Category: Workforce Discrimination

Why is it misogynistic to call a woman a ‘witch’? | The Conversation

Over recent weeks, the slogan “ditch the witch” has been featured alongside AI-generated photos of Victorian premier Jacinta Allan. She’s depicted in a dusty and distressed witch’s hat, a fake wart on her chin, on billboards and trucks around Melbourne in the lead up to the state election this November.

Instead of critiquing her policies or governance, the campaign attacked her gender. The brothel owner who partly funded the campaign says the slogan is not sexist.

It’s not the first time the phrase has been used that way. In 2011, then-opposition leader Tony Abbott stood before protest placards that read “ditch the witch”, targeted on that occasion toward our first woman prime minister, Julia Gillard.

In fact, there is a long sexist history of labelling women in power as witches.

So, why is it misogynistic to call a powerful woman a “witch”?

Tony Abbott (left) attends an anti carbon tax rally in 2011, standing near a placard that says 'ditch the witch'.
In 2011, then-opposition leader Tony Abbott stood before anti-Gillard placards that read ‘ditch the witch’. AAP Image/Alan Porritt

Witchy women weren’t always bad.

In early European medieval stories, for instance, the magical woman Morgan Le Fay is described as a healer and scientist. Then, starting around the 12th century she is recast as a vindictive, evil character.

From the early 15th century on, it became a very derisive way to refer to women. Texts like German friar Heinrich Kramer’s misogynistic witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum (1486), among others, were highly influential in shaping the negative image of the witch.

Threatening the patriarchy by displaying ambition or failing to conform to societal gender norms – such as the expectation to be “beautiful”, to bear children and to be a “good wife” – began to be taken as evidence of witchcraft. Think of the infamous Salem witch trials of the 1690s in America, where Bridget Bishop, an elderly, poor and argumentative widow and midwife – all of which were taken as evidence of her being a witch – was the first to be executed.

Many women were violently killed as a result.

Witch-hunts have since shifted from the literal to the metaphorical.

Contemporary witch-hunts demonise women who hold positions of power or possess similar traits to the women deemed witches centuries ago.

Feminist scholars note how frequently women who rise in male-dominated institutions are marked as “bad women” who can potentially threaten the patriarchy, making them targets for misogyny.

From the 20th century, witches have been embraced and reclaimed by some feminists who deconstructed the negative stereotypes. They have reinterpreted the witch as a feminist icon of women’s resistance.

Source: Why is it misogynistic to call a woman a ‘witch’?

Highly sensitive Australian court data accessed by foreign entity based in India – ABC News

Highly sensitive Australian court files have been accessed offshore in breach of the privacy act and Commonwealth contractual obligations, an ABC investigation has revealed, raising concerns of a national security risk.

Workers raised concerns with managers at VIQ Solutions — the company responsible for the data breach — months ago and were told they were “not relevant” and were directed to stop spreading “rumours” about the issue.

The transcription of court cases in most jurisdictions in Australia is done by VIQ Solutions, which is based in Canada and employs transcribers in Australia.

An ABC investigation found VIQ Solutions subcontracted work to e24 Technologies — a company based in Chennai, India that specialises in automated voice-to-text technology — in breach of its Commonwealth contract, and without notifying the courts.

Internal VIQ documents, sighted by the ABC, showed thousands of court files were accessed by staff at e24 Technologies with Indian email addresses.

VIQ staff based in Australia told the ABC that e24 staff were accessing court files outside of Australian business hours and completing transcripts at a speed that was not possible for a human. They claimed the transcripts completed by e24 contained significant errors, which then fell to VIQ staff to correct.

“Incredibly sensitive evidence from organisations like ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, is given in private court because it could be addressing links to international criminal organisations, potential foreign interference in the country,” he said.

He said this information in the wrong hands could do “incredible damage”.

The ABC understands that since July last year, at least a dozen senior VIQ staff were either made redundant or quit, along with staff who belonged to the Quality and Assurance team.

Senator Shoebridge said the revelations that Australian court data had been accessed offshore without the knowledge of the court were grounds for an independent audit and the urgent termination of the contract with VIQ.

