Dialogue: It's still a man's world at heart

By SANDY BURGHAM

I never got around to digging out some of my early 90s glamour on Christine Rankin Dangly Day. My excuse was that it was the school holidays - drop earrings and a mini were simply impractical garb for a trip to Kelly Tarlton's.

But I am still feeling guilty about my failure to put my ears and thighs on the line in solidarity with Christine, particularly since I was aware how much easier it was to cop out rather than have people tell me to get over it.

You see, I sensed that there were many who quietly wished she had just worn grey and got on with it, rather than dredging up the issues of sexual discrimination again, and maybe I had bowed to this undercurrent.

A 23-year-old friend who has been keeping at best a vague eye on the dangly earring debacle, passed comment to the effect of, "I didn't think that sort of thing still went on."

For many in her age group, Women's Lib is now a dated, almost embarrassing concept, as they assume that equality for women has been around long enough to become a norm.

But those of Christine's generation know different. Many of them still often wear the title "Ms" as the war veterans do their poppies.

My contemporaries and I are caught on the cusp between these two generations. We don a mellow brand of feminism because the more hardened version seems like so much effort for little personal return.

We've not only succeeded in many domains traditionally left to men but have revelled in playing it like a girl and not a boy, while being able to appreciate ironic gags like, "Who got the job? The girl with the biggest tits."

Indeed, in the past I have advised women to play the game a bit if they want to get ahead. This doesn't mean sleeping your way to the top (a strategy that usually sees the bimbo stuck in the middle with no friends) or indulging in drinking games with the lads.

It simply means knowing how to stand out at the right times while blending in on the occasions that don't matter as much. You get less personal grief and an easier path to the big bucks.

But it seems us post-bra-burning feminists have been caught sleeping on the night watch.

While we may all like to think that women in the workforce and a more enlightened and vigilant society overall have cured the problem of discrimination, it has simply driven it underground, making it all the more insidious.

And as a result, stories abound of the promotion you missed for no apparent reason, the idiot buffoon in the next office on more money than you, the innuendos from amorous bosses in their midlife crises, and patronising remarks after you've been crying in the loos.

These issues are hard to nail on the basis of discrimination as the offender always has a plausible alternative agenda. "You have got to understand, John has been with the company 40 years," or "Oh, you were offended! Look, we were just joking, for God's sake!"

Thus when Ms Dyson in notably drab attire remarked that the Rankin case was becoming a gender rather than a performance issue, she seemed to forget that it was her tunnel-visioned colleagues who couldn't seem to separate the two.

I remember seeing Christine Rankin once on the early bird flight from Wellington. She was a striking-looking woman who held herself with confidence and style, a bit like a tall poppy in a field of suffocating, stubborn kikuyu.

Sure, she didn't look like a public servant whose working environment breeds sameness and greyness. But then I assumed she was changing the paradigm, thinking outside the box, celebrating Kiwi ingenuity or whatever else is encouraged in progressive organisations these days.

And thus, Christine's fixed-term contract aside, I am haunted by the discriminatory persecution she allegedly suffered.

If a high-ranking official so close to a female-led political arena is subjected to such personal attacks, can you imagine what is happening lower down the food chain with the less empowered, motivated and gutsy?

The first feminist I ever encountered as a kid was a family friend who, while padding about being a dutiful wife, wore a defiant badge reading "Women make politics not tea."

How disappointing that many years later so many women, including our Prime Minister, have remained politically silent on the issue of Ms Rankin's dress.

Strange to think that in a country that prides itself in pioneering the vote for women, we tolerate men behaving badly so close to our female Prime Minister's office.