The shocking link between women’s mental health and domestic abuse

4 Questions Your Organisation Needs to Consider to Prevent Gender Balance Deteriorating

TW: mentions suicide, mental health, abuse

New research is just out highlighting a shocking link between women’s mental health, specifically suicide attempts, and domestic abuse.

Commissioned by Agenda Alliance, an group consisting of 100 organisations such as Oxfam, Women’s Aid and Mind, the research shows that women subjected to domestic abuse are three times more likely to attempt to end their lives than their peers. When sexual abuse occurs within a relationship, the number shoots up to over seven times higher. When it comes to self-harm, women suffering violence from their partner are three times more likely to hurt themselves.

It is suggested that all professionals who come into contact with women struggling with their mental health should, as a high priority, be asking about their personal safety, especially if a woman discloses suicidal ideation.

Given that at least one quarter of all women will experience domestic abuse (DV) -  emotional abusive, coercive control and/or physical violence - this is an important factor for workplaces to be considering when it comes to supporting their women with mental health, avoiding long term mental health sick leave and retaining their staff. The cost of staff who are on long term mental health sick leave is enormous, £42-45 billion annually in the UK alone; the impact of domestic violence is a proportion of this.

Consequences for Gender Balance Within Organisations

Here are 4 things what you/your company need to be thinking about from an HR and DEI perspective, loosing women means upsetting your gender balance:

1) How can you absorb the implications of this research into its mental health policies and practices?

2) Make your mental health first aiders aware; can they gently enquire about personal safety if they are supporting women with spiralling mental health, self-harm issues or suicidal ideation, since these could be signposts to a lack of safety at home?

3) Know where to get support for your women. Have info ready with helplines, refuges and relevant organisations. Consider safeguarding requirements for children and pets. The Dogs Trust has a fostering program called The Freedom Program specifically for this situation. Women don’t leave if they will have to leave children or pets behind.

4) Consider hosting a training day on the psychology of victim blaming, to help all staff supporting women and to be better allies if domestic abuse is disclosed; any notion that they will be blamed may deter disclosure and keep women unsafe. I am accredited by VictimFocus to facilitate this training. Learn more here.

Ultimately, staff are a company’s greatest asset. Being able to support staff to stay well, be safe and be able to continue to do their job is of enormous benefit all round. Companies must create enough safety that their women can talk about what’s going on, and not be afraid to ask if someone is safe at home if their mental health deteriorates. Organisations should be working to prevent gender balance deteriorating, including loosing women to DV related absence.

The patriarchy hurts men too

Why Breaking Down Gender Stereotypes Is Beneficial To All Genders

I wrote recently about how stereotypes for women hold us back in the workplace. As someone who is passionate about making workplaces and the world better for women, how the current system of patriarchy also hurts men is an equally important topic.

Yes men get paid more, get given more leadership roles, are seen as the default while women are ‘other’... but it’s not all a bed of roses. Having to appear tough, strong and confident, to be natural leaders or be derided as weak, incompetent and unattractive, adds immense pressure. Not being allowed to ask for help or admit you don’t know, nor permitted to talk about your feelings or admit you even have them, is damaging.

It is still assumed that men do far less caring and parenting, because they don’t want to, aren’t as good at it as women or are better put to use earning money aka ‘proper work.’ But this simply isn't true: men aren't happy to have less quality time, enjoyment and responsibility for caring. The greatest deathbed regrets are around not spending enough time with those that matter the most to us, afterall. If we want men to be more caring in general, we mustn’t deny them the opportunity to care.

Toughing it out when not feeling physically well rather than seeking medical help is unhelpful; later diagnosis can negatively affect prognosis. US based research revealed that during the pandemic men were apparently less likely to wear masks if they felt peer pressure to resist, putting them at far greater risk of a serious illness in the name of not being seen as weak.

Gender Stereotypes Create Impossible Standards

If fitting in and being respected as a man means being tough, strong, decisive, unemotional, competitive, distant from your family, ambitious and a natural leader and so on, it’s an impossible standard to measure up to, plus unappealing and daunting. Research on the impact of toxic perfectionism includes anecdotal evidence about the impossible ideal young men feel they have to live up contributing to suicide attempts. Not being able to talk about your emotions feeds into this.

This ideal for men also creates a career disadvantage around most desirable leadership traits of the future, which include vulnerability, empathy and collaboration; this leaves men striving in the wrong direction, and becoming something that later holds them back.