“I have had multiple whistleblowers, not one, not two, multiple whistleblowers contacting my office and each time we raise this in public, we get more whistleblowers coming forward and showing very credible evidence.

Source: Highly sensitive Australian court data accessed by foreign entity based in India – ABC News

Australia’s aged care crisis is coming for every woman | Women’s Agenda

Australia needs a new aged care home to open every three days. We’re not even close. And when the beds run out, daughters will.

This week, Health Minister Mark Butler stood at the National Press Club to announce a landmark NDIS reset. Tucked inside it, almost as an afterthought, was a $3 billion aged care investment and a pledge to support 5,000 extra beds a year. It sounds like action. Here’s the problem: we need 10,000. Every year. For the next twenty years.

We are not building our way out of this. And when the system buckles, as it already is, the weight will fall, as it always does, on women.

Hospitals have people waiting up to 200 days for a residential bed that doesn’t exist. Occupancy across the sector has surged. And we have been talking about the baby boomers arriving as though they are still on their way. The first one turns 80 this year. They’re here.

Most of the people living in aged care are women. Most of the workforce caring for them are women.

When there aren’t enough beds, those women don’t get a break. They become the system. Unpaid female labour, nationalised by default.

Age 58 is the peak age for unpaid caregiving in Australia. It is also the peak of most senior careers. When the collision hits, something has to give. It is rarely the job that absorbs the impact.

Sixty-six percent of working carers reduce their hours. Thirty-eight percent step out of paid work temporarily or permanently. Forty-five percent report missing promotions or career opportunities because of caring responsibilities. These numbers exist right now, before the bed shortage reaches crisis point. Before the baby boomers arrive in volume. Before the system runs out of room entirely.

Source: Australia’s aged care crisis is coming for every woman

Inside the Gay Tech Mafia | WIRED

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley.

[W]hen I call up a well-connected hedge fund manager to ask his thoughts about what is sometimes referred to in industry circles as the “gay tech mafia,” he audibly yawns. “Of course,” he says. “This has always been the case.”

And it is absolutely the case now, he adds, when gay men are running influential companies in Silicon Valley and maintain entire social calendars with scarcely a straight man, much less a woman, in sight. “Of course the gay tech mafia exists,” he continues. “This is not some Illuminati conspiracy theory. And you do not have to be gay to join. They like straight guys who sleep with them even more.”

Sure, there were gay men in high places: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the list went on. But the idea that they were operating some kind of shadowy cabal seemed born entirely of homophobia.

At an AI conference in Los Angeles, an engineer casually referred to a top AI firm’s offices, more than once, as “twink town.”

One San Francisco investor tells me that he believes the Thiel Fellowship is a training ground for gay industry leaders.

[O]ne afternoon in late November, spend nearly an hour texting one . . . account owner over Signal who agrees to speak to me only if I keep his handle secret.

This person describes the Valley as a place known for “ecstasy, psychedelic fueled gay sex stuff.” Has he experienced any of it himself? No. But he knows people who have—people who are “pretty afraid” and “young af.” He won’t name names, won’t connect me to anyone, but he swears that any negative rumor I’ve heard about gay men in Silicon Valley is true. He suggests a conspiracy so sprawling it rivals QAnon and implicates the entire US government.

Finally, frustrated by his evasiveness, I ask what he thinks will happen if he tells me what he knows. “I truly believe,” he says, “killed.”

The problem with conspiracy theories, even offensive ones, is that they are rarely wholly invented.

Most of the people who speak to me for this story do so on the condition that their names be kept confidential.

In 2022, a popular anonymous tech insider X account, Roon, tweeted that it was “crazy how venture capitalists have reinvented the Roman system of pederasty.”

I’m told to connect with Joel, a gay man who works in tech and who spent a lot of time among the older in-group of powerful gay men in Silicon Valley, more than a decade ago.

When I ask Joel to explain how the gay tech mafia works, he tells me that it’s similar to people who “went to the same college or came from a similar background or a similar town.”

Joel tells me about the parties at the time—the exact specifics of which remain off the record. But they were, in summary, what you might expect.

