Mick Hartley

More on the Jo Phoenix employment tribunal ruling last week, from Sonia Sodha in the Observer – Vindictive, cowardly leaders bowed to the gender bullies and failed Jo Phoenix:

The judgment is scathing about the way in which 368 academics signed an open letter wrongly implying that the gender-critical academic network that Phoenix helped set up was transphobic; about the academic who said watching back a speech Phoenix gave elsewhere made her “cry at work” despite the court finding it contained no upsetting content; about the colleague who groundlessly likened Phoenix to “the racist uncle at the Christmas dinner table”; and the childish hyperbole some academics deployed in their statement suggesting that to establish a gender critical research network was to put lives at risk.

Not only did the Open University allow this harassment campaign to proceed unaddressed, it put out one-sided statements that implied there was a legitimate basis for concern. It is clear from this judgment that, if employers take their lead from organisations like Stonewall, whose chief lobbying tactic is to depict gender-critical belief as inherently hateful, they risk finding themselves on the wrong side of the law, and if activist employees fling around baseless insults like “transphobic” and “terf”, that could amount to unlawful workplace discrimination….

How on earth did a university set up to democratise access to learning and the exchange of ideas get captured in this way? It is partly a tale of how the bullying of women speaking about their sex-based rights is given an acceptable gloss through a self-described “progressive” cause that would be better described as authoritarian in its threat to get with its beliefs, or else. But it is also a story of the cowardice of leaders, of bystanders looking the other way when a lesbian – who survived a school shooting, the experience of being raped at 15 then living on the streets, and profound societal homophobia to become an accomplished senior academic – experiences workplace harassment so bad that it left her with PTSD.

You would expect a grown-up institution like a university to mediate the polarising effects of social media on a contentious debate; instead, what is happening right across society is that institutions as diverse as legal and arts organisations and the police are amplifying what is going on social media into women’s professional lives with awful consequences, not just for the direct targets of the persecution, but for the many women who are chilled into self-censoring their views as a result. Leaders have left a vacuum in organisational culture that gets filled in by a small number of domineering bullies; institutional cowardice morphs into institutional childishness that morphs into institutional vindictiveness.

Yes – exactly that.

The qualities that enable a certain type of person to rise to the top in these bureaucracies – enthusiastic agreement with whatever the agenda of the day happens to be, a notable lack of willingness to think for themselves, a dogged determination to punish wrong-thinkers – are precisely the qualities that allow this kind of situation to develop. Add a dollop of smugness for being progressive and  "doing the right thing", and it's irresistible.

The type of people, then, who are keen to see their organisation getting into Stonewall's Top 100 Employers list.