"I have to admit, you don't look bad on paper," he said, reaching out and touching my knee. "And you look pretty great in person, too."
This wasn't the beginning of a bad Tinder date. It was the end of what, until that point, had been a pretty decent job interview. Despite holding several postgraduate degrees and having more than a decade of professional experience, my achievements gained less attention than my appearance--an all too often occurrence amongst qualified women.
Like so many other women looking to build a career, I accepted the role with trepidation, went about my business, and kept quiet about the incident. My motivation for doing so was simple: I needed the opportunity, and he, being much more established and powerful, could easily take it away.
As the #MeToo movement has shown over the last few weeks, sexual harassment pervades every aspect of women's personal and professional lives. It's a spectrum that ranges from sexual predation on one end, where even physical assault on campus can be excused if the perpetrator fits the right profile, to more insidious instances of gender micro-aggressions on the other.
You would be hard pressed to find a woman who hasn't experienced them. The boys at university who rank their classmates in terms of physical attractiveness and other acts of harmless 'locker room banter'. The man who speaks over his female colleague in meetings. The C-Suite executive who believes nothing can be done about the lack of female representation in upper management because he assumes women don't want the responsibility. Many men don't realise they're engaging in biased behaviour, let alone understand how their participation reinforces gender discrimination or, in the most extreme of cases, encourages sexual assault.
Plenty has been written on gender inequality in the workplace. Study after study across various professional industries has shown women are less likely to get interviews and less likely to get hired. If a woman is fortunate enough to be offered a job, she's less likely to get a promotion and more likely to be seen as abrasive if she asks for one. It often feels like there's nowhere to go. Where indeed, when those at the top are overwhelmingly men? Among the largest publicly listed companies in the European Union (EU-28) in 2016, only 15% of executives and 5% of CEOs are women. And in the same year, women's representation in senior management actually declined in the UK, with only 21% of companies employing them in these roles.
Gender bias is systemic and often unconscious, and even women are guilty of it. To eradicate it, we need to do more than just call out individual men for their worst acts of violence. We need to challenge the system's smallest offences. How? Promote women. And I don't just mean in rank. It's true that more women in senior roles would change the power culture that so many people face at work. But to help them get there, we need a different kind of promotion: advocacy.
A woman's success isn't always limited by outright discrimination, but often a lack of opportunity to demonstrate competency. A 2017 report from McKinsey & Co shows that women are less likely to receive challenging assignments, get feedback, and have access to senior staff. These are simple changes. Pay attention to the voices dominating a meeting. Ask women for their opinions, and don't interrupt when they offer them. If a woman on your team has an idea, give her credit, or better yet, the chance to present her work to leadership.
Until we foster workplaces where women are encouraged to succeed, they will continue to enter into, and stay in, situations that are uncomfortable and potentially unsafe. If we check our biases and actively promote women, perhaps one day #MeToo can lose its connotations to sexual assault and instead reference inclusivity in the workplace.