Kathie Lingle's Work-Life Blog

The Inconvenient Truth About Sexism
PART TWO

Aug. 8, 2008 — So, what’s the connection between the discrimination against women going on at my local country club (and, potentially, one near you) and the practice of work-life in corporations today? More than any of us will be comfortable with, I’m afraid.

It has to do with the cultural norm about women and motherhood that Bob Drago and Joan Williams have described so vividly (see my Nov. 6, 2007 blog entry – Norms That Aren’t So Normal). Given its historical antecedents, the work-life “movement” was branded early as a women’s issue, an association that is proving impossible to shake, even though contemporary reality no longer fits the single gender mold. And the simple truth is that women’s issues are not popular or “safe” causes today, in or outside the workplace. A very timely reminder of this is the media energy being expended against China’s repression of civil rights on the eve of the summer Olympics in that country vs. the silence that accompanies the annual PGA Master’s golf tournament at Augusta – an institution that epitomizes the denial of civil rights to women in this country. One is shaping up as a cause celebe and the other is not discussable. This is the power of cultural norms. They are like the oxygen we breathe, so taken for granted they aren’t generally noticed. If you contradict or challenge one, however, there are immediate penalties to pay. Someone might even pee on your tree.

What gets more convoluted about norms is that the targeted group drinks the same Kool-Aid as everyone else. In reaction to my prior blog entry, a colleague here at work informs me that NAWBO meetings have been held at the Phoenix Country Club. That’s the National Association of Women Business Owners, a group that you might think would keep their distance (and their hard-earned money) from a place with such strident policies against their ilk. 

But that’s small potatoes compared to other, more obviously warped accommodations made by women I’ve known to the misogyny they encounter.  Some years ago in another region of the country, I was part of an HR leadership team headed by a man who decided to hold a series of HR team meetings at his country club. Tipped off by his peculiar, energetic insistence on accompanying each woman to the restroom as the meeting progressed, I suspected we were in one of those establishments that prohibited women from entering some area on the premises. Sure enough, he explained that he was escorting us on a circuitous route to avoid trouble. I privately conferred with my female colleagues during a break, checking in to see if they were as offended and uncomfortable as I was, only to be told that I was out of order; there was nothing wrong here, because this particular club no longer discriminated against blacks and Jews. The unspoken assumption left hanging in the air was that these women accepted discrimination against themselves as right and proper. I was unsuccessful in bringing them around to my contrarian point of view, but I did prevail in nixing this venue as an appropriate place to be holding HR meetings in future.

So what’s the harm in boys being boys, you’re thinking? Well, the plot sickens.  The HR head took great pride in telling us a story about how his pre-teen son appreciated the exclusivity provided by the country club that separated him and his father from his mother and sister. In fact, he spontaneously shared with his dad how much he loved their private time lunching together without the girls and “wished this policy could last forever.” And so the tradition gets passed on. Meanwhile, the subterranean feelings against women as full partners and contributors play out in complex ways, sometimes abetted by women themselves, making the job of those running initiatives that get branded (justly or not) as focusing on women that much harder. It has become easier – or perhaps more acceptable – to run a diversity effort. But that’s a story for another day.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of WorldatWork and its affiliate, Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP).