ABSTRACT
Despite decades of work in almost every industry on gender and diversity training, scores of policies, laws and regulations, and legions of gender advisors and specialists, in recent years cases of sexual harassment, abuse and exploitation have rocketed to centre stage in organisations as diverse as mainstream media corporations, the United Nations, international NGOs and government agencies. These persistent abuses can be explained by power dynamics that maintain a toxic alchemy of institutional power, which is elaborated in this chapter as having four key dimensions: (a) patriarchal norms of discrimination deeply embedded in institutions; (b) rules maintained by a culture of silence that particularly affects women; (c) the treatment of cases of gender discrimination and sexual harassment as isolated and individual events; and (d) the absence of systemic accountability and transparency. To address this toxic alchemy, the Gender at Work Framework draws attention to the systemic changes needed to secure women’s rights and gender equality, with a particular focus on how to transform discriminatory social norms and deep structures of institutional power.
