Ground Floor: Over the last few years there have been a number of women who've taken legal action against City employers, writes Sheila O'Flanagan.
Most of them said pretty much the same thing - that they were given lower bonuses than male colleagues and that they were, at some point, harassed by them. Actually, to say harassed is unfair; what many women complained about was being the butt of some ribald humour or sexist jokes and eventually deciding to leave their jobs because they'd had enough.
Usually the financial firm involved will say - as they did in the most recent case of Carina Coleman who won her case for unfair dismissal but lost her sexual harassment claim - that the woman herself was a bit of a flirt and that she joined in the banter. Carina, apparently, strode around the office in a pair of knee-high boots that had been sent to her as a present and had worn an "inappropriately low-cut" dress to a Christmas party. High heels and a low-cut dress! Obviously a harlot.
The whole female-in-a-male- world thing is a minefield for two reasons. One is that blokes pretty much want the top jobs for themselves and (regardless of what their New Man upbringing might tell them) still don't like being beaten at anything by a mere woman. The second reason is that while most women will happily join in the ribald laughter at a few off-colour jokes, sometimes those jokes overstep the boundaries of what female employees will consider acceptable. But their male colleagues find it difficult to find that line.
Well, it's quite simple. If you make someone the butt of a sexist joke, you've overstepped the mark. If you tell a sexually explicit joke in the workplace, there's a very good chance that you've made your female colleague feel uncomfortable.
And if you bring in men's magazines and leave them open on the desk on the page where Debbie Does the Dealing Room you can be sure that the women won't find it funny. We might, however, simply close the magazine with a wry comment that they'd be lucky to find Debbie in their Dealing Room but it doesn't actually mean that we're very happy at having seen it in the first place. And just because we haven't, at the time, burst into tears and cried that all men are sexist bastards doesn't mean we're complicit in allowing the stuff in the room either.
The backlash against Carina Coleman comes in the form of newspaper articles which comment that major companies are standing up to women who didn't get what they wanted from the job and are claiming sexual harassment as a way of getting the money instead. To be honest I'm fairly sure that most women would rather get the bonus than go through the ordeal of appearing in court and discussing how they'd been ridiculed by their male colleagues. The companies should ask themselves why their female staff are so resentful that they are willing to go to court in the first place and whether or not being told by your boss that you are a "tethered goat" is the kind of thing that anyone wants to hear, whether it's said in a light-hearted way or not.
It's apparently difficult for men to understand the feeling of having to prove yourself over and over again simply to be allowed to do your job in the first place, while leaving aside all the hopes and aspirations you might have to do even better.
I remember thinking that I had made my mark when a bank I worked for asked me to come to the dinner following the annual golf outing one year, despite not playing. But lots of my clients did and so I had to turn up to talk to them afterwards. The importance of looking after my client base came second to the weight of history which, at that time, had dictated that female clients weren't invited to play in the tournament itself.
To be fair to the bank, there were very few female clients who did play. None of them could become members of clubs! So I was totally behind Annika Sorenstam as she teed off in the Bank of America Colonial Golf tournament last week and I kept my fingers crossed that she wouldn't duff her tee shot and end up disgracing the name of sportswomen forever. (Because that's obviously what would have happened. No matter that she's the number one woman in the world, it's a long way from being Tiger Woods.) But Annika did a good job even if she missed the cut. Therein, of course, lies the problem. Most sports are designed to be won by the strongest or the fastest or the toughest of the competitors.
Biologically, it means that women cannot win when they compete with men no matter how good they are, though I see no reason why the top 100 players of any individual sport can't compete with each other whether they're male or female.
The one sport where women should be able to compete equally is snooker. Before the final session of the Ken Doherty/Mark Williams match in Sheffield the broadcasters kindly showed about four minutes coverage of the women's final. The winner, Kelly Fisher, had knocked the socks of every other woman she'd played. But why wasn't she competing against the men? How much more difficult would that have been? Every time a woman does well in an area that has hitherto been dominated by men we applaud them. But only if they have the sense to be suitably grateful for our recognition. And only if they don't get a bit above themselves after the event and expect to do it again.
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