Abstract
This chapter is an investigation of the place of emotions in the workplace and the dangers of silencing and “shutting up.” Mayock addresses here the questions of agency in speech, “talk” as work, emotional intelligence, silence as assertion of power, and shutting up as a coping mechanism. Silence is viewed as an element of gender shrapnel and, thus, as a negative influence on workplace dynamics. New terms introduced in this chapter include “professional rubbernecking,” “rhetorical anorexia,” and “professional ventriloquism.”
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Anita Hill has since become one of the leading legal scholars on sexual discrimination and harassment in the workplace. See her essay “Thomas versus Clinton” for a fascinating look at the state of the public discussion and the law in the early to mid-1990s. In addition, see the 2014 documentary Anita. Speaking Truth to Power for a more contemporary view of the Hill–Thomas case and its consequences.
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See De Welde’s and Stepnick’s Disrupting the Culture of Silence. Confronting Gender Inequality and Making Change in Higher Education (17 essays from a variety of viewpoints) for a thorough examination of gender inequality and silence in the Academy.
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In “Sexual Harassment: A Problem Shielded by Silence,” Kathy Hotelling emphasizes the association of sexual harassment with silence: “In 1978 the Project on the Status and Education of Women (1978) called sexual harassment on campuses a ‘hidden issue.’ In many ways, despite the prevalence reports, court cases, establishment of policies and procedures, and other publicity, sexual harassment remains an invisible and elusive problem because its victims are extremely hesitant to report its occurrence to a university official. For example, Adams, Kottke, and Padgitt (1983) found that none of the victims that they surveyed reported their experiences. Only 4% of the participants of Johnson and Shuman’s (1983) study reported incidents to a department head or other administrator, and 20% told a faculty member. Singer (1989) surveyed deans and directors of graduate programs in social work and found that while 54% of these administrators had knowledge of sexual harassment occurring at their schools within the last 5 years, only 22% of the situations were reported directly to them” (499). This phenomenon is particularly distressing when we consider that those who do report often have a negative experience, thereby retrenching the no-reporting tendency and further sullying, through the rarity of reporting, the professional names and reputations of complainants.
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See Cheryl Glenn’s Unbroken: A Rhetoric of Silence for an outstanding treatment of gendered power dynamics in the varied silences we create.
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See Sexual Harassment. Theory, Research, and Treatment (Ed. William O’Donohue) for a thorough discussion of sexual harassment and its effects on those who have experienced it.
- 6.
The UC Hastings College of the Law Center for WorkLife Law created in 2009 a game titled “Gender Bias Bingo.” Individuals who submit stories pertaining to three of the nine squares on the bingo card receive a free T-shirt. The areas for submission include “Double Binds” (sanctions for self-promotion, hostile prescriptive bias), “Maternal Wall” (attribution bias, role incongruity), “Double Jeopardy” (intersectionality; women who experience bias that is shaped by their race as well as their sex), “Prove-It-Again!” (leniency bias, recall bias), “Gender Wars” (conflict, rather than support, among women), “Frigid Climate for Fathers” (discrimination against fathers in an active parenting role). Many of the stories submitted reveal how in some workplaces, “now it means something because he said it.” Joan C. Williams, of the Gender Bias Bingo project, and Rachel Dempsey have organized the project into an extremely useful book titled What Works for Women at Work. Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know. I would argue that working women and men need to know the four patterns analyzed in the book (“Prove-It-Again!,” “Tightrope” [double bind in prescriptive bias], “Maternal Wall,” and “Tug of War” [balance between assimilation and resistance to gendered norms in the workplace]).
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In his article “Faking It for the Dean,” Carl Elliott cites the term “bureaucratic plagiarism” (coined by Gavin Moodie) to talk about how often in colleges and universities, thoughts, ideas, and projects are committed to paper by an anonymous underling and then used by employees in communications and/or by upper-level administrators.
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Mayock, E. (2016). On Emotion, Silence, and Shutting Up. In: Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50830-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50830-0_7
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