This kind of ideal also ignores individuality, our humanity and the benefit to society of a range of values and personalities. I’d love to see gender stereotyping disappear and each person able to be, and celebrated for, who they really are far beyond this simple distinction.

How would the culture in your workplace be enhanced by stereotypes no longer being reinforced? How might respect, inclusion, wellbeing, collaboration and success rise? How are stereotypes being reinforced through language and performance reviews?

Book a conversation with me to find out how dismantling stereotypes could enhance allyship in your organisation.

Harmful Stereotypes: Women

For February, the theme of my content is stereotyping, highlighting sexist stereotypes, examining how they can be harmful and how they are intertwined with equity issues for women.

From the UN’s High Commissioner on Human Rights:

”A gender stereotype is a generalised view or preconception about attributes or characteristics, or the roles that are or ought to be possessed by, or performed by, women and men. A gender stereotype is harmful when it limits women’s and men’s capacity to develop their personal abilities, pursue their professional careers and/or make choices about their lives.”

Some stereotypes can be clearly harmful, such as ‘women are too emotional to lead,’ while some can appear to be neutral, such as ‘men are strong,’ or ‘women are nurturing’. However, on deeper inspection, the last one reinforces the idea that women should be default primary caregivers; we know that the vast majority of child care and other caring responsibility falls to women and is unpaid, thus creating inequality of opportunity, power and finances. So all stereotypes are worth examining for their truthfulness and impact.

In the workplace, you might have come across situations such as a woman in the meeting always being asked to take notes or make the drinks rather than a man, even when she is more senior. Perhaps you’ve seen women with young children not being invited onto projects or to apply for promotions because it has been assumed that they are no longer ambitious or able to commit. If a woman is seen to be direct, she might be looked down on for not being kind (GASP!), when a man would be seen as assertive and viewed positively for the exact same behaviour. We all have an abundance of lived experience of stereotyping harming women in the workplace.

Stereotyping is a huge contributor to the lack of a level playing field or equity for women in the workplace and in the wider world. The first step to tackling the harm that stereotyping causes is to understand the breadth of sexist stereotypes, notice them affecting people’s behaviour and expectations of others out in the world, and to take time to reflect on the implications of not tackling them.

What are the bigger paradigms that are reinforced by allowing stereotypes to perpetuate? Is it really for the best for the world, your workplace and all the women you know that sexist stereotyping continues? It might seem ‘minor’ in your world, something we just have to put up with, yet at the other end of the scale, women in Afghanistan can no longer access education and in some states medical care because of it. It’s all part of the same continuum, and is misogynistic at its roots. None of it is ok or helpful for your future, nor our collective future.

And yes, men are hurt by sexist stereotypes too. More on this here.

Sexism, ageism and inclusivity: why what your staff are saying about Madonna matters

The women, especially the older women, in your organisation, are taking note about how Madonna is being spoken about after her appearance at The Grammy's. 

Madonna has chosen to have plenty of cosmetic treatment on her face to keep up a youthful appearance, and commentary globally has completely slated her for it since Sunday. 

You cannot open a magazine or app without an abundance of ads and features for anti-aging products and gossipy articles about famous women's looks. Here's the message this emits: it is completely unacceptable to look too old, too big, too wrinkled, too grey...do something about it or you'll be ridiculed and discarded. The ageist pressure on women, especially women in the public eye, not to look older, is intense. 

Men do not face this criticism, scrutiny or shaming for ageing. Quite the opposite most of the time; men can be seen as more valuable as they age, in looks, experience and appeal - it's a big compliment to be called a 'silver fox.'

How do you want the more women in your organisation to feel about themselves as they age? Valued, appreciated and respected, as though they very much still belong, and are welcome in the organisation regardless of how age impacts their physical appearance. 

Surely not as if they have to take expensive, time consuming and sometimes dangerous measures to keep their youthful looks BUT DON'T GO TO FAR or you'll be a laughing stock and an outcast. 

Harmful stereotypes of older women have a lot to answer for, not least in the way they work to cause younger women to go to great lengths, expense and sometimes danger not to appear older. 

The government has been pushing the idea of enticing older workers back to the workplace. Stigma around ageing, women's perceived decrease in value as we age, and of course menopause related challenges, are a real barrier for women. 

