接上文:
Today, men and women often disagree about what should count as sexual harassment. Almost everyone, male or female, accepts that sexual favours cannot be made a condition for a job or a promotion. Big majorities see unwanted touching as wrong. But the sexes differ over ogling a woman or making unwelcome sexualised remarks. Young men’s attitudes are more similar to women’s than older men’s are, but the gap persists.
Sometimes, a consensus can be forged by calling on deeper, long-held social norms. MsBicchieri cites campaigns against FGM that have described uncut girls as pure, intact and as God made them. From that viewpoint, FGM violates fundamental Islamic values. Campaigners against domestic violence in Latin America sometimes try to get machista attitudes to work for them by saying that a “real man” is the family protector and would therefore never hit his wife or child. Ms Bicchieri speculates that older men—the group most likely to minimise sexual harassment and least likely to be won over by feminist arguments—might be brought round by the notion that upsetting women is not the behaviour of a gentleman.
ogle: to look at someone in a way that shows sexual attraction
Ultimately, though, a new norm will only be adopted if it is widely agreed to be important. For sexual harassment, that means demonstrating the harm it does. Hundreds of studies have looked at how marriage, motherhood and education affect women’s careers and earnings, but the damage from harassment has largely been overlooked. The few studies that exist suggest it is an underappreciated reason why women are paid and promoted less than men, and even why so few women work in traditionally male fields.
In a paper published in May in Gender & Society, an academic journal, Heather McLaughlin, Christopher Uggen and Amy Blackstone analysed responses from participants in the Youth Development Study, which has followed a cohort in St Paul, Minnesota, since 1988. In 2002-03, when participants were aged 28-30, 11% of the women who had jobs said they had suffered sexual harassment at work in the previous year. Two years later, they earned less than the other women, and were more likely to be in financial distress. More than half had changed jobs. For those who had been harassed repeatedly or experienced unwanted touching, the figure was 79%.
overlook: to pay no attention to something
让一个社会新准则被大众所接受,必须证明它是重要的。对于性骚扰来说,必须让大家知道这个危害是很大的。众多的研究结果都一致地发现,在职场上受过性骚扰的女性比其他女性赚的更少,而且两年的离职率会高很多。
In follow-up interviews the researchers heard how some of those women had abandoned careers they had spent years training for, or left jobs despite having no other employment. Some felt that this was the only way to escape. Others felt betrayed by their employers’ and their colleagues’ feeble responses. They saw HR staff as more interested in hushing things up than stopping the harassment.
Some of the interviewees said their employer had been unwilling to confront a man who was seen as a star performer. And many of those brought down by the recent allegations had long been treated as untouchable because they brought in a lot of business. But turning a blind eye to sexual harassment is now risky for firms. Mr Weinstein’s star was already fading before the accusations against him were made public. Since then, the Weinstein Company, which he founded with his brother, has had to seek a buyer.
feeble: very weak, not good enough, not successful or effective
hush: to make someone quiet, calm, or still
很多研究者听到受害者只能放弃自己多年努力奋斗的事业,没找到下家之前裸辞,因为她们觉得这是唯一逃离的方法。有些觉得同事没有帮上忙,人劳则为了平息事件而不是制止性骚扰。
很多受害女性则表示,公司不愿意得罪那些明星员工或者说重要员工,因为他们能带来生意,所以对他们的性骚扰行为睁一只眼,闭一只眼,但现在包庇这种行为也是很危险的,有可能给公司带来巨大的损害。
Firms that are lax about sexual harassment are waking up to the risk of expensive lawsuits. Recent research into “toxic” workers, whose behaviour harms a company’s assets or other employees, suggests that employers’ self-interest should have caused them to take harassment more seriously all along. In a paper published in 2015 in the Harvard Business Review, Michael Housman of Cornerstone OnDemand, a consultancy, and Dylan Minor of Northwestern University analysed data on 50,000 workers in 11 firms. They found that toxic workers were much more productive than the average—presumably because equally unpleasant people who were less productive had been let go. But that was more than outweighed by the damage they did to their colleagues’ productivity andby job churn, as people resigned to get away from them. A firm does better to get rid of a toxic worker, they concluded, than to replace an average one by someone in the most productive 1%.
The final step in creating a durable social norm, says Ms Bicchieri, is when normative expectations become empirical ones—that is, when everyone can see that the new rules are sticking. For sexual harassment, this means that women must be able to continue speaking out and perpetrators must continue to be punished. It also means that men who might have been perpetrators continue to think twice and decide against it.
lax: not careful enough, not strict enough
现在的公司也在怕性骚扰案带来的负面影响, toxic worker!这一段可以好好读一下,挺有意思~
Duncan Green of Oxfam, the author of “How Change Happens”, makes a distinction between the self-deluded and the bullies. The self-deluded may be put off by their newfound understanding of how strongly women feel about unwanted sexual attention. But the bullies are unlikely to care, and may even enjoy the thought of making women miserable. Detailed accounts of some of the allegations aired in recent weeks suggest that humiliating women was part of the point.
A bigger stick
For a bully to stop, says Mr Green, he needs to be afraid of someone. As more women rise to senior positions, more of them will have the power to face the harassers down. Until then, the job will often fall to other men, as both managers and bystanders.That is the biggest reason women need men with them in a united front.
要使施暴者停止施暴,就是要让他们害怕!
这篇超级长文终于到此结束,音频都有差不多20分钟,证明这个话题在2017年是多么的火热,大家都希望事情往好的地方发展。
维克多语录: 有人的地方就有人渣!清理渣滓的工作可能要持续下去了~
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Results
Lexile®Measure: 1200L - 1300L
Mean Sentence Length: 18.80
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.28
Word Count: 827
这篇文章的蓝思值是在1200-1300L, 适合英语专业大二的水平学习,应该是经济学人里属于普通难度
使用kindle断断续续地读《经济学人》三年,发现从一开始磕磕碰碰到现在比较顺畅地读完,进步很大,推荐购买!点击这里可以去亚马逊官网购买~