How the Women in Business Online Community Is Fighting Harassment
Speak Up and Support the Women in Business Online Community
One of the things women, and especially business women who have to travel, encounter on a constant basis is harassment on the street. Members of the women in business online community will appreciate the way a group of young New York women has chosen to confront the problem. Emily May, founder of the women’s network www.Ihollaback.org, which offers women a place to tell their stories of harassment and mark maps with the relevant data of their harassment to create a database combat the issue, calls the phenomenon they oppose “street harassment.”
This website is just one of many efforts, mainly coming from women under thirty, to stand up, be heard, come together, and publicly address the problem of street harassment head-on. A March 1 New York Times article, “Keeping Women Safe Through Social Networking,” discusses the phenomenon of street harassment and what different women’s online networks are doing about it. The main points are two. First, business women have undergone this abuse virtually unmentioned for decades, and it is only in the past few years that circumstances have made it possible for them to come forward. Second, online women’s networks are the vehicle that has made this coming forward possible.
The conclusion here seems obvious. This network of online communities for women in business and traveling in general hopes to stimulate real action to change an abhorrent status quo. No one among us has gone through life unscathed by street harassment, whether it is as seemingly innocuous as an inappropriate whistle or comment, or something more aggressive such as threatening physical contact. And yet the issue remained deliberately ignored, absolutely unpublicized for years. Now these websites hope both to make the workplace more accepting of women’s attempts to discuss the problem, and to lay the groundwork for efforts to prevent it in the future.
Networks like IHollaBack are clearly just an early step, if an important and empowering one, but they are also another sign about how women are whole-heartedly leaving behind the soft spoken behavior of past generations, using new media to come together and change the world that they see, whether through establishing a women in business online community or engaging the press to get heard.
