Are we really listening to women?

What One Ordinary Team Conversation Revealed About Women and Work

Every August, we celebrate women. Strong women. Successful women. Women breaking barriers and taking their rightful seats at the table.

That matters, and it should continue.

But perhaps Women’s Month should also be a time to talk about something less comfortable: what women have learned to quietly tolerate at work, simply because they are women.

A Question Our CEO Asked

A few weeks ago, our CEO asked our team a straightforward question.

Our team is made up mostly of women. He asked whether any of us had experienced uncomfortable or inappropriate behaviour during our careers, because we were women.

There were five of us in that conversation.

Four had a story.

Different workplaces. Different points in a career. Different circumstances. Some involved men. Some involved women who made another woman feel judged, excluded or undermined. Only one of the five had come through her career without something like this happening.

This Is Not a Rare Story

It would be easy to treat that as an unusual outcome from one small conversation. In our experience, it isn’t.

This isn’t a claim backed by a formal survey. But ask most women in most workplaces the same question our CEO asked, and a similar pattern tends to emerge. Not because every workplace is unsafe, and not because every uncomfortable moment amounts to harassment or bullying. But because enough women carry a version of this experience that four out of five in one ordinary room felt less like an outlier and more like what happens when you actually ask.

Why Women Often Say Nothing

There are ordinary, practical reasons this goes unreported.

• It can feel easier to let a comment go than deal with what follows.
• There is a real risk of being labelled difficult, too sensitive, or not a team player.
• The person involved is sometimes more senior, which changes the cost of speaking up.
• Many women have watched a colleague raise a concern and not be taken seriously, which teaches everyone else what to expect.

None of this makes the behaviour acceptable. It explains why it continues.

Not a Men-Versus-Women Conversation

It is worth noting who started this particular conversation. It was our CEO, a man. He did not tell us what our experiences should have been. He asked, and then he listened.

There are men who do this well. They respect boundaries, challenge behaviour when they see it, and build teams where people feel able to speak. Organisations need more of that, not less.

It also has to be said plainly that women do not always support other women. Gossip, exclusion and undermining happen between women too. Being a woman does not make behaviour toward another woman acceptable.

This is not a men-versus-women issue. It is a dignity issue, and it belongs to everyone in an organisation.

What Good HR and Leadership Actually Look Like

When someone raises a concern, the standard is simple to state and harder to practise consistently: is the person safe, are they being heard, and is the process that follows fair to everyone involved.

• Listen properly, before defending or explaining.
• Investigate with genuine curiosity, not a predetermined conclusion.
• Follow through, and tell the person what happened next.
• Apply policy and the law consistently, regardless of who is involved.

Good HR does this every day. But it has not been every woman’s experience. Some have raised something and been told to let it go. Some have been made to feel they were the problem. Some simply stopped raising anything at all.

When people stop speaking because they no longer believe anything will change, the organisation has a larger problem than the original complaint. Trust, once it erodes, is far harder to rebuild than almost anything else inside a workplace, and its loss shows up later as disengagement, attrition and reputational risk that is difficult to trace back to its source.

What This Means for Women’s Month

Celebrate the women who are doing well. That deserves the spotlight it gets.

The same standard applies here that good HR practises every day: listen before you explain, and investigate with curiosity rather than a conclusion you’ve already reached.

But use part of this month to actually ask the women in your workplace three things:

• Have you ever felt uncomfortable at work because you are a woman?
• Did you ever stay quiet because you weren’t sure you’d be taken seriously?
• Did you believe someone would listen if you spoke up?

When they answer, don’t explain, don’t defend, and don’t rush to fix it before you’ve actually heard it. Listen first, properly, before doing anything else.

Final Thought

Perhaps the question this Women’s Month isn’t, “How do we celebrate women better?”

Perhaps it’s, “Do the women in our organisation actually believe we’re listening?”

Better workplaces for women do not require women to toughen up. They require the people around them to pay attention and follow through, in August and in every other month of the year.

References

1. Department of Employment and Labour. Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace, Government Gazette No. 46056, 18 March 2022.
2. Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998.