We’re hosting our next Big Thinking event on February 9th with Lori Curtis. Get all the details at fedcan.ca or from the Facebook invite here.

Elsie Hambrook
Guest Contributor

Recently, researchers at the University of New Brunswick interviewed 36 women from Atlantic Canada who had been bullied in the workplace. What they learned is surprising. The researchers’ main conclusions, published last month in an academic journal, was that women could not continue working in a business-as-usual way after experiencing bullying because it interfered with their health and work practices.

“Their approach to work, energy while at work, and ability to accomplish work are affected.” Their thoughts were consumed by the interference caused by the bullying. One woman said, “I had abilities but I couldn’t use them in this organization. You are a competent person but you weren’t allowed to be competent.”

Some women reported having, for example, gastrointestinal symptoms when thinking or talking about work, driving past work buildings, or being at work.

The researchers identified that women managed this problem through a four-stage process the researchers called “‘Doing Work Differently’: Being Conciliatory, Reconsidering, Reducing Interference and Redeveloping Balance”.

How fast and how well the women moved through the stages seemed to depend on the effect of bullying on their health, whether they had support from family, coworkers and workplace structures, and their financial circumstances.

About half of the interviewed women worked in professional roles such as education, health care and management and the other half in roles such as retail, food service, and clerical. Over half worked in unionized workplaces. Most were bullied by a person in authority, most often a woman.

In the first stage, “Being Conciliatory,” women try to make peace or avoid the bully, make excuses and try to accommodate. Some may not have identified that they are being bullied. One woman attributed bullying to her own personality: “I’m easygoing… I’m not aggressive.” Some excused bullying by blaming their own problems or their work reputations. Another woman said, “[The bully’s] gotta be going through something. She’s very unhappy in her job.” Eventually, the women see that the bullying is not transitory and question themselves: “Maybe I’m imagining this.” “Am I losing my mind? Is it this a menopause thing?”

Women who felt supported by families, friends, or coworkers were more likely to look further and begin to question the bullying behavior.

Some changed their approaches to work to fit bullies’ expectations. “I kept changing me and changing me.” Another would leave work at the right time and go back and finish her work. One woman would close her door, and avoid contact with others, which ultimately compromised her work. Some women deny it to avoid filing harassment charges. When one woman’s supervisor asked if she wanted to file a complaint, she replied, “I just want her to stop.”

All these excuses and attempts to accommodate have an effect on women’s ability to work and on their health.

When they begin to realize the futility of their responses, they begin to name the actions as bullying, and the transition to Stage 2 begins. Women who do not identify what is happening “linger in the first stage, trying the same approaches repeatedly”.

Women could recognize bullying earlier and spend less time being conciliatory in stage 1 if time and money were invested in educating workforces about what constitutes bullying and how it can be addressed. “There are devastating long-term consequences when women try to access resources that are too little and too late.”

If employees who witness bullying felt able to record and report it confidentially, earlier intervention might be possible. Currently fear of becoming targets themselves limits many bystanders from intervening.

Bravo to Judith MacIntosh, Judith Wuest, Marilyn Merritt Gray and Sarah Aldous for their study, “Effects of Workplace Bullying on How Women Work.” It is noteworthy that this was nursing research – developing knowledge related to nursing practice – expanding nicely what we think of as nursing.

Additional new research from Queen’s University in Kingston has shown that workplace bullying can be more damaging than racial or gender harassment. “General workplace harassment is a subtle form of mistreatment that masks underlying motives.” It may be especially detrimental because unlike gender and ethnic harassment, it is not illegal and because victims don’t have a recourse.

• Bullying versus harassment
• MP3 Audio: Bullying versus ‘difficult behaviour’
• Creating hope for the future

Evidently, employers but also workplace health and safety legislation and commissions need to pay attention to workplace bullying. Prevention is also key. After the fact, there is no totally satisfactory solution.

• MP3 Audio: How to listen to someone who is being bullied

The bully must get the message “Don’t even think of it”; potential targets must know there is help; bystanders must know how to react; and we must all see this as a social, not just an individual, problem.

Elsie Hambrook is Chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women. E-mail: acswcccf [*at*] gnb [*dot*] ca.

