Is sexism on the rise?

Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney was belittled by a government minister. Photo / Getty

Why aren't women respected at work? Amal Clooney is not the only woman to suffer from the misogyny of male workers, finds Victoria Lambert.

This has not been a great week to be a working woman. A mushroom cloud of retro-sexism appears to have bloomed above the country, as though the derogatory attitudes we thought had been left in the Eighties have, all along, simply been simmering underground, waiting to re-emerge.

How else to explain the belittling of leading human rights counsel Amal Clooney by a government minister; the exposure of a City trading company where women were rated as sex objects; and the misogynistic abuse and death threats engendered by young barrister Charlotte Proudman's public complaint about a senior lawyer's leering email?

Women have been told for years that we must achieve on merit; having done so, it turns out being the best is no longer good enough - as Mrs Clooney must also wonder. Despite two degrees in law from Oxford and New York University, and an illustrious pre-marital career working for the International Court of Justice, the UN and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, she is only in constant demand for "high-profile cases" on account of her Hollywood husband, according to Justice Minister Edward Faulks QC. Lord Faulks has since heartily apologised for his comments, but there's no doubt he's not the only one to hold such opinions.

Last summer, the Associated Press described her in a tweet as "Amal Clooney, actor's wife". When it comes to hard-fought-for workplace equality, it's hard to escape the discomfiting sense that men are now moving the goalposts.

An apt idiom, as this week also saw Clarissa Farr, high mistress of St Paul's Girls' School, in London, attack private boys' schools for turning out young men with sexist attitudes. She revealed that her former pupils are quitting top jobs with "some of the most sought-after companies in the country" in order to escape a laddish culture that includes endless football banter and sexist remarks.

Workplaces, perhaps, like investment bank Jefferies International Ltd, where Dalal Belghiti, a female trader claiming pounds 3.5 million for sex discrimination, alleges that bankers made "bids" for good-looking women and labelled those deemed less attractive as "offers only".

These attitudes are more prevalent in the workplace than one might like to think, according to a new survey of 2,000 British women by Stylist magazine. It found that two in five women have been "expected" to make the tea and endured sexist innuendos from colleagues; a third have had their appearance commented on or been accused of being pre-menstrual; and a quarter have been joked about in a sexist way or patronised in meetings.

Most staggering, though, 87 per cent believe that they have been passed over for promotion because of their gender.

For Heidy Rehman, a top-ranked financial stock analyst in the City, this was what finally drove her to quit the large American investment bank where she had worked for 13 years, to set up Rose & Willard, an ethical and feminist British womenswear brand in 2013.

"My boss told me I was his best-performing analyst," she says. "Yet I knew I was being paid less than my male peers, and I was passed over for promotion. It was so frustrating."

Whenever Rehman brought the issue up, she was told: "Next year's your year." But she admits: "I thought, 'I can't keep doing this. What can I do in another year that I haven't already achieved?"'

Rehman was already well-versed in having to stand up to casual sexism. "If I answered a colleague's phone (which we all did, regardless of gender, as you don't want to lose a client), I could expect to be treated as a secretary because I was a woman. That drove me up the wall, and I often called men out on it.

"You have to deal with these situations assertively. But I knew it would have been futile to go to HR about pay inequality. Complaining doesn't go down well."

The monarch of assertiveness, of course, is Karren Brady, now Baroness Brady, whose response to a disrespectful junior became legendary. On her first match day, the then 23-year-old managing director of Birmingham City Football Club was challenged by one of her own footballers.

He said, "I can see your t--- in that top", to which she retorted cheerfully: "Well, don't worry - when I sell you to Crewe, you won't be able to see them from there."

Perhaps the shortage of women like Baroness Brady in senior roles - currently there are only six women that are FTSE 100 CEOs and female representation only accounts for 23.5 per cent of available board positions at these companies - can be ascribed to institutionalised misogyny, as new research from Columbia Business School in New York concluded earlier this year.

The study killed off the myth of women known as Queen Bees - jealously guarding their positions from usurpers of their own sex. Instead, said the team, the most likely explanation for the failure of more women to reach the boardroom is down to a desire among men to lock them out.

"Women face an implicit quota, whereby firms seek to maintain a small number of women on their top management team, usually only one," the authors concluded.

One of the key problems for women taking up leadership positions, warns Katie Lee, managing director of communications agency Gravity Road, is that "we are expected to earn respect when we are appointed, whereas men get respected because they have been appointed. That can be frustrating."

Another subtle point is that Lee, like many senior women, is an inveterate note-taker in meetings:

"Every female director I know turns up with a Moleskine notebook and a pen, whereas men grab a sheet of old paper on the way in or don't bother at all."

This puts women into the role of administrators or secretaries. Yet it seems supremely unprofessional to me that you wouldn't take notes on everything your client is saying. I train all my junior staff - both genders - to take notes all the time, and I can feel some of the men bristle initially."

As Rehman points out, pay inequality is the clearest quantifiable indicator that sexism is still alive in the workplace. According to the Fawcett Society, the overall pay gap stands at 19.1 per cent (2014), measured by median gross hourly pay.

Actor Sienna Miller highlighted the problem last week when she revealed that she had turned down a role in a two-person play on Broadway, as she was offered less than half her male colleague's pay.

In an interview with Vogue, Miller said: "The producer wouldn't pay equally. He wouldn't pay me within a million miles of what the male actor was being paid. The only way is to make a stand. We are going to have to make sacrifices to make change. I want to turn up and feel dignified."

A struggle Sacha Romanovitch, the new CEO of Grant Thornton, and the first female boss of a major City accountancy firm, recalls from her early days of training. "At networking events, you'd walk into a room of 200 men, with just a scattering of women, and be aware you were being looked up and down," she says.

"It was really quite intimidating, being assessed for something that wasn't about my work ability, and I think it still does happen to younger women." Rehman believes change will come, but more effort needs to be focused across business into improving talent "pipelines" - channels that take female graduates from their first jobs all the way to the director's office.

Now an MD herself, she finally has the chance to put her morals where her mouth is: "I don't want to perpetuate the domineering stereotype: the idea that women bosses are either weak or bitches, and there is nothing in between. I hire and promote women on merit."

Fiona Hathorn, a former investment director and senior asset manager for Old Mutual and Hill Samuel, who now runs the social enterprise Women on Boards, believes these recent bursts of retro-sexism are, in effect, growing pains - with women's steady gains in the workplace reflected in men's unease at suddenly having to compete harder to get to the top.

"Many companies today, like Lloyds, RBS and PwC, have set targets for gender diversity at senior manager, executive director and board level," she says. And while she accepts some perceive unfairness in such quotas, she counters: "Disgruntled men are misinformed men.

"Seventy per cent of new FTSE board appointments are still going to men. Yes, it is probably more competitive for men today - but so it should be."