I’m writing in response to Gaby Hinsliff’s column (White men are apparently terrified of doing the wrong thing at work. I have some advice, 26 May). I was sexually assaulted at work by a man twice my age – my boss. I reported it to my company and to the police. I pursued legal justice. I spoke openly about what had happened. And I lost my job and haven’t worked since.
This isn’t from a lack of trying. I would love to be working again. I’m a well-educated woman in my 30s – I have a postgraduate degree, I’ve worked for the Foreign Office and the BBC, I speak Arabic and French. I’ve been working since I was 13. Even as I changed countries and careers in my 20s, I was never unemployed – until now.
I’ve applied for hundreds of roles. I’ve networked. Nothing sticks. My hunch is that when prospective employers Google me and find my name linked to a story of sexual violence at work, the conclusion is swift: she’s trouble, or she’s troubled. The great irony is that I believe I’m far less trouble or troubled than I would be had I stayed silent – this stuff festers if you swallow it. Speaking up wasn’t about getting my own back and it wasn’t about wallowing. I made an impossibly hard choice to protect my dignity. Women should be allowed to work without betraying themselves to get it.
I agree with Gaby that some of the anxiety that Tim Samuels identifies is real, but it should be some relief to those behind the YouTube show that he presents, White Men Can’t Work!, that, time and time again, men who are called out for bad behaviour in the workplace bounce back. It’s the women who had the courage to call them out who suffer the devastating professional fallout.
If you publish this, please keep me anonymous, as my days of believing it’s empowering to speak up are long gone.
Name and address supplied
• It’s easy to sneer about white men being discriminated against at work. But I’ve been in precisely that situation myself on two occasions – once in a civil service department and once at a charity. On both occasions, the discrimination, which was humiliating and hurtful, was perpetrated by white women in positions of power. I suppose I could have just accepted it, as Gaby Hinsliff suggests, by acknowledging that others suffered much more (which was undoubtedly true), but I felt forced to leave the job instead. The experience has had a profound and lasting effect on my health.
Name and address supplied
• What I find objectionable in Gaby Hinsliff’s piece is the treatment of white men as some kind of homogeneous group. As if the combination of whiteness and maleness alone confer privilege. Some white men are indeed very privileged and have a sense of that privilege being diminished, as Ms Hinsliff suggests. Other white men are very far from privileged.
White males are greatly overrepresented among those failing at school, among the homeless living on the streets, among those injured and killed in industrial accidents or through self-destructive reckless behaviour, among the isolated and lonely, and among those who take their own lives.
Hinsliff writes: “So if white men genuinely don’t think work is working for them, welcome to the club, boys. Just don’t forget that some of us have been here rather longer than you.” For many white working-class men (and black men too), it’s not just work – the education system, the criminal justice system and social structures have never worked for them. They don’t need to be told to check their privilege.
Graeme Booth
Canterbury