I tell Joel that I’ve heard from some young men in the tech industry who feel pressured to sleep around to get ahead. Was that true in his experience? “Mmmmm,” he says, and pauses. Then he bursts out laughing. “I mean, in all of this, there are weird gray areas. It can be very sexual. It is not all professional. A lot of people have dated or slept with each other.” He had experienced a kind of coercion firsthand. “I definitely felt pressured to do—not overtly illegal things. But they walked the line.”

The exchange of sex and status may not be the reason these men rose so quickly, but it can be a factor—if only because sex, as he puts it, “makes people become closer rapidly.”

Source: Inside the Gay Tech Mafia | WIRED

Liberal candidate who ousted Moira Deeming found ineligible over child sex offender reference | The Australian

Moira Deeming’s future in the Victorian Liberal Party is uncertain following the party’s decision to hold a new preselection after the candidate who defeated her was ruled ineligible for giving a character reference to a convicted child sex offender.

The debacle has thrown the party into turmoil, prompting a group of Liberal State Council members to call for the immediate resignation of Victorian Liberal president Philip Davis and vice presidents Holly Byrne, Cathrine Burnett-Wake, Trent Sullivan and Geoff Gledhill.

Under the party’s constitution, Ms Deeming continues to be a candidate for top spot on the Western Metropolitan upper house ticket, after receiving 29 votes to Dinesh Gourisetty’s 37.

But the party could simply have endorsed her as its candidate for the first position on the Liberal Party’s group voting ticket for the Western Metropolitan Region, and has chosen not to.

It is not clear what action the MP, who has previously spoken of her own sexual assault as a child, will take, having been deeply traumatised by the party’s rejection of her on Sunday in favour of a man who had provided a positive character reference for a ­pedophile.

In the reference letter, Mr Gourisetty said he had known Patel for nearly four years. “He is a good friend of mine. I understand that Mr Kashyap Patel has to attend court about child grooming and sexual assault charges,” he wrote. “He is very upset about the charges and I truly believe he is extremely sorry to the complainant for what he has done.”

“Even though he has been charged, I would continue to trust him as my friend. Finally, I can say that in all the time I have known him, Mr Kashyap Patel has been a decent, hardworking and trustworthy person. I believe any behaviour he displayed that caused him to be charged with child grooming and sexual assault was a one-off event.”

Patel was convicted in September 2024 and sentenced to nine months imprisonment and a two year community correction order.

County Court Judge Peter Rozen KC found that in the full knowledge of his victim’s age, Patel had connected with her via an anonymous chatting app called Antiland and asked her to meet him after school for sex, telling her he would bring protection.

He also persuaded the child to send him three sexually explicit photos of herself, having told her he could use the images to obtain contacts for escorting.

Patel told the girl he wanted to masturbate in front of her and encouraged her to do the same.

Despite being told she was not interested, he asked her if she wanted to work in brothels and told her she could make a lot of money if she was prepared to perform certain sexual services.

Judge Rozen found Patel was a “man of otherwise good character as set out in the three character references filed with the court.”

It comes as the Supreme Court battle over the party’s $1.55m loan to Mr Pesutto to pay his legal bills for defaming Ms Deeming escalates, with both sides launching appeals over access to sensitive financial documents and the identities of guarantors.

A five-day trial, brought by a rebel faction of Liberal members opposed to the loan to the former opposition leader, had been due to begin last week. Instead, it was vacated by consent amid a dispute over whether the guarantors’ identities should be revealed and a push by the plaintiffs for access to internal party documents.

Former Liberal MP and Pesutto chief of staff Louise Staley meanwhile took to Instagram to gloat over Ms Deeming’s loss, posting an image of the MP walking out of Liberal headquarters on Sunday with the caption “Happy Days” and the Lily Allen Song “F — k you very much” playing.

Source: Subscribe to The Australian | Newspaper home delivery, website, iPad, iPhone & Android apps

Why do men sexually harass women at work? Science offers two explanations – but only one of them holds up | The Conversation

There are two ways to understand sexual harassment in the workplace, but one of them is more scientific than the other.

