Challenging sexism with humour gives minister a pass to tell it like it is

YOU’VE got to hand it to Kathleen Lynch. She tells it like it is. A few people in politics have tried that approach, to transient public and media acclaim and speedy career dissolution. But the minister of state at the Department of Health always gets a free pass.

About a year ago, I was due to speak after her keynote address at a conference about women, power, and influence. She snuck in a door down at the back I had snuck through minutes earlier, and we lurked together there until called upon. Whispering, I asked her how long her speech was. She rolled her eyes and produced an official document which, judging by the numbers of pages, would have had us all there until sundown. Then she stuffed the official speech into her handbag, handed me the handbag to mind, headed to the platform, and — sans script, sans notes, sans even a card — did a stunning oration.

On Friday’s The Late Late Show, the same woman said something that was described by Ryan Tubridy as “male bashing”. Outrageous, she was. She said, first of all, that women suffer guilt. Guilt about not doing enough for their mother, about not doing enough for their father, about not having the house clean enough, about not having dinner on the table, hot and piping, every day for the kids.

Tubridy fair-mindedly asked her if women have a monolopy on guilt-feelings. Yes, she said. They do. What about the New Man? Tubridy asked. Her response suggested that the New Man was in a chemistry tube somewhere in an early stage in the process of development. This was an OMG moment, but was she going to stop there? Nope. She announced that she was a people-watcher, preparatory to sharing some of the fruits of the people-watching.

“What I find about men in Leinster House is that the newly-married young men — everything’s great and full of spice and then they have the first baby and all of a sudden they’re up in Leinster House at 10 o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, not at five, because it’s their only opportunity to get a night’s sleep.”

The audience roared laughing and the programme moved on. See what I mean about a free pass? If a male politician had said the equivalent about his female colleagues, up in arms, they’d have been, just as Mary Lou got good and mad at Ruairi Quinn when he made a satirical comment about her being motherly. Kathleen, on the other hand, got away with it. She got away with it, because she made no particular negative judgement out of the observation, but she got away with it, more importantly, because she deployed what is thin on the ground when it comes to challenging sexism, and that’s humour.

For far too long, too many women, facing sexism in the workplace, have deployed outrage, reproach, and a range of responses including the legal and the pompous, rather than starting with humour. Making a sexist look ridiculous in front of their colleagues while leaving them an escape hatch is much more likely to make them think again about patting someone on the bottom or making an inappropriate comment than lecturing them about how offensive they are being.

Humour works. Up to a point. I still encounter women who have finally reached the point of wanting to go legal about not being promoted within heavily male-dominated organisations. They come to me bearing evidence. They can prove they have credentials superior to those of men who have been promoted to jobs they went for. They can prove they have experience which matches or exceeds that of the lads who got the job. What they can’t prove is that unspoken prejudices have been shared about them those prejudices transmitted by shrugs, by eyes rolled to heaven, and by inflection. Inflection? Inflection is what can subvert legally-safe language. Take this sentence: “Oh, she’s very efficient.” Nobody could misunderstand that sentence, right? Wrong.

Any good voice coach could train you so that this exact sentence can be delivered in ways that convey a quite different — and quite contrary — meaning than it delivers in print. It’s not complicated. Put an upward inflection and an unseen question mark at the end of it, for example, so it goes “Oh, she’s very efficient?” Do that and the immediate implication is that, based on your long personal experience of this individual, efficiency is the very last characteristic you would associate with her. You do not have to say anything negative, and, were the conversation to be recorded and transcribed, nothing in the printed version would indicate anything other than a proper desire to be informed.

An alternative is to inflect the word with implied italics. “Oh, she’s very efficient...” Put that into your tone and the implication — the perhaps inescapable implication — is that, while the individual may demonstrate box-ticking efficiency, she is, at the same time, volatile, without vision and thick as a plank. Hesitating just before the use of the word “efficient” can send a similar message.

The point here is that an ostensibly simple comment made to an impartial outsider on an interview panel can prejudice their thinking. That can happen accidentally or deliberately, and women in male-dominated organisations who believe they are — even now — discriminated against when it comes to promotion would maintain that such deliberate negatives are frequently used to queer their chances. No matter how much some of us despise quotas, the fact is that insisting that a third of a party’s candidates in an election be female cuts right across that kind of wink and nod exclusion tactics.

WITH luck, diligence, and talent, women then not only get into Leinster House but eventually into senior ministries. At which point, of course, sexism no longer applies. It was nonetheless interesting, in this context, that when Frances Fitzgerald was appointed to succeed Alan Shatter, coverage included particular words to sum up the contrast between them. Some of those words were provably accurate and relate to their personalities, which are about as unalike as it is possible to be. One of the recurring themes, however, was that Ms Fitzgerald was not an intellectual. Now, “intellectual” can be defined in several ways, one of the more pleasing being “Someone who has found something in life more interesting than sex and alcohol”. But it’s generally taken as meaning someone of considerable academic clout, which suggests that Ms Fitzgerald’s master’s degree from the London School of Economics in some unspecified way doesn’t cut it. Or that social work, as a professional activity, requires less use of synapses and neurons than working as a solicitor does.

Or possibly — just possibly — that if you are a woman, qualifying for the flattering description of “intellectual” might be a bit harder than if you are a man. Kathleen Lynch, please address.