O assédio contra mulheres e as assimetrias de gênero-Camila Peres

Hello, my name is Camila Perez, I am a federal prosecutor. In this class, we will delve into the cultural factors that precede and create an environment conducive to the occurrence of sexual and moral assault, such as unconscious bias, stereotypes and discrimination.

Let's understand why sexual and moral harassment are considered a form of gender violence. In addition, we will demonstrate that in the work environment, harassment translates into an invisible barrier to the full professional development of women, as well as the triple journey and discriminatory behaviors.

And the most important thing, in the end, we invite all of you to join in concrete and preventive actions to avoid the culmination of the practice of harassment and together promote a safer, healthier and ethical work environment for all. As we have already seen in this course, moral harassment and sexual harassment are behaviors that violate dignity and violate human rights.

The phenomenon is especially affected by women, black people, people with disabilities and LGBTQI+ people. Data and research show that women and girls are the vast majority of victims of sexual harassment and the vast majority of perpetrators are men. According to the research "Visible and Invisible" from the Brazilian Public Security Forum together with the Tata Folha Institute,

47% of Brazilians aged 16 or older indicate having suffered sexual harassment. This data matches the study "The cycle of sexual harassment in the workplace", carried out by the Finkieva Institute, which pointed out that 47.12% of women claim to have suffered sexual harassment in the workplace, and one in every six ask for resignation after the incident.

78.4% claimed that they did not report their aggressors, with the expectation of: impunity, lack of efficient policies, and fear of retaliation. Sexual harassment affects each woman in a different way, from the incidence of other factors, such as race and social class, what we call intersectionality. Black women are the biggest victims of this violence.

According to the Ministry of Labor, women are also the main victims of moral harassment, especially due to maternity, pregnancy, pregnancy and family responsibility. Because of this scenario, harassment is understood as gender violence.

It is what the Convention for Prevention and Combat of Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, also called the Istanbul Convention ratified by the European Union and the National Council of Justice, the CNJ, says in the protocol for judgment with gender perspective. What marks gender violence is not the fact that the victim is a woman, but because violence is committed as a reflection of a society with deep gender inequalities.

The CNJ brings an elucidating example of this difference. When a woman is run over in traffic, we are not necessarily facing gender violence, even if there is violence and the woman is the victim.

On the other hand, when a woman suffers sexual harassment, she suffers due to an asymmetry of structural power, which creates material, cultural and ideological conditions for a group to exercise domination over the other. It is important that it is clear that when talking about sexual harassment, we are not dealing with sexual desire, but rather with a relationship of power, of desire, of domination.

To better understand the phenomenon of sexual and moral harassment against women, we also need to bring other data related to women. The IBGE gender statistics study reveals the size of gender inequality in the labor market.

According to research, in Brazil, the level of school for women is higher than that of men. Even being more educated, women have less participation in the workforce. They occupy fewer management positions, about 37.4%. They receive lower wages when they occupy an equivalent position of a man within an organization, only 77% of what they receive.

In functions and positions that ensure greater gains, directors and managers, for example, women receive less than 62% of men's income. Feminine representation in public spaces is also low. In Parliament, less than 18% of positions are occupied by women. In the judiciary, women are only 18% of ministers and ministers, while men are 82%.

In the Federal Public Administration, only 20% of the level 6 positions are occupied by women, although women are more than half of the total number of employees. According to the World Economic Forum, we will need another 132 years to close this gender gap. And I ask:

How the data of victims of sexual and moral assault, the data of female participation in the labor market and the sub-representativity of women in public spaces relate? All this data shows a society with deep gender asymmetries and has in common a cause: the cultural factor. The cultural factor is composed of our stereotypes, unconscious biases and beliefs.

In a sexist society, the cultural factor results in several invisible barriers to the development of women. Sexual and moral harassment is one of the major obstacles to the entry and development of women in the world of work. Therefore, our invitation is to look at these factors in greater depth from the perspective of gender.

Before we move on to the next topic, we must remind you that not only women, but also vulnerable groups are also especially affected by the cultural factor, such as black people, people with disabilities and even more LGBTQI people. We all know that harassment is a prohibited and punishable practice. So why do we still have, even with the subnotifications, alarming numbers of this occurrence?

Harassment is usually a insidious behavior. The harasser does not wake up and decides to commit the harassment. Before that, he will test the limits, realizing the degree of tolerance of his work environment for actions and words that discriminate a person or a specific group. Therefore, the importance of repressing, from the first inadequate manifestation, constrainment or microaggression, making an educational prevention.

