In plain sight – when are we going to address the problems in our sector?

It’s all we could talk about last month – Russell Brand and the exposé by Dispatches and The Sunday Times. I wasn’t remotely surprised. Brand’s alleged behaviour was, as the title suggested, ‘In Plain Sight’. Unfortunately, the still male-dominated built environment industry suffers the same ills: lots of money, lots at stake and lots of bad behaviour.

I have been in the property sector for well over a decade, working with developers, agents, governmental stakeholders and household names. One of my first roles involved working with a British supermarket chain. While running through the agenda in a meeting I was leading, I couldn’t help but notice the project director starring at my breasts. Shaming him, I used my hands to direct his glare to my face. He learned very quickly that that wasn’t going to be tolerated. I raised it with my senior and he said: “It is just is what happens sometimes.”

Years later in a new job, my boss enjoyed ‘inspiring’ me with suggestions of what to wear to meetings – Joe Bloggs “likes red heels, so wear those”. I didn’t think much of taking his fashion advice at the time, not least because this same boss would be very mindful about me getting home because of known predators in the industry. This was shortly before the FT reported on the goings on at Presidents Club Charity Dinner in 2018. My boss knew many of those who attended but as in the previous situation dismissed their involvement with a: “That’s just what he’s like.”

It is important to note here, that not all men are guilty of unacceptable behaviour – but that behaviour is in plain sight and remains so, despite all the lessons supposedly learned since the #metoo movement took off following the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

I am in the communications industry, a sector largely made up of women, yet this is still an ongoing issue. It is worse in other sectors.

After the #metoo movement started, the dialogue began amongst women. Some women have been inspired to pursue legal and criminal action. Others have simply come to realise that maybe the behaviour towards them wasn’t their fault but was down to grooming or coercive behaviour.

A surveyor I met many years ago remarked how she and her colleagues were given rape alarms because, while at work, there was ‘an incident’.

A procurement manager told me how she had spoken to HR about a colleague who was stalking her, only to be told that maybe she was leading him on and they weren’t going to investigate it further.

A planner shared with me how she was pushed onto the bed by the developer client when doing a walk-through in a new development. She confided in a colleague who responded: “I should have told you”. She didn’t report it because he was the client. This power imbalance is so often the case in property.

Earlier this week, I was speaking to a senior woman in a consultancy who told me about when a colleague’s hand went wandering, she confronted him only then to be taken off the project because she wouldn’t be able to ‘control her emotions’ in meetings. The inaction was deafening.

When predators have been named, so many of us ‘saw it coming’. I wasn’t at all surprised by Brand’s alleged behaviour because I’d heard about it on the grapevine. This too exists outside of celebrity, but what confuses me is why we are not doing anything about it. Why, when raised with HR, is it ‘managed internally’? Why do we allow ourselves to say: ‘Let me come with you, he has a reputation’? Why aren’t we stamping out these behaviours?

As someone who has lobbied for change in employment law, I often come to the same conclusion: we just aren’t taught about our rights enough and about what is and isn’t appropriate. We shouldn’t just find new jobs to get us out of bad situations, we should challenge behaviours more and make use of the law to stamp this out.

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