I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Australia’s Me Too movement isn’t moving forward. It lacks direction, inclusivity and government support.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the alternative, that change is afoot. We’ve had women coming forward en masse to disclose their allegations of sexual assault. Students have called out harassment and abuse in high schools. Universities have introduced consent courses. Laws gagging sexual assault victims have been overturned. We’ve had an inquiry into Parliament’s workplace announced. The Australian of the Year is a sexual assault survivor.
With tens of thousands rallying in front of parliaments across the country, there’s a new energy spreading like wildfire. It’s kindled by rage and chants of “enough is enough”.
But how much of this anger and energy is leading to long-lasting societal and policy change?
What has changed in the past few weeks since Brittany Higgins came forward? Or in the past few years since the Me Too movement started trending on social media? Or in the past nine years since Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech?
This latest wave of feminism has focused on the symptoms of a societal illness, but not the disease. It focuses on women — their experiences, their wellbeing — and on individual men, but rarely on how a society cultivates sick behaviour. Its focus has been on soliciting stories, raising awareness, offering support — but not creating change.
The movement has also been led by powerful white women, often putting their faces at the front. While Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse voices have been added, it’s often as an afterthought. As experts have told me, focusing on sexual violence instead of the societal drivers behind it (including power and poverty) goes against what these communities fight for.
Distinct from previous feminist movements, Me Too lacks both government support and specificity. The closest Australia’s movement has come to having specific demands is the latest petition presented at March4Justice — but even here there’s no direct policy change.
Petitions and anger can only get a movement so far. There needs to be work behind the scenes to address the drivers of inequality, sexual violence and our response to it. There needs to be a greater community feel that we, society as a whole, want change — not just the scalps of sleazy men.
This massive reckoning risks fizzling out, moved off course by a distraction or a tokenistic gesture. But on the ground for women, things will stay the same. Unequal division of labour. Women shouldering unpaid work. Women on visas trapped in violent situations. Sex trafficking. Paltry domestic violence funding. The murder and abuse of Indigenous women.
Over the next few days, I will explore how the movement has focused on awareness-raising, calling out harassment and soliciting stories — the first few steps in a long march to justice. But I’ll also look at how it has yet to demand targeted change, and how it focuses on the stories and experiences of a select few.
We need to work together as a community to demand equality, led by the women of colour who have been fighting this fight for decades. I’ll ask what needs to change, and how we can keep this movement in momentum.
Unless change happens soon, we may well be doing this all over again. We’ll rally and shout, again and again, as a new generation wonders why we put up with so much and did so little.
We better have a good excuse.
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au.
Read the next part of #MeTooWhere? here.
I am sad and disappointed and would love to be proved wrong. Scomo’s women’s circus is exactly that. Window dressing by the marketing department. I am afraid that real change, and we need it, will not come out of the present Government.
God yes Amber thank you for writing this article. Looking forwards to the rest of the series
I can think of one concrete suggestion, but not how it can be implemented.
The court system whereby victims of sexual assault/rape are re-traumatised, as has been widely acknowledged – by women at least. If you are a victim of a mugging I doubt you would be asked on oath to say what you were wearing, whether you had been drinking or why you were where you were.
And if the victim’s sexual history is relevant so to should be the sexual history of the accused.
Laws of interrogation can be amended if there is a will to do so – yes it would take a lot of work, but those women and men who work in the legal profession (who are very highly paid) have, I think, an obligation to put serious effort into doing this. It would not mean the accused would not get a fair trial but that the two people facing the court would be treated fairly.
Hi Mary
I think you are heading this discussion around ‘being believed’ in the right direction. Rather than shouting slogans and running away from the resultant probing questions, you are delving into the practicalities and how we can make it work. And we need to make this work for everyone’s sake!
Ive written a VERY long set of comments under the Crikey article on the Consent App, trying to understand the conundrum of ‘believe vs convict’. No one will touch the issues I’ve raised.
Im hoping you and SueC might be able to respond to those.
