women rallied behind Anita Hill and inundated her with their own experiences of harassment. There was no hashtag or internet then. Complaints of sexual harassment in work places went up by 58% after Hill’s testimony. Both Hill and Thomas are African Americans, but Thomas is a conservative Republican who is opposed to affirmative actions and was picked by President Bush Sr to replace Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court judge and a doughty fighter for worker’s rights and affirmative action. Yet, in the course of his statement to the Senate Committee, Clarence Thomas invoked the famous saying of Martin Luther King: "judge me not by the colour of my skin, but by the content of my character." Anita Hill shot back: "when the content of his (Thomas’s) character came under question, he took cover under the colour of his skin." Be that as it may.

What is different now, according to Gloria Steinem the matriarch of American feminism, is that for the first time in her experience women are being believed in their accounts of sexual harassment. That in itself is a profound change. Legal academics agree. Women victims have never been believed before. They had to prove harassment beyond a reasonable doubt in legal terms. A cultural change is now upending the legal protection of the harasser. But the cultural change must translate into work place protocols and processes for preventing sexual harassment, and for exposing and addressing occurrences of sexual harassment.

The presence of Trump is huge a huge catalytic factor in the US for advancing the frontiers of women’s rights and gender equality. Other societies that are better off not having their own Trumps will be even better if they could systematically target and eliminate work place sexual harassment. It is a responsibility that falls not only on women but also on men. Not all men are harassers, but even they must not ignore or be silent about work place sexual harassment, if only for the selfish reason of preventing someone close to them becoming a victim of harassment in an unprotected work place.