It likely won’t come as a surprise for you to learn that many of our members here at the Federation love statistics. This love finally has a musical outlet. World Statistics Day – an annual event recognizing the positive role played by official statistics in making the world a better place – has an official theme song. Those of you still looking for that Stats Anthem for 2010 (or perhaps your wedding song?) are in luck. The line “be partners in using statistics for your decision” is sure to be running through your head. The MP3 is below, but if you’d like to download a copy to play on your iPod (or get the lyrics) you can find it online here. Thanks to Kady O’Malley at the CBC for this.

If you’re on the fence about statistics, I’m sure that our letter to the Minister of Industry in defence of the long form census will get you singing a different tune.

Valerie Mason-John, Independent Scholar
Guest Contributor

What is fair and just in the world that we live in today? The conflict that flourishes in this world, within each of us, in our families, at work and out there in the world is proof enough that people do not feel they live in a world that treats them impartially.

Who am I to talk on this subject when you could look at my life and count the privileges I have had on more than one hand?  Winner of several awards, including an honorary doctorate for the research and writing that I have contributed to the African and Asian diasporas, a home owner, and someone who has lived and worked in three different continents and visited numerous places in the world.

My world became a kinder place when I stopped being a victim; when I moved from being a victim of my race, gender and sexuality, and became a survivor and then finally someone who could live comfortably in my skin and in the world that I had created for myself.

Research I conducted in India 2006 and now published as a nonfiction book in 2008, Broken Voices: ‘Untouchable’ Women speak out, changed my life forever. I came back from living seven months in India among the Dalit community, some of the poorest people in that country. Poor because a caste system has rendered them unfit to be included in the caste system; considered polluted, not fit enough to drink water from the same fountain as anyone else from a higher caste, and born to do literally the shit work. Still today this attitude prevails.

Being born a woman and a Dalit, perhaps is considered the worst curse, as the Manusmirti, one of the sacred Hindu texts states that women are born to serve their fathers, their, husbands and their sons.

After listening to story after story of women killed in dowry burnings, women beaten by drunk husbands, women forced into marriages with men 20 or more years their senior, women trafficked, women living on the streets as beggars, women living in slums I came back to the United Kingdom with less complaint. I realised that my life was pretty okay. Not to say I hadn’t suffered any oppression, but I knew if I had lived my life in my country of origin on the Africa continent, or in India, my life may have been very different.

How fair is that?

Since my visit, India has chosen its first woman president, Smt. Pratibja Patil, who is an advocate of the empowerment of Dalits and especially the masses of poor women. A year ago India’s parliament also unanimously elected its first woman Speaker – a Dalit – Meira Kumar to the Lok Sabha, the lower House of Parliament.

This is all a wakeup call to remind me that the majority of the women in the world are still domestic slaves. Many of us in the west live a life that often negates these women’s experiences, through our ignorance and our need not to want to look back and to carry on fighting for the equality and humanity of all women in the world.

Living in Canada has brought it home to me much more. As a black queer woman living my 20s and 30s in Brixton, a black borough in South London, I could not be out on the streets, through fear of being attacked, raped or beaten. And to walk down the road with my white lover hand in hand – forget it. It was bad enough walking down the road with a white male colleague, and receiving all the insults under the sun from black men hanging out on the streets. I was in their eyes sleeping with the enemy, and from their point of view I could see how they could think this, as to be a black male on the streets of London has no fairness at all.

Listen to Valerie Mason-John’s interview on Bookmark.

My life as a black queer woman is totally different here in Canada; there is a professional acceptance, and an acceptance on the streets from the black community. However, working with youth in the education system, I can see that although there is an overwhelming tolerance of queerness, there is still much hatred and intolerance within some of the fundamental religious communities, so all is not bliss.

And in the mainstream Canadian community I still have to navigate racism. It is masked in by the fact that my status has gone up a notch living here. I am no longer at the bottom of the pile; it is the First Nations people who are visibly and overtly discriminated against. However, as a black person in Canada I can feel invisible. There is this unspoken notion that I should not complain; that it is the First Nation people who are oppressed.

I know this is not the whole picture. I have no idea what it would be like to be black in Canada and not have the language English or French. What I do know is that many people think I speak such brilliant English, and I must be extremely clever. The sensible Canadians realise I am British.