On one view, sexual harassment – as the name implies – is all about sexuality. According to the evolutionary psychology research program, men and women have evolved different psychological mechanisms to solve the different challenges they faced to successfully reproduce back in the Pleistocene epoch.

For men, these adaptive mechanisms include a greater interest in casual sex, and a tendency to mistakenly conclude that women are sexually interested in them. Women, in contrast, evolved to be more sensitive to potential threats to their sexual autonomy – and therefore perceive men’s advances as harassing.

But for social science scholars informed by the gender hierarchy – the idea that men hold more power and status than women – sexual harassment is “an expression of workplace sexism, not sexuality or sexual desire”. It is a mechanism for preserving work roles as masculine terrain, and pushing back against threats to men’s higher status within a workplace.

It might be tempting to think one scientific view is preferred over another for political reasons: he likes the evolutionary psychology account because he is a misogynist; or she likes the gender hierarchy account because she is blinded by her feminist ideology.

These accusations don’t get us very far. Fortunately, the philosophy of science gives us three well-established criteria for what makes for a good scientific explanation.

In our recently published research, we used these three criteria for a good scientific explanation to compare the evolutionary psychology and gender hierarchy maintenance accounts of workplace sexual harassment. So what did we find?

First, we found that the gender hierarchy maintenance explanation was clearly superior when it came to identifying causes that make sense of a broad range of workplace sexual harassment phenomena.

Evolutionary psychology makes sense of sexual coercion and some forms of unwanted sexual attention, to be sure. But research shows these kinds of behaviours almost invariably go hand-in-hand with sexist jokes, crude sexual remarks and sexually degrading imagery, such as porn.

None of these behaviours are plausibly about trying to gain sexual favours, even though some are sexual in nature. These behaviours are called “gender harassment” –which is the most common form of sexual harassment.

Unlike evolutionary psychology, gender hierarchy maintenance can explain all three forms of harassment. Demands for sexual favours, sexist remarks and requests for note-taking can all be understood as behaviours that reinforce traditional gender roles and confer greater status and authority to men.

Our research points to the value of understanding workplace sexual harassment through the lens of gender hierarchy maintenance. This offers hope for the future of workplace culture: it suggests men are not essentially predisposed to be sexual harassers, with little that can be done to alter their evolved natures.

Instead, sexual harassment is best understood as a consequence of our current social and cultural environment. And this is something we can shape to facilitate a better and safer future at work.

Source: Why do men sexually harass women at work? Science offers two explanations – but only one of them holds up

Former NSW prison officers say system protects abusers and silences women – ABC News

The ABC has obtained internal documents showing Corrective Services NSW (CSNSW) received multiple reports of former prison officer Scott Hawken making unwanted sexual advances towards female staff, three years before he raped a colleague in 2022. 

Hawken’s case was one of more than 64 matters of sexual assault or harassment involving CSNSW staff reported to the Professional Standards branch between January 2020 and April 2023, according to records obtained by the ABC.

The ABC has spoken to nine current and former correctional officers. 

Most declined to be identified for fear of retribution, but all described a toxic workplace culture that discouraged reporting and shielded senior officers.

One who did speak publicly is Kirsty Prince, a junior officer who medically retired in December.

Ms Prince said that, after she reported a senior correctional officer, she was labelled by her colleagues as a “career destroyer” and “a dog”.

“You’re a blue family now — you stick together,” she said new recruits were often told, blue being a reference to the corrections uniform.

In late 2022, Ms Prince reported a senior officer, Adrian Willis, for sending a photograph of his genitals to her, her 12-year-old son and three other minors.

As a survivor of sexual abuse as a teenager, she said she immediately recognised the seriousness of the image.

“It was the start of a grooming process,” she said.

Within days of reporting the matter, she said her confidentiality was breached by a senior manager she had confided in, and “everyone knew”.

“When it comes time to negotiate my payout, I will refuse to sign an NDA and I’m willing to walk away with nothing. This matters to me because women sign NDAs and those responsible never face consequences.”

In recent years, New South Wales prisons have been in a deepening crisis following a series of sexual misconduct scandals involving senior correctional officers, including former senior officer Wayne Astill, who was convicted of sexually assaulting more than a dozen inmates.

