There are a million reasons to dislike the “open concept” office, a grey Sahara in which everyone from intern to CFO is utterly exposed. You can’t pick your nose. You can’t pick a wedgie. You can’t eat a chopped liver sandwich without inciting questions from across the room such as “What in God’s name is that?” and “Can you please take it outside?” You can’t pass gas. You can’t even gossip. What can you do? Well, if you’re a woman who works in one of these wide-open spaces, you can be leered at by your male colleagues and ranked on your looks. This is the takeaway from a recent study published in the journal of Gender, Work, and Organization. Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K. conducted long-term interviews with workers in an open concept office and determined that such spaces enable male employees to watch, and judge, and ultimately creep out their female colleagues.From the study: “Visibility (in open concept spaces) enabled these men to judge and rank women according to their sexual attractiveness” like men on “nudist beaches.” The open concept setting “provided a space where it was much easier for men to exercise this kind of ‘male gaze.’ Conscious of this possibility, some women spoke of the anxiety they felt and the restrictions they placed on themselves to avoid being judged in this way. Several chose to manage their visibility by adjusting the way they dressed.”The study, a perfect pairing with #MeToo media coverage, has gone viral. But it’s also attracted a predictable conservative backlash from critics who want to know: don’t feminist academics have anything better to do than tackle the “male gaze?” In the words of Dr. Debra Soh on Twitter, a sex researcher and frequent critic of the feminist status quo, “This is the tripe modern day feminism wants us to obsess over, comparing open ...
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