Navigating my life as a black queer woman in Canada also has its issues. It is not the first identity I would refer to myself as. But as I have left a body of work behind me, author of the only two books to document the lives of black and Asian lesbians in the United Kingdom, author of one of the cult plays in the UK Sin Dykes, a story about three black lesbians and three white lesbians and sexuality, and once the artistic director of London Mardi Gras Arts Festival and host of the biggest women’s club in Europe for a while, and much more, it is hard to throw off this label. Named a Black Gay Icon, chapters and papers written about my work, it is hard to step sideways from a label that others put on you.

Admittedly once upon a time, my race, gender and sexuality were at the centre of my life. I grew up as an angry young black woman because of growing up in orphanages, living on the streets at 14, incarcerated at 15, sexual abuse, racism and homophobia.

Listen to Dr. Mason-John discuss Borrowed Body.

At the age of 19 when I attended Leeds University, I found the lesbian feminist separatist community which I believe saved my life. It was the beginning of a healing journey within a community where I could talk about the abuse in my life without being judged. However, I left and became a journalist reporting stories about the underdog. Black deaths in custody, Aboriginal land rights, Nicaragua, South Africa, the Black Riots in the United Kingdom.

When I wrote my first book on lesbian issues, I was dumped by the black British media. I had gone from giving talks with John Pilger, offered the chance to interview Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister, though her office later reneged, to being silently shunned. But I was young and I didn’t care on the surface. I needed to protest, shout out aloud for my rights.

I am a contented human being now, who has found the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha and has found perhaps my Prozac to survive in the world: Meditation.

Listen to Valerie Mason-John’s Loving Kindness body meditation.

I continue to write, but who I write about continues to change. My master’s in creative writing, education and the arts revitalised the researcher in me. Since then my research has led me to writing a book about hatred, anger and fear, to the caste system in India, the rebel war and indigenous religions of Sierra Leone.

Most recently I am beginning to research the slave trade in Canada, my new home. I descend from a long lineage of slaves. And so it is apt that I should be embarking on such a project, especially as in Canada there is a link between slavery, Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

Meanwhile, if I am to aver an identity that encapsulates the essence of equity and social justice, it would be Buddhist. But of course once we begin naming, we are moving into unfairness, exclusivity. I try to live my life observing an ethical practise, one of not harming life, taking the not given, aware of my speech, intoxicants, sexual misconduct, hatred, covetousness and ignorance. It is the best I can do.

As Gandhi said, ‘we must be the change we want to see in the world’.

Valerie Mason-John is an educator, writer, poet, playwright and performance artist in Edmonton.

In what was NOT an April Fools Day joke, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences hosted Professor Stewart Elgie at our April 1st Big Thinking lecture on Parliament Hill.

You can access a podcast of the lecture here on the fedcan blog!

Stay-tuned for our next lecture on May 12. Email us at media@fedcan.ca if you would like to be added to our invitation list.

The full podcast of the plenary is now available – listen as Adelle Blackett (McGill University), Larry Chartrand (University of Ottawa) and James Deaville (Carleton University) present their thoughts in this session moderated by Malinda Smith, VP Equity Issues.

You can also read the live blog of the event here.

On March 28, 2010, the Annual Meeting of the Federation’s General Assembly featured an intriguing and thoughtful session on Engaged Scholarship, moderated by Karen Grant, VP Research Policy. Listen to the full podcast of the session below, or read the live blog account of the event here. Excuse the initial part of the recording – the session gets underway at 2:34 into the recording.

In the plenary, you’ll hear Shauna McCabe (Director, Centre for Humanities and Arts Research in Transdisciplinary Space at Mount Allison University) explore how creative research can offer an important tool for engagement, using examples of current research involving artistic and environmental practice coming together to explore landscape change.

Budd Hall (Director, Community Based Research, University of Victoria) discusses Canadian dimensions of engaged scholarship, the challenges that researchers face in the university, and the idea of the knowledge commons summit.

Lastly, Ian Graham (Vice President, Knowledge Translation, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)) discusses CIHR’s knowledge translation initiatives, outlining how health research can be quickly and effectively transfered into practice.