Bullish columns appear monthly on The Daily Muse. Additional articles from Jennifer are also appearing on DailyWorth, Medium, and here on GetBullish.
Let’s say you’re a feminist.
And you don’t exactly work in a feminist workplace.
Maybe you see some shit happening that shouldn’t be happening.
What do you do?
(Note: because non-intersectional feminism is no feminism at all, this article will talk about what individuals can do to combat sexism, racism, and all forms of discrimination.)
This post—the minutes from a Feminists at Work salon—contains some suggestions about calling out sexism, as well as about the self-care you may need to persevere in a hostile workplace.
But this post by C.V. Harquail on Authentic Organizations highlights some of the problems with explicitly talking about issues of concern to feminists:
Any time I bring this up as a woman’s issue, it gets marginalized and put in a corner because women are a “special case.”
Any time I bring this up as a women’s concern, people disregard it and tell me that this isn’t a business issue.
We don’t want that.
You can’t be effective as a feminist if people around you consider feminism to be some kind of quirky special interest you have, one basically irrelevant to business—as in, you’re into feminism and your co-worker is into bluegrass, and those two things are of equal importance.
