Extract from Why Men Win At Work by Gill Whitty-Collins

yes it is an issue
on, we start to notice that we are constantly served up malecreated
media full of male-driven stories and characters. Caroline
Criado Perez’s Invisible Women brilliantly documents the extent
to which the male experience has come to be seen as universal
and the female perspective is excluded and what we see is, at
best, a limited, one-dimensional representation of women and,
at worst, a damaging one. This is critical because it is proven
that we are all greatly influenced by what we see on screen and
around us – if we see men in the boardroom and women in the
kitchen it affects how we all perceive women and their role in
society.
Haley Swenson, a fellow at New America, observed in her
response to Pew Research Center’s study (which calculated
gender representation in top Google image search results) that
Google significantly under-represents women as managers
and chief executives: 30
We know that what people see affects what they
perceive to be normal, and that in turn affects
behaviour… If you don’t think it’s normal for a person
like you to do a certain job, then you just don’t do
that… one of the things that drives sexual harassment
is men in those jobs perceive women as infringing in a
space that’s supposed to be theirs. 31
We could ask Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the Prime Minister of
Iceland, about this. As she was about to take the podium to
deliver a speech, she was asked where the Prime Minister of
Iceland was. 32 She clearly didn’t look like the kind of person
(read correct gender) who would or could do that job. One
of the key problems is that so few of us are actually aware of
the extent to which we are being influenced by the media and
images over time – the impact is largely unconscious for us.
Seeing their own experience and identity reflected back at them
is something men take for granted and they are not conscious
of the very different experience women have in this context. As
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