We are too comfortable with letting women lose

"Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny: period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don't. They have to seek it out, they invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren't any wars they can play rugby." - Kristin Scott Thomas, Fleabag

OVER a round of drinks, a male friend had recently asked if I had ever been harassed while alcohol was involved. My first answer was no. But then I realised it wasn't exactly accurate, I had merely buried the memory, until the question brought it back.

You see, in one particular year of university, soon after exams were over, the part-time lecturer (who is no longer with the school) invited all the students for drinks at a pub.

As many of these peer-pressure things go, it's a matter of sport. I refrained from touching alcohol for much of the night. When the lecturer got wind of it, he insisted on buying a light drink, an amaretto cocktail.

Then, sitting beside me in a booth, with schoolmates packed on the other side, his hand went on my back, and slid an inch or so down, and overstayed. My brain went into risk-assessment mode and the two main issues that stood against my favour - despite having done nothing wrong. Firstly, my exam results may be jeopardised. Secondly, it seemed hard to prove or to make a point about this.

Trust was broken. I'm not sure I today would endorse my silence on that incident. It was how I had left it behind. I did nothing because it had felt that the most powerful thing I held then, was a grade I deserved for hard work. (As universities' recent responses to harassment go, you can see why my risk assessment did not put much weight in the system.)

Top female executives today have told me of their drinking tactics during business events in their earlier years because they were in risk-on mode. One would heavily tip a waiter a couple of hours before a client drinking session started, to have him keep the alcohol topped up very slowly. Another would have the waiter quietly swop the whiskey out for tea.

Of course, none of this should be normal. But society has somehow made itself comfortable with women having to take on the added burden of protecting themselves in risky situations that they did not orchestrate, much less deserve.

This unsavoury trip down memory lane also brought back a silly argument. Many years ago, as a cub reporter, when I told a male ex-colleague that a male contact was staring at me for longer than was appropriate, he brushed it off as a matter of oversensitivity.

Looking back, it seems to me that for some, such an incident can only make a point if I had reframed it as the odds that his own daughter would be stared at this way. Perhaps then, a father's instinct would kick in to play a powerful protector. For some, only then is the male aggressor not a fellow man to be defended, but a faceless villain.

In a recent Korean movie titled Kim Ji Young, Born 1982, viewers watched through the female protagonist's point of view of how among other things, she had to hold her pee while mothering a fussy child, because there was a spat of spy-camera planting around public toilets. As a child, she was followed by a male student on a bus - to which her father would only say, wear a longer school skirt. As an adult, she falls into postpartum depression.

My male movie companion struggled to understand the movie. I don't blame him. It shows he has not experienced that frequent risk assessment for women that begins from the time of youth, encrusted in unwarranted self-blame.

We soldier on, nevertheless. But as my girlfriends in the last week of 2019 discussed fresh incidents of harassment in the media, it seems that there should be a point made about gender diversity among leaders.

Women have seen - and still see - how power has been wielded, and for the benefit of insidious behaviour in some cases. When more of the best women make big decisions, the ones who wield power right - because they know how power can go wrong when wielded badly - can address harassment as a pressing agenda but in an even-handed manner.

So in dealing with harassment at a corporate level, it would be seen as paying less lip service if there were more female bosses who sharply understand the risks for women in the first place, while resisting the male-bashing temptation.

Meanwhile, men and women who show empathetic traits risk being seen as weak, and so, unsuited for leadership. Yet this rests perception of "strong" leadership on outdated definitions of masculinity - a selection process that in its design can easily eliminate women as a choice.

Layer this on with research showing that women's risk-adjusted returns tend to beat those of men. Women are less likely to overestimate their intelligence. But even as the systemic gender gap persists, top-performing women who rightly promote themselves are ostracised, while men who do so are rewarded.

Given this, companies that do not adjust for leadership biases - including gender bias - may make uneconomical decisions about pay. It is responsible to ask if organisations - and shareholders - have been overpaying for hot air, and underpaying for risk-adjusted returns.

I do not think that having more women alone, without a common respect for merit, is a panacea to better leadership. It is the lack of respect for diversity across strengths of different people that is faulty thinking, and that perpetuates groupthink. The widely-used StrengthsFinder test has shown that leaders with different strength combinations succeed.

We then ask questions about the lack of gender representation because women make up about half the population, yet remain underrepresented in leadership, and as data shows, mostly underpaid. It reflects a vicious cause and consequence of groupthink.

What all of this says is that we are too comfortable with women being set up to lose. Institutions - schools, businesses, families - can chart a more thoughtful, supportive path for women that bears honesty to the current reality of lopsided treatment.

So in 2020, I unearth my story from more than a decade ago. And for every year passed without progress on shifting the balance in many aspects of gender issues, is simply progress another year overdue.