You don’t have to go to Donald Trump’s America to see misogyny

While it is dispiriting to be reminded of the difficulties for women at work and at play, so to speak, it is simply unacceptable to ignore the violent reality faced by many women in their own homes, writes Clodagh Finn

IF the word of 2016 is ‘post-truth’, as the Oxford Dictionary says it is, then the image of the year could well be that unsettling picture of Donald Trump prowling behind his opponent Hillary Clinton during the second presidential debate.

The footage, showing a suited, white businessman pacing, menacingly, to and fro as his female rival tried to carry on regardless, contains within it an awful but sadly recognisable truth.

The posturing was designed to distract, to undermine, to thwart the woman speaking within the rules and within her own legitimate space.

As another Hilary — Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel — so brilliantly summed it up: “It was the indecent mimicry of what has happened at some point to almost every woman.”

The president-elect’s display of supremacy was caricatural. His act — let’s give him the benefit of the doubt — was overblown and cartoonish, yet it rang completely true because the hovering shadow of a dominant male presence features, in some way, in every woman’s life.

Sometimes she ignores it. Sometimes she apes it. Sometimes she cringes from it. Sometimes she even fights it. But it is always, always there.

This week, there was a discouraging abundance of examples to prove that point. You don’t have to go all the way to the US to see what misogyny looks like — it is alive and well and present in every single corner of Irish society.

Let’s start with the workplace. A new survey repeated what we know already: Irish women continue to earn 20%, or €12,500, less than men doing the same job. The study, by recruitment firm Morgan McKinley, also found that the pay gap widens with the number of years’ experience women have. How utterly depressing is that?

At the very least, you can measure the pay disparity. How many women have also experienced an enduring sexism in the workplace that is difficult to quantify, too seemingly trivial to name? It’s in the maleness of the boardrooms, the language at meetings, the loud, throaty laugh of the boss.

Sometimes that boss might even be female but — whisper it — some of the women who make it to the top do so by becoming more sexist and more rigid than many of those in the male-dominated culture that has produced them.

Try to switch off from work and you’ll find that women are also underrepresented and underpaid in the world of the arts.

This week, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor made that point loud and clear when he told of his first-hand experience of the difficulties faced by women actors, including his wife, Claire Cox. He said women in the industry are paid less, have fewer role choices, and endure constant scrutiny about their looks.

He was speaking at an event to mark a year of campaigning by #WakingTheFeminists, the movement set up to protest at the shameful lack of women in the Abbey Theatre’s 1916 commemorate programme.

Over the last 10 years, not one of the top theatre organisations has achieved equality among its directors, authors, cast, or designers, according to #WakingTheFeminists research.

The three worst offenders? The Abbey, the Gate, and the Dublin Theatre Festival, though at least now the Gate has a female director in Selina Cartmell.

As Vaughan-Lawlor said, if you exclude women, the conversation starts to get very narrow.

“If you are acting in a predominantly male company you start to crave a female energy to work with, to respond to, and to bring out the colours in our sensibility,” he said.

How well articulated. Here’s to striving for an entertainment industry in full Technicolor.

While it is dispiriting to be reminded of the difficulties for women at work and at play, so to speak, it is simply unacceptable to ignore the violent reality faced by many women in their own homes. That terrifying reality was put into words in the stories and statistics that emerged from the Safe Ireland conference during the week.

Of course, men suffer domestic violence too, but the focus of this conference was on the issues relating to gender-based violence against women and children. Here is one sample of what is happening in homes around Ireland today: One in eight pregnant women has been attacked in her own home, according to the master of the National Maternity Hospital, Rhona Mahony.

She said such attacks were “particularly common” and that pregnant women were more likely to be assaulted in the abdomen than the face.

Too many women, pregnant or otherwise, know what the threat of violence in the supposed safety of your own home feels like but for the smug among us who tend to turn a blind eye, the words of one victim in an anonymous letter to Ryan Tubridy must surely shake us out of indifference.

She wrote of the shredding of her soul, of the beatings that almost rendered her to dust, of the violence that changes “your judgment capacity, your self-belief, and your resilience”.

Here’s the bit that explains why many women feel trapped in their own homes: “Leaving the man that beat you senseless is an incredibly painful metamorphosis — the new world that you now live in is very, very difficult.”

Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald said a proposed domestic violence bill, designed to make the justice system more victim-centred, will be published in this Dáil term. That is to be welcomed, but it’s clear the issues facing women are deep-rooted and complex.

Back to that picture of a skulking Trump. How much passion was ignited in all the women who saw that debate? How many of us shook an angry fist at the TV and said, ‘Give the woman a chance, give her some space just to be’?

Many more are fearful of what will happen now Trump is on his way to the White House. If only we could admit it is already happening now — and all around us.