Think Bigger, strategic change, women Independents standing against Liberals and Nationals. Back the Independents and Vote for Women. The wall of women warriors behind Albanese will take care of the rest if they win the next election
Another suggestion which has been discussed is to oblige companies to disclose the gender pay gap, and explain why two people doing the same work are being paid differently.
There could also be an obligation on companies to have a written plan to fix the pay gap along with a time-line, and sanctions if it does not happen.
Its indefensible for 2 people doing the exact same duties to be paid differently. But…
Go to any high school in Australia and ask a bunch of students to rank what they value in a PROFESSIONAL career. Lots of overlap but there are key differences between the genders at a population level.
SueC – as a teacher what differences have you observed?
As an interviewer I see males more fixated on narrow range of aspects of an advertised job and they will be more likely to chase those aspects at the sake of others aspects.
What causes these differences? Culture and upbringing is part of it, but hormones is another.
High level statistics are really useful, but you need to understand the mechanisms driving them if you want to successfully enact change.
Since you’re asking me, my comment would be this: Girls have been outscoring boys in science for a while (they apply themselves more, generally), and they go on to represent more than half of current tertiary science graduates (at least last time I looked), and their performance is not in question. And from then on, they do worse than males at obtaining jobs in their fields, and when it comes to promotion, things get exponentially worse, and most of science in academia (I spent three years teaching undergraduate science students before turning to secondary education) is still a boys’ club.
And you can’t explain it away with pregnancies etc. It’s like that even before women and their male partners decide to have children, if they do.
I know a long string of super-qualified female science and mathematics professionals with amazing performance reviews who lost out on positions they were seeking to less qualified males – and this tends to happen more in the expensive private schools than in the state system which is cumulatively being gutted by poor funding (Lib) and bad policies (both major parties).
Our general experience as females – if you’re asking me and the many female colleagues I’ve discussed this with – is that one of the few ways to get a fair go is if a school principal (or other person in charge of staffing) is actually enlightened – and I’ve seen both male and female examples of such rare creatures, and both male and female examples of the opposite…
You know how a while back, famously, a white American put on dark make-up and a wig to see if it would change how they were treated? …if it were equally easy for a male to morph temporarily into a convincing female phenotype, then this is what I would suggest you do, and observe for yourself…
I agree with every single thing you said. Everything.
But do you feel at a population level that males and females place equal value on the same things in a particular role separate to the issue of whether they can actually get the job in the first place?
Probably not, but we have to look at whether the values that are perhaps being expected in a role really are the best way to serve the community, or whether we shouldn’t be overhauling these values.
Which partly comes down to: Less sizzle, more steak. Less marketing, more honesty. Less box-ticking, more real work. Less “do not engage emotionally” and more “we need to nurture each other.” Etc etc etc.
These are all fine questions to consider, that you’re asking – but it’s like you’re bringing up a species and then I have to consider the whole ecosystem! 🙂
Another comment I’d like to make is that the gender (and other) stereotyping imposed on children during their upbringing is not their fault – with either gender. It’s all this shiitake that’s being loaded on; bad programming from the beginning from family and culture, and it goes mostly to the subconscious when it goes in that young, which makes it much harder to shift because it’s quite resistant even to a person’s own intellect!
In health education we often talked about gender stereotyping – I’d say, “As a female, I see the girls hugging each other when they need support and the boys hugging each other mostly when their sports team wins – and I’m so sad for you boys! Don’t you think you should be allowed to hug?” …and they’d say things like, “Well, if we do that, someone will call us a homo.” And I’d say, “If you see girls hugging, do you assume they’re sexually attracted?” …to which they’d say, “No, that’s different, girls are allowed to hug.” And it’s so sad – because so much humanity is being amputated off boys in the process of their socialisation, and most of the boys I taught were actually such warm human beings still, before going out into the world.
