As Mary Portas, author of Work Like a Woman demonstrates, flexibility in the workplace can begin to be a means of achieving substantive equality.
“We looked at all the women in their thirties in the office and thought, how can we make a policy that won’t put them in the back of the queue just for going off and having a child? Then we looked at the men and thought, how can we empower them to say, I’m taking today off to look after my child?”
Sixty hour work weeks and kids, for example, has always been much more possible for straight white blokes with partners at home who take care of children and run the house. There’s an enormous degree to which traditional, inflexible workplaces, and progression within them, continue to operate on that model.
If you’re a woman, a person of colour, a member of a minority, a single parent, you’re not binary or straight, you have a disability, or some combination of these attributes describes you, then you really can’t compete in the alpha cultures we’ve all experienced that workplaces can be.
Brittany Packnett, an American educator, activist and writer says “It’s not merely that some days I experience racism and some days I experience sexism. Rather it is that oppression shows up differently for me than it does for black men and white women…” Packnett goes on to say that women of colour don’t want to be “helped to handle the hardships”, but rather that we must dismantle them.
Celeste Liddle writes (heartbreakingly) of the oppression she and other indigenous Australian women face “I felt continually limited and ridiculed by virtue of my race and sex and therefore considered the oppressions interconnected and to be contested together.”
As we read it, unless we ask questions about the experience of our workplaces for employees of all backgrounds, and unless we provide flexibility that meets those diverse needs, we run the enormous risk of losing out on the talent and insights that diversity offers and winding up with an office full of Barnaby Joyces who have been promoted on the basis of “merit”.
