No More Gas Lighting on Harassment, Workplace Aggression and Periods with Dr. Kate Clancy
Credits: Fred Zwicky (photo) and @styledstocksociety (graphic)
In This Episode…
Hello Privilege commentary (Chelsea Handler's Netflix doc) 2:22
Kate's research on periods and gender/workplace harassment 6:00
How her menstrual cycle research turned into advocacy against harassment 10:51
The National Academies 12:34
Her testimony in front of Congress 14:12
The real, lasting effects of harassment 19:51
Solutions for harassment 26:02
The Period Podcast, and your forthcoming book! 33:40
Kate's forthcoming book, "Life Blood" 37:02
Success is... 39:49
What advice would you give your younger self? 43:07
Key Points
The outside world affects how the inside body works— how much you eat, how much you move around, whether you've had a cold recently, how much psychological stress you're experiencing. Psychosocial stress impacts the hormones in our body, for example how frequently we menstruate or whether we ovulate. The problem is the environment— a bad relationship, a stressful job, and systemic oppression, racial microaggressions, harassment at work. Those things are going to affect you mentally and make it harder for you to get good work done, but it turns out they really affect your body too might make it harder for you to get pregnant, it might make you have more painful periods, it might make you have more irregular periods, and so on. Folks who are more likely to be oppressed, or experienced different types of harassment or microaggressions are also they're less likely to be believed when they try to explain these things.
Sexual harassment is harassment that is due to gender. What constitutes over 90% of the sexual harassment that people face at work are put downs, physical intimidation and threats. And there's this expectation that we're constantly nurturing, smiling, and available to make other people feel good. And if you don't, they call you a derogatory name, and then maybe they follow it up with a worse form of sexual harassment. And sometimes race is brought into it, and it becomes racialized gender harassment, because that's expressly pulling on a particular stereotype, it's identifying someone's race, as well as making a sexual comment about that person. LGBTQ harassment is invoking someone's sexuality or mocking someone's sexuality or making them feel like that sexuality isn't welcome.
What You Can Do
If people strongly want to report, they should. And increasingly, there are ways in which the reporting process is improving, so that they can actually do an informal mediation if it's like a low level behavior where you want someone to stop inappropriate comments or behaviors that make you feel uncomfortable. Often these cases do not get reported because people don't know how to report it.
There are places that are creating restorative and transformative justice processes, and mediated processes that allow you to have conversations around these low level behaviors where you as the person experiencing them get to identify what you want to have happen (the behavior to stop). Unfortunately, the vast majority of the research into sexual harassment has shown that reporting tends to make things worse. Often, even when the harassed person wins their case, they still leave the company because of the morale and environment shifting thereafter.
We must change this idea that the victim has the responsibility of fixing the problem right when the problem is the culture, the perpetrator and the infrastructure. We do this with leadership training, bystander intervention training and allied justice trainings and interventions so everyone knows how to respond and support the person(s) being harassed. We need to all become more responsible for our communities and figure out how can we better take care of each other.
When we think about culture, leaders can really make the difference. If you are a boss with people reporting to you, think about what it would look like to be more intentional in the kind of culture you create. Just because you have some tenets listed in your mission statement doesn't mean everyone will fall in line with it. You have to think about how explicitly you can model your values, what behaviors are positive, and what kind of guidelines are expected in terms of professional conduct, as well as model the kinds of consequences there might be for when things do think people do things that aren't right. Leaders must recognize how much responsibility they bear and that it's not the victims responsibility to bring this to your attention. It's your responsibility to not make the culture one that allows people to act that way to begin with.
Connect
Dr. Kathryn Clancy is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. Dr. Clancy’s research, teaching, and service all focus in varying ways on reproductive justice. Broadly speaking she is interested in how environmental stressors (e.g., those related to energetics, immune function, and psychosocial stress) influence the reproductive functioning of women and gender minorities. At the macro level this means looking at the major stressors that might influence reproductive functioning, such as sexual harassment. At the micro level this means exploring the inflammatory mechanisms that mediate the relationship between many stressors and reproduction.
Dr. Clancy’s research had broad implications for the public and for science: she has provided Congressional testimony, co-authored a National Academies report on sexual harassment of women in STEM, and now serves on the Advisory Board of the National Academies Action Collaborative to Address Sexual Harassment in Academia. Clancy was named one of Nature’s “10 most influential scientists” in 2013, and received the Gender Equity Award from the American Anthropological Association in 2018.
Much of her public intellectual work takes place online, with a popular Twitter feed at @KateClancy, a website and blog at www.kateclancy.com, and Period Podcast, a podcast about women and gender minority health. Clancy is under contract with Princeton University Press for a book on the evolutionary medicine of the menstrual cycle, forthcoming in 2020. She has two extraordinary daughters who are perfect exactly as they are.
Resources
Samantha Fitts’ interview (Daree referred to at 39:10)