Strong women still being held back by sexism

Add to the list the words hormonal, hysterical, mumsy, high maintenance, Feminazi... they’re all words UK women want banned from day-to-day vocabulary, according to a study released last week.

They feel patronised when male colleagues call them ‘Honey’ or ‘Gorgeous’ and a third of women aged 16-24 are furious that have been told to ‘man up’ in the workplace.

They also hate it when female colleagues call them ‘doll’ or ‘babe’ because it’s also patronising and belittling.

At work, I’ve been called a fair few names other than my birth name, including “the blonde bimbo” behind my back when I was the editor of a group of newspapers and my colleagues informed me who was saying that out of my hearing.

Perhaps the fact that he thought he should be in the editor’s chair instead of me, at the time aged 29, helped him justify his patronising put-down in his own mind.

This was also a man who referred to his own wife as the “domestic engineer”, which says it all about him, really.

Stereotyped as both thick and available to men simply because I have blonde hair was a staple insult for most of my early career, when I was in my late teens and 20s.

As a teenager, I was wolf-whistled and touched up in public in the street by men who were strangers, so in a way I had become used to it and accepted it as the norm by the time I started work at 18, in an era when men thought they had the right of access to anyone they wanted.

Male colleagues, including my bosses, assumed I had the morals of a Page Three model and the brains to match – and they were eager to take advantage of a teenager in a junior position.

I should have known what to expect the moment I walked into the office, because its walls were plastered with pictures of topless girls.

I was regularly groped in the office until I made the perpetrator stop – by force - despite fearing for my job because he was my boss.

Another boss, married with children and a good 25 years older than me, cornered me at a fancy dress Christmas party in the office and, trapping me with his arms, tried to snog me and grope me.

I was rescued by another colleague, who was dressed as an elephant and lumbered over to release me from his clutches.

These are just a couple of snapshots of my workplace experiences 30 years ago when ‘no’ simply wasn’t good enough to deter many men, who just thought it was a come on and how could I possibly want to resist their advances?

Even today, British women say they feel their strength as a female is undermined four times a day, according to the study, which is part of a new campaign from Special K inspiring inner strength in women.

A strong woman is viewed negatively, believe 51 [er cent of Brits, and two-thirds of women want to see women described more often as confident, resilient and courageous.

Campaign ambassador Nicola Roberts, the former Girls Aloud singer, puts it in a nutshell when she says: “It is a strange thing that in a modern society we still have room for language that holds strong women back. It is very important young women in society grow up learning that you are not a ‘ball breaker’ if you are successful – you are simply a strong woman succeeding.

“Women are too often called bossy or feisty - it’s time to change the conversation and rewrite the vocabulary we use to empower women and not let others define us."

Quite right. Office politics, rules and the law have all changed dramatically since my early years at work, to a large extent preventing the kind of harassment I had to put up with. And that’s fantastic, because it means that the current generation of young women joining the workforce, including my teenage daughter in a few years’ time, will not have to put up with that kind of thing.

MIDDLE-AGE has brought me one of the worst things in life: sleepless nights.

I relentlessly wake up at 2am, 3am or 4am, staring at the ceiling, no end to the night in sight.

It makes no difference if it’s a week night, when I have work on my mind, or a weekend, when the most mundane rubbish wanders through my head. Who, for heaven’s sake, wants to be thinking about cleaning or shopping as dawn breaks on a Saturday morning?

I usually end up creeping downstairs, much to the joy of the dog, who comes and cuddles up to me and my novel on the settee.

By morning, I’m tired enough to sleep. Too brain-fogged and exhausted to haul myself up and get myself ready for work, so what’s the solution? Later nights? Eye masks? Different diet? I’m working my way through all of them but if you have any suggestions, please do email me at katy.rice@theargus.co.uk. You’ll probably receive my reply around 3.42am.