Some of you may have been surprised to wake up yesterday to discover the British workplace is a den of sexual, misogynistic iniquity, in which more than half of all women are said to have been victims of harassment.
Hundreds of breathless reports burst forth in lock step, trumpeting the lead statistic that 52% of all working women have been “sexually harassed” in the course of their careers. The #harassedatwork hashtag filled social media with troubling anecdotes.
The report, put out by the Trades Union Congress and the Everyday Sexism project, was described as “alarming” and “ugly” – but the thrust of its argument is barely supported by its own data.
In order for the 52% statistic to stand up, the survey relies on a remarkably broad definition of “sexual harassment”, which includes overhearing “comments of a sexual nature about women in general” and any kind of joke linked to sex.
It also divides incidents into two time periods – the first is “in the last twelve months”, and the second includes everything else ever, under the label “more than twelve months ago”.
Here are the results in full:
According to this definition, a sexist joke overheard in 1986 would be sufficient evidence to label the nation’s workplaces hotspots for harassment 30 years later.
As the survey shows, barely 10% of women (second bar from left) can recall even eavesdropping on sexual conversation in the past year, while just over 5% (rightmost bar) say they personally have been objectified in the last year.
In the results there is – obviously – a hard core of unacceptable behaviour, some of it criminal, that needs to be dealt with.
Meanwhile, by sloppily piling together everything untoward ever and wrapping it up as “sexual harassment in the workplace”, the likes of the TUC get lots of horrified gasps from the pundit class, but tank their credibility with the general public.
And it gives a comparative free pass to other places where the working conditions of women are truly in need of attention.
Among the outlets triumphing in the TUC’s survey results were Al-Arabiya – run by the government of Saudi Arabia, which bans women from driving, Pulse, an outlet from Nigeria, the world capital of female genital mutilation, and Pakistan Today, who might more usually cover stories like that of Qandeel Baloch, the woman killed by her brother for taking selfies.
But so long as the likes of Emma Watson can visibly wallow in Britain’s moral depravity, who cares about that?