Harassment and violence are at the top of an iceberg. To understand this phenomenon, we need to look at the factors that precede it and are often not apparent because they are naturalized or tolerated in our behavior. We are talking about unconscious bias, stereotypes and discrimination. STEREOTYPES The stereotypes are formed from a simplification of the perception of the world, of generalizations about a group of people.

These generalizations make the person be seen not by their individual characteristics, but by those attributed to the group they are part of. Bringing to the sphere of gender, stereotypes are the expectations about the social roles that men and women must fulfill, how they should act and the characteristics they must possess.

Stereotypes affect everyone, but women are greatly affected because they reproduce a social hierarchy in which they are in a lower position. To understand some of the stereotypes that fall upon women, we need to look at the historical aspect. Until 1962, there were legal barriers, invisible, for women to participate in the work environment.

It was with the statute of the married woman that guaranteed that the woman would no longer need to ask for authorization from her husband to be able to work. As much as the world has changed from there to here, there is still a strong social conditioning that associates the man with roles of authority and power and the woman with the responsibility for the home, for the care and for the children.

Therefore, when we make a decision or take a judgment, we need to be attentive and question whether we are being led by a social conditioning or by stereotypes. I bring two examples of gender stereotypes with great negative repercussions for women. The stereotype of responsibility for domestic work.

This gender stereotype is from which the woman is the only or primarily responsible for the work of the home, children and care, and it is revealed in the data brought by the IBGE. In Brazil, women devote almost twice as much time to care for people and household chores as men: 21.1 hours a week for them, against 11 hours a week for them.

The triple journey is a limiter for women to achieve better positions in the labor market, contributing in many cases to a situation of financial dependence on men. In addition to the professional and financial damage, we must not forget the mental health damage due to the overload of tasks and the unparticipated management, which leads to exhaustion, to the feeling of guilt and incompetence. The second stereotype I bring is that of maternity.

Women receive fewer job opportunities and promotion due to the maternity stereotype. It is what is called "penalty for maternity". It is assumed that women who are mothers are less committed to work or less competent, or that they will dedicate less precisely because they accumulate maternity. Due to this assumption, women end up not being indicated for higher positions, receive fewer promotions.

Even when they reach the leadership positions, mothers end up being penalized when they leave maternity leave or are replaced because the schedules are more restricted due to domestic overload. A survey conducted by the FGV pointed out that half of women lose their jobs until one year after the beginning of maternity leave. I bring here some examples of how gender stereotypes for women manifest themselves at work. Phrases like:

If you take this position, who will keep your children? I will put her as a substitute, but promise not to get pregnant. She is very good at work, she looks like a man. Nice that you managed to establish yourself in this profession even being a woman. You must be signing with the boss. She is in TPM. We now move on to unconscious biases.

Unconscious biases are automatic and rapid associations of the human brain, fed by beliefs, stereotypes, prejudices and life experiences. This mechanism is inevitable. The problem is associating a value judgment to the unconscious bias, often generating prejudices and errors of judgment, which bring harm to our interpersonal relationships.

The first step to fight them is to bring them to the conscious through self-reflection and learning from different perspectives and points of view. A second step is to avoid them manifesting in discriminatory, harassing or violent attitudes. Now I will detail a little more about four types of unconscious biases. The bias of affinity.

Affinity bias is a tendency to better evaluate those who look like us. The fact that we prefer people similar to us and that in the current scenario we have mostly white male leaders, ends up perpetuating a male and white leadership profile, since leaders, even if unconsciously and unintentionally, try to choose their peers to be promoted to higher positions.

The affinity bias can be perceived in interviews, interviews for trust charges, selections and even in oral tests in public contests. Therefore, the importance of observing the representativeness in the composition of the examiners. The bias of perception. The bias of perception occurs when stereotypes are reinforced without a concrete basis in facts. An example is a research carried out with professors at Yale University.

Two candidates, John and Jennifer, graduated in the field of sciences, presented the same curriculum for the job of laboratory manager. Jennifer's result was always worse in the evaluation of skills and willingness to hire. Regarding remuneration, Jennifer received lower wage offers, even though she had the same technical baggage as John.

Here, the stereotype that men are more competent in science than women resulted in different results, even before the same technical qualification. The confirmation bias is the disposition to consider only the information that confirms an idea and ignore information that puts our own beliefs in check.

The protocol for judgment with gender perspective, edited by the CNJ, draws attention, for example, to a situation in which a greater weight is attributed to the testimony of people in positions of power, discrediting the testimony of women and girls from a preconceived and stereotyped idea that women are vindictive, temperate and less rational than men. I also want to talk about the group bias. It is the tendency to follow the group's behavior so as not to deviate from the current pattern.

