Rich men sit at a long mahogany table smoking cigars and drinking port as they manage millions of dollars for the board.
It’s an antiquated, laughable picture — but it wasn’t as far back in history as we’d like to think. And despite the Me Too movement, the boys’ club — on boards, in law, government and sport — is still very much alive, in control, making action against serial sexual harassers difficult.
‘Sexual but not seductive’
Journalist Jane Singleton has hosted the ABC’s 7.30 Report and radio shows on 2GB. Across her career she’s had to tell a mayor, live on air, to remove his hands from her lap, been described as a journalist who is “sexual, but not seductive”, and endured co-workers turning up the air-conditioning so her nipples would stick out.
Male management — the boys’ club — often took issue with “unfeminine” females on radio and TV. Singleton was dismissed from one radio gig after cutting short an interview with Bob Hawke, and from ABC’s 7.30 Report after asking hard-hitting questions.
Singleton and Richard Talbot were the first members to be elected to the NRMA Motoring & Services board since World War II. As outsiders to the “boys’ club” — the inner circle of men who decided how things would be run — they were ostracised. Singleton was subjected to a culture of sexual harassment.
“There was venomous treatment of people with an opposing view — especially if you were female,” she told Crikey.
Cigars, port and board stacking
Their first board meeting started with a cocktail party.
“I got out of the lift and I was dragged like a schoolboy over to see [a board member] who asked me which school I went to,” Talbot told Crikey. “It was the one and only question they had for me.”
Port and Cuban cigars were handed out by dressed-up waiters.
“The room was filling up with smoke … [Singeton] walked out and went to the boardroom and I followed. I only had one suit and I didn’t want it smelling like smoke.”
The boards were practically incestuous, Talbot said. If the members didn’t know each other from private high school, a golf or football club or social network they knew each other from the boards they sat on.
“They kept me off serving subsidiary boards to ensure I didn’t get the director’s fee — they weaponise what they’re given to use against anyone that won’t go along with them,” he said.
This made going against the board’s decisions dangerous.
“If you don’t go along with them, you don’t get money … If you step out of line, don’t go along with what they’re saying or don’t cover up for wrongdoing, it’ll affect your whole life. You’ll be a persona non grata.”
At the time, the board’s legal representation was Dyson Heydon. An independent High Court investigation has since found Heydon harassed six women, five of whom worked in his office.
But this was the ’80s and ’90s. Things are different now, right?
Not much has changed
Reports of sexual harassment are on the rise. Reported prevalence of harassment in the workplace jumped from 21% in 2012 to 33% in 2018.
While this might be due to better support and awareness for those coming forward, it also shows it’s not going away.
Sydney lawyer Dhanya Mani told Crikey she was sexually harassed by Heydon multiple times. The boys’ club turned a blind eye.
Despite complaining to her judge about Heydon’s advancements, nothing was done. She has found that even after the High Court investigation, legal professionals are still reluctant to talk about the allegations against Heydon.
“I think it exposes how interwoven and interconnected the upper levels of the profession are amongst men, and how much of a boys’ club it is,” she said.
“There’s this weird patriarchal fraternity aspect to the profession that I think some female judges and senior female figures don’t like and haven’t wanted to admit to, because it means admitting to the relative disempowerment and exclusion.”
A spokesperson for the High Court told Crikey the court has developed a supplementary HR policy and allows associates to speak about workplace issues without worrying about confidentiality requirements.
The Liberal Party has an embarrassingly low level of women in its ranks — an issue it has tried to address with op-eds and forced photoshoots (seven men and zero women are praised for implementing women-positive policies on its party page “Liberal Women”). It has also stacked the Administrative Appeals Tribunal with fellow Liberal men.
When the party was organising an event to discuss its “woman problem”, two staffers who alleged harassment and assault by party members were brushed aside. The party has been accused of having a boys’ club culture.
When AMP’s female executives stepped down amid the Hayne royal commission into financial misconduct, no one rallied around them. When Boe Pahari was accused of harassment, he was protected and promoted, with the board supporting him despite public outcry and falling share prices.
Being “part of the boys’ club” is often important for career progression — drinking, partying and getting along with the men can be key to promotions — but it also makes raising instances of harassment near impossible.
Singleton said although the Me Too movement was positive, it was upsetting how little had changed.
“It astonished me [the culture] is still like that,” she said. “After all the fights we went to, the position of women is [still] subject to male pressure and male power.”
A spokesperson for the ABC told Crikey it does not tolerate or condone discriminatory behaviour in any form, with staff aware of the organisation’s discrimination policy and standards expected.
Not to mention the awesome Male Champions for Change, which seems to have achieved little actual change other than making existing male chairmen feel good about themselves. https://malechampionsofchange.com
Great series Amber, thank you.
Just want to second that. Thank you, Ms Schultz, both for dealing with this topic, and for writing decent articles (I’ve noticed for a while!).
The power of the boys’ room:
Some years ago the CEO of a large Australian Bank was having a private lunch with two senior managers to celebrate the success of a major international program “rollout”; one of the managers was a man, the other a woman. The men went off to have a postprandial pee together (as you do, apparently), and the CEO asked his colleague at the urinal, “what job would you like next, [name]?”
Sadly, I came to the same conclusion after over 20 years working as that rare female species in a male dominated profession, engineering. Let’s get more girls into the engineering pipeline, they said. That way there will be more female engineers and more female managers, they said. Reality check: after more than 20 years when all those hopeful young girls have entered that pipeline, most have left not long after and so we still stand at just over 10% women in engineering.
Why is that? Everybody wonders, except those who have left the profession or have endured like I have. It’s a man’s world built by men for men.
No, no, it must be unconscious bias! That’s it! Lets conduct training courses for managers to raise awareness. That’ll fix it! It won’t, because that ‘unconscious’ bias is very much conscious. Jobs for mates ( aka, males). Hence, so few women engineers being promoted up the line. I won’t mention the ‘unconscious’ sexual harassment that many experience just to top it all off.
Yep, same experience with science – lots of boys’ clubbing going on there, including corruption covered up with anyone not going along having their reputation poisoned. One of the universities I worked at had an open secret of sexual harrassment of research students by male supervisors – who were threatened with academic fails if they didn’t go along with this, and/or didn’t turn a blind eye to other kinds of misbehaviour by the boys in charge. You’d not think they could possibly get away with it, but they do, even when students put principles before the threats to blacken their names to the entire research community in their field if they talk – even then, the fancy lawyers employed by these illustrious universities bend it all into “it was just a misunderstanding” etc etc, and the perpetrators are insulated from the just consequences for their misconduct, and get ever more arrogant about it.
While acknowledging that some males benefit from what is perceived to be a boys club ignoring the realities of the full spectrum of male and female behaviour simply excuses those who perpetuate the system because they can always quote an ‘anecdote’ that proves their point. Sexual harassment is a major problem and is one component of a range of problems that often appear linked to power and a belief of entitlement.
The ‘debate’, if it can be called that, is often couched in a manner that is too simplistic and we cannot afford that.
Most likely too many of males in privileged power positions came from the University male colleges where the appalling assaults on women as well as their bastardisation of each other was common place and accepted. It is no wonder that given these training grounds together with the dominant blokes culture in Australia that our country is such a mess. It in some ways is not all that different than the outcomes generated by the Catholic Church where all power is invested in males