How can your organisation truly be somewhere that values and retains women? Not ridiculing women's efforts to stay young when societal pressure constantly tells them they must, and not adding to this pressure, is just the start. Speak up if you hear this happening. Call it out. Send a clear message of allyship and inclusion. 

Want me to support your organisation with gender diversity issues? Book a call here.

We need to talk about p*rn and allyship. Can men really be allies in the workplace if they watch p*rn privately?

We need to talk about p*rn. 

Yes, p*rn. 

We cannot talk about DEI, allyship and all of that good stuff without talking about p*rnography, the sex industry and the huge impact it has on how women are viewed and treated, even subconsciously. It has a well researched negative impact, increasing feelings of misogyny for those who view porn regularly, and contributes hugely to the objectification or dehumanising of women, and how women are viewed as worth less than men, and only valued for their looks. 

Of course this spills over into the workplace, how could it not??? Yet I don't hear people talking about how secret p*rn habits are holding back workplace DEI efforts or people's ability to be genuine allies. And we need to. 

Today, the Children's Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza released a report into the impact p*rnography has for children on their body image, relationships and self-esteem, as well as highlighting children's exposure to p*rn. 

No prizes for guessing that it has a damaging impact, with an rising percentage of boys expecting girls to enjoy and want violence as part of intimacy because it's so normal in p*rn. They don't check with girls that this is true before they try it out on them, and girls are being strangled, beaten and more in a misguided attempt to turn them on as boys emulate.

79% of young people have seen violent p*rn before the age of 18, (degrading behaviour, coercion or pain-inducing acts), and the report highlights that frequent viewers of porn are more likely to engage in these kinds of acts themselves. 

Andrew Tate's misogynystic version of masculinity is insanely popular; his videos have been viewed 11.6bn times on tiktok alone, the equivalent of every man globally seeing his content 4 times. Misogyny and objectifying women is popular. 

The vast majority of p*rn shows women in a dehumanising and negative light. Objects to be used and abused. Objects to be ridiculed, humiliated and looked down on. The degradation of women is the main product of the p*rn industry, and it is highly linked to human trafficking. The demand for p*rn fuels trafficking of women and children. 

It isn't possible that anyone who consumes p*rn, is a true ally to women and views women as equal to them, as people of value and people worth listening to. In p*rn the women are genuinely being violated, hurt and abused, it's not acting, what you see on screen is what is actually happening to the women. 

Watching p*rn for 'entertainment' privately, then pretending to be an ally to women at work, is incongruent at best, and certainly deluded.

It's not an easy conversation, but it's one that needs airing. I would like to see all people, especially men, that consider themselves genuine allies to women, denounce all pornography and the sex industry, and call out their friends who consume it. Let's create social pressure to make p*rn as socially unacceptable as domestic violence. 

People pleasing will never win you respect

People pleasing is generally driven by the desire for one or both of two things. 

First up, approval or validation aka please like me, respect me and fill up my low self-worth tank. This looks like not speaking your mind, going along with things to avoid conflict, compromising your own needs to do things for others and so on. Second, control. Needing things to turn out a certain way, especially in a way that feels safe and calm.

However, there is often a deeper reason that people pleasing shows up as a deeply entrenched pattern. And that reason is that it can be a trauma adaptation and learned survival skill.

When faced with danger or threat, the responses we most commonly hear about are flight or fight. Research used to focus on these as human's responses to danger because studies used to only have male participants until more recently (I know, maddening, luckily women are much more frequently included these days). 

For women, we may well not win at either fleeing or fighting, and so we are likely to freeze in the face of danger to survive. This is one of the reasons why women’s lack of fighting back nor attempting to escape has be used against us in cases where we have experienced violence.

Alongside freeze, the most common response to danger for women is to try to appease or placate the source of danger in the hope that we will get away later. This is sometimes known as the fawn response.

People pleasing, keeping others happy at our own expense, and abandoning our own needs to win validation, can be a coping strategy carried over from times in our lives when we’ve faced ongoing threat or danger. If we learn that by not rocking the boat, we avoid something horrible or painful, then we might develop people pleasing as a coping mechanism and then carry on doing it as a way of avoiding conflict long after it has served its purpose and the danger has passed. 

The problem is that people pleasing causes the opposite result to what we want. 

• We want to be liked and appreciated, and instead people pleasing causes a lack of respect from others and being walked all over. 