The crisis resulted in a major inquiry in 2023 that examined and found the culture, practices, and procedures within the jail, and the performance of several correctional officers and their managers, were inadequate and inappropriate.

Source: Former NSW prison officers say system protects abusers and silences women – ABC News

How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM

IAll entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media. 

The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out. 

“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.” 

In reply, Brockman justified the women’s inclusion, and says they’d been a part of a related book about AI, which needed to be inclusive to sell. “Today, it’s impossible to get a publisher to buy such a book with essays by 25 men and no women,” he wrote. 

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who emailed with Epstein hundreds of times, made a joke in one email about how “half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.” 

In another exchange, Epstein and Jeremy Rubin, a bitcoin developer and MIT researcher, went back and forth over whether there are any games that women are actually better at than men. It would be “interesting to attempt to make an intellectually stimulating game where women outperform men,” Rubin wrote in 2016. “Unless women are inherently inferior to the maximally talented man at all tasks ;).”

For women like Lauren Aulet, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, the files revealed conversations that were more brash than she expected. “I think what was most shocking was simply how blatant and explicit the misogyny was.”

“We have this narrative that explicit misogyny is something from the ’50s and ’60s, and what we have now is like implicit bias and microaggressions,” she said, adding: “I think this made clear that explicit misogyny is still out there in science and in academia, it’s just perhaps behind closed doors.”

Source: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM

OHCHR | Call for input to thematic report to HRC62: Violence and discrimination experienced by lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

Background

The Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (IE SOGI), Mr. Graeme Reid, is preparing a thematic report on violence and discrimination experienced by lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women worldwide, to be presented to the 62nd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2026. This investigation seeks to understand the distinct and intersecting forms of violence and discrimination that LBQ women face across diverse contexts globally.

Source: OHCHR | Call for input to thematic report to HRC62: Violence and discrimination experienced by lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women

“It doesn’t touch me”, Rachel Ward is unbothered by online trolls – The Australian Women’s Weekly

All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.

Rachel Ward speaks out after receiving an on-slaught of online hate simply for ageing and choosing to do so naturally.

It was days before Christmas – mid-summer – and cicadas trilled in the background as actor, director and beef cattle farmer Rachel Ward posted a video to her Instagram feed thanking friends and neighbours for their support throughout the year.

No one – least of all Rachel – imagined this chatty, generous and otherwise innocuous post would attract a band of ill-mannered (and inarticulate) trolls.

‘OMG!! What the hell happened to her. Wow!! She has aged really bad.’ ‘I wish I never saw her like this!’ ‘She looks ravaged.’ And worse.

Her daughter, Matilda Brown, also an actor and food producer (at The Good Farm Shop), was incensed. She jumped to her mum’s defence and reposted the comments, calling out the idiocy of criticising a 68-year-old woman for, essentially, looking 68. “Warning!! Naturally aging woman. Proceed with caution,” she wrote and posted a series of exquisite photographs of Rachel with her grandkids, and at work on the farm.

The resulting pile-on of love is what Rachel has focused on, she says, sitting in her kitchen, enjoying a morning cuppa as she chats with The Weekly.

“Why are we giving ourselves these expectations to maintain youth, and what is perceived as attractive? It’s so great to not weigh into that anymore. Maybe if I was 40, I would mind the comments, but now I’ve so left any kind of attachment to youth and beauty behind … It doesn’t touch me because it’s not important anymore.”

Rachel let her hair colour grow out last year, against Bryan’s advice. It was a conscious decision.

“I’d been wanting to do it for a while,” she explains. “It was Bryan who was very resistant. I was just, ‘Well, you’re grey, why does it matter?’ And he was like, ‘You don’t need to go grey yet.’

“I had no idea it was going to be this white, but I like it, and my daughter cut it, so it’s her haircut. My kids like it, the grandkids don’t have a problem. and even Bryan seems to have come around to it, so there we go.”

Source: “It doesn’t touch me”, Rachel Ward is unbothered by online trolls – The Australian Women’s Weekly