I don't know how she does it

The Liberal-Democratic party is to put a proposal to its conference next month that MPs be allowed to job-share in a bid to entice more women into Parliament. The Lib-Dems have only 12% of their Parliamentary Party female, compared with around 20% for the House as a whole. The other parties have also long acknowleged this as a problem, and Prime Minister David Cameron (Conservative have around 17%) emphasised his concern yesterday on his trip to India.The peculiar tensions between work and home that are raised by a career in politics was aired in the last episode of the second series of Danish TV drama Borgen, and for careers more generally by the feature film I don't know how she does it.

Class this week looked at the issue of sexual harassment, through a viewing of clips from 1994 film Disclosure and Jo Brewis 1998 article on the issue of "recombinant packing" that its eroticisation of sexual harassment propagates, despite the veracity of some of its narrative. The issues of women harassing males came to light again last year as Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks. The background here is that with the American workforce becoming majority female (51%) for the first time, and the number of women in management jobs having doubled between 1983 and 2002, the number of harassment and discrimination suits filed by men has also shot up. Does power indeed corrupt? If you have do you inevitably abuse it? A more non-eroticised look at male harassing behaviour, its normalisation and the difficulties surrounding its reception and interpretation can be found in the first 1.30 minutes of Girls. A more humorous look, that nevertheless has a serious undertone, at female harassing behaviour, which is ironically perhaps a better representation of the discomforted male reaction than that in Disclosure, appears in Horrible Bosses.

One of the elements of the argument in Disclosure is that organizational cultures can facilitate sexist behaviour without necessarily having the explicit intention of doing so. In other words, sexism can become taken for granted as normal, part of having a sense of humour etc. The website Everyday Sexism invites readers contributions of examples (mostly tweeted) and makes interesting food for thought. More elaborate, the controversial Unilad site, aimed at future opinion-formers, knowledge disseminators and shapers of practice, claims to be humorous and ironic, but critics have accused its defenders of being disingenuous, arguing that there is nothing beyond its banner disclaimer that encourages such a reading. Even Facebook has been accused of condoning violent attitudes, and even violence, towards women. Is this just over-zealous political correctness by people who have no sense of humour, or something more serious that really threatens equality in the 21st century workplace?