Before anyone slits their wrists, I do think that this got better between the time I was in high school and the time I stopped teaching 25 years later – I do think boys were much more expressive and able to talk about stuff than my own male classmates were – and I think when the next generations start to captain the ship, there’s going to be some positive change (change sometimes happens one funeral at a time). I think young male children are as much a victim of the shiitake our society loads on children’s backs as female children, and you can see it in the suicide statistics down the track as well. Females are at a structural disadvantage, and that needs to be fixed, but we also have to fix the shiitake we’re piling on young people’s shoulders, as families and as a society – and it’s imperative everyone deals with their own encultured shiitake, because how can you put an oxygen mask on someone else if you’re out cold yourself?
…and do your think anyone ever asked me those questions when I was employed? Nope. Not part of the general conversation. Not valued in staff meetings or in-service courses, every single one of which I attended was useless – I’m not kidding, it was regurgitated stuff from what I’d already learnt at university, plus shonky ideas dreamt up by middle management, the Education minister and their cronies, etc. I was a more effective teacher before all that so-called continuous education started. I self-educate, and not on the basic topics and idiotic management ideas that they waste educators’ time with at these so-called professional inservices. And when you impose hours of dribble and box-ticking on me, that comes off either my class preparation time or my private life – neither of which I wanted to compromise, but I don’t have a time machine.
…and in PS to what I said before: You know the saying, “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man?” It’s part of the explanation (and that gets into the Dunning-Kruger Effect again as well). As a teacher I observed that boys exude way more confidence about their ability and achievement than girls usually do, and that girls don’t brag like boys do, in general, and that many boys tend to try to push girls off the science equipment in group work and we have to counter that actively as teachers (or those of us who care).
…and don’t get me wrong, I liked and enjoyed my male students just as much as my female students, and I felt it was part of my job to correct any kind of injustices in the classrooms I was teaching in, and to model and teach respect, good manners and consideration of others, and to just draw attention to various things for them to think about, with interaction patterns etc. Takes a village to raise a child etc.
When males show up at interviews, they’re likely to have a greater confidence-to-ability ratio than their female counterparts, and maybe part of the solution is that interview panels pay more attention to a person’s actual qualifications, achievement and references, than their marketing of these things! (…and drop conscious or subconscious bigotry about all sorts of matters including if the women have children or might be thinking about having children…etc etc)
After I posted the above, I remember an experiment I did once. While waiting for the commencement of a position I’d been appointed to, I applied for a highly paid position with a local government as their environmental adviser that I actually didn’t want (that kind of job is greenwashing, and they usually want a friendly face for it, preferably with nice qualifications they can cite – it’s all marketing, like the so-called Minister for the Environment…)
(…and yes, now we can get into whether there’s a gender difference for what people want out of work – and for me the usefulness of it to making positive change in the world, and how broadly my various abilities would be employed – I’m a big-picture person – were much more important than salary, status or permanency – although salary and permanency for jobs that make high positive impacts on the world ought not to be lower than for socially useless jobs like CEO or middle management etc…)
(…and let’s not forget that the culture of how we employ people is also mostly still based around male ideas of how to run the world and what should be prioritised – sort of like the IQ test is really a test skewed towards Western cultural values…)
Anyway, getting back to my experiment: I purposely went into the interview and acted as a character rather than myself – I deliberately adopted what I considered arrogant behaviour towards my interview panel. Every time they said, “And could you do XYZ? And do you have the ability to do ABC?” I raised my eyebrows at them and replied affirmatively in a condescending tone, as if only an idiot would ask me that question. When I walked out of the building post-interview I was actually blushing at how I had behaved – I’d not normally treat people like this, and I don’t condone that kind of posturing.
They rang to offer me the job within the hour. Interesting experiment. With n=1 you can’t allocate that much statistical significance to it. But it was…interesting. And no, I was never tempted to repeat it for positions I really wanted, because it offends my sense of what is right – and I’d not want to accept a job on such terms.
Wasn’t that George’s discovery in an old Seinfeld episode?
There is an entire subset of yoga devoted to ‘oppositizm’ – living in graveyards & coprophagy.
I’ve never watched Seinfield, but I believe people can make all sorts of discoveries independently, in parallel, etc! 🙂
That yoga subset sounds…interesting. Is it a sort of coprophagic Goth yoga?