For example, if I bring only one woman to the board, she will hardly be able to maintain a position against the consensus already formed within the group. Studies point to the need to reach a minimum sociological threshold of 20% to influence the perception of the world. Thus, if the woman cannot make a difference, the group leads her to behave as if there were no her presence, completely erasing the diversity.

For this reason, other countries, such as France and Germany, have edited laws with affirmative policies, ensuring the presence of 30% of women without administrative councils. Another conductive factor of violence is discrimination. Discrimination is any form of unfair treatment, such as distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference, based on some kind of prejudice.

Prejudices are preconceived judgments about an individual or group of individuals and can be against race, ethnicity, color, gender, religion, disability, political opinion, national origin, social origin, age, sexual orientation or any other.

A classic case of gender discrimination is the fact that women receive lower wages than men who perform the same functions. Another gender discrimination is not hiring or promoting women to leadership positions for reasons of pregnancy or maternity leave, or exonerate them in this case. Black women are great victims of discrimination.

We remember that discrimination or prejudice due to race, color, ethnicity, religion or national origin is a crime according to Article 140 of the Criminal Code and Law 7.716/89. Another form of discrimination is sexism.

In the workplace, some sex-oriented behaviors are recurrent and harm women's self-confidence and work health. Because they are so common, they were named. The first one: "mentorrupting" When a man constantly interrupts a woman, unnecessarily, not allowing her to finish her sentence.

The second, gaslighting, is one of the types of psychological abuse that leads women to doubt their sense of perception, reasoning, memory and sanity. Phrases like: "You're crazy", "You're exaggerating", "Don't you accept jokes?" Third type: "Bropriating", when a man appropriates the same idea expressed by a woman, raising the credits for her. It happens a lot in meetings and with women scientists. And the fourth:

"Mansplaining" When a man is dedicated to explaining something obvious to a woman or her experience, assuming that she does not understand the subject, but he does. Everything we've seen so far, sexual and moral assault, gender stereotypes, unconscious biases, discrimination against women, constitute invisible barriers to the professional development of women and also the exercise of their leadership. These barriers can be explained by the following metaphors: The Glass ceiling

It is the invisible barrier that prevents women from ascending to the highest positions, which is not related to qualification or competence, but with socio-cultural factors associated with gender. It is a form of vertical inequality. The higher the hierarchy, the fewer women are present in the positions that have more power and have better salaries.

We also have the glass wall. It is a form of horizontal inequality. Women mostly occupy professions associated with domestic work and care, and therefore are worse paid, such as teachers, health professionals, assistants, among others. While the most strategic and best paid areas, such as financial areas, administrative councils, technology and innovation, are mostly occupied by men.

This social distribution of professions is a reflection of gender stereotypes that we have seen before. And finally, the labyrinth is a metaphor to affirm that it is possible for women to ascend to leadership, but this path is still very arduous and full of barriers. During this journey, women will face several walls, formed by vestiges of prejudice, gender stereotypes, resistance to female leadership, family demands and care.

Due to so many invisible and additional barriers, we highlight the importance of female empowerment. In a very simple way, it is a movement that, recognizing the importance of women for society, seeks to reduce gender inequality and ensure the equality of rights and opportunities between men and women.

We remember that gender equality was elected as one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 UN Agenda, of which Brazil is a signatory. Currently, women are just over 51% of the world's population. We must ensure that women's participation and representation in public debates and decision-making spaces are important for the future of society, including the aspects that are related to women.

Moving towards the end, we bring 4 tips on how each one of us can collaborate with the beginning of this change. The first one: base our interpersonal relationships based on respect for people and differences. This is always the golden tip.

The second: be alert to automatic judgments and our behaviors, recognizing when they are being conducted by stereotypes, by biases, so that we can overcome them. The third: do not practice and do not be convent with any type of discriminatory behavior, sexual harassment or other types of violence. And the fourth: welcome the person who reports to be a victim of these behaviors.

In practice, we cite here some examples: Avoid jokes and comments that can be disrespectful. In meetings, respect the diverse and representative speaking space. Express assertively when a person externalizes an inadequate behavior. Help a woman when she is interrupted, informing that she would like to hear the conclusion of her idea.

Do not make physical contact with unconstructed intimacy. Avoid narration of jokes or use of sexual content expressions.

Do not make insistent and unquestioned invitations. Practice respect in all relationships. We have reached the end of this module and we hope that you have learned a little more about these cultural factors. Factors that create an environment conducive to the practice of sexual and moral assault, especially against women, the biggest victims of this violence. And most importantly, that we can act in a positive and propositional way, in the individual sphere, from self-reflection and also in the collective sphere.

acting preventively from the beginning of these disrespectful conducts, in order to avoid the culmination of harassment and other forms of violence. Thank you very much!