• We want to be seen as capable and confident, yet we’re seen as doormats who will unquestionably do more than our fair share. 

• We hope others will see how hard we work and how much take on, and see us as having leadership and promotion potential. But instead, we are seen as bad at delegating or managing our workload, unhinged when we explode at the resentment of being unappreciated, and incapable of leading a team since we cannot balance our lives, nor simultaneously manage self-care and being a high achiever. 

When people pleasing is a coping strategy as a result of trauma, you might experience some or all of these:

1. You feel misunderstood, unseen or like no one knows the real you. That's because you aren't being authentically yourself, because you learnt that it wasn't safe to speak up or be yourself, and that keeping others happy, perhaps morphing into a person they would like or at least not dislike, was vital.

2. You say yes all the time even when you're already overloaded and exhausted; saying no feels impossible. Why? Because you might upset people, they might get angry you've refuse their request for support, and you feel safe when you avoid that possibility. Trauma can result in being hypervigilant to others needs to avoid them kicking off, and this becomes far more important than self-care, and saying no becomes impossible.

3. You keep your challenging emotions and needs away from those you are close to. Instead, sometimes you share your troubles or life story in all its gory details with a taxi driver or someone you just met, because they are unlikely to reject you, and you might never see them again anyway so there's not much to lose.

4. You have resentful meltdowns about how unappreciated you feel by others and how exhausted you are from helping them and never taking care of yourself, but are quickly remorseful, guilt-laden and apologetic, so you shift back in people pleasing to keep the peace asap.

5. You take too much responsibility for other people's feelings and behaviour, instead of recognising that it's theirs to own and choose.

If you are reading this and recognising yourself in the patterns outlined above, you are probably wondering how you move past all of this. I want to reassure you that it is more than possible to let go of coping patterns that are no longer serving you, and shift to a much better place in how you think, feel and act.

The first step in making change is acknowledging that what you’re doing now is not working, and then becoming fully ready to change and move past it. 

If you are genuinely ready, book a discovery call that will help you leave behind sabotaging patterns including people pleasing so that you can create a life and career where you are genuinely respected and successful; a balanced, happy, healthy life full of self-worth.

I want you to reach a place of empowerment, feeling calmly in control and full of inner peace. 

Book a conversation

Before you lead others, lead yourself: The important of self-leadership

“Exceptional leaders distinguish themselves because of superior self-leadership.” Daniel Goleman, ‘Emotional Intelligence’

What is self-leadership? 

It is far more complex and nuanced than being ‘in control.’ Think of self-leadership more about being in the driving seat of our own lives: owning our own thoughts, feelings and actions, plus being in charge of our own direction of travel. 

Self-leadership is about how we observe and manage ourselves; how we compassionately and deliberately reflect and evolve. It is about how we prioritise taking care of ourselves, how self-aware we are, and the extent to which our behaviour is consistently congruent with our values. 

Good self-leadership is incompatible with playing the victim or being a people pleaser. It also means rejecting perfectionism and other forms of self-sabotage. How we handle disappointment, failure and challenges with honesty and compassion, and without self-rejection, catastrophising or blame shifting are all part of self-leadership. 

It includes taking responsibility for doing the own inner work necessary to move past childhood or other issues, so that the past does not impact how we show up in the present in our relationships and working life. This means investing time, energy and emotional capacity in to therapy and/or coaching.

Another aspect of self-leadership is all thing to do with self-validation and self-worth, inner stability and self-trust. Knowing your value, and fostering the skills to handle your inner world even when thing get sticky and curve balls hit, means feeling calm and confident in your ability to cope no matter what. In this way, self-leadership is a core pillar to our resilience and adaptability.

It also means taking responsibility for how we spend our time and energy, how we balance our lives, who we spend time with, the media we consume and so on. 

The Value of Self-Leadership for Leaders

The most effective leaders walk their talk. They do not ask of others what they are not doing themselves. Self-leadership brings self-respect, and this is an important component of being able to command the respect of others too, as well as role modelling to everyone around you many excellent, desirable personal traits. 

One of these is trust, which is such an important trait for effective leaders to foster with everyone around them. Our people need to trust us to work calmly and effectively, to buy into the vision we ask them to contribute towards: with trust comes results, good culture and team spirit. If we cannot trust ourselves, how will others trust us? Self-leadership equals self-trust. 

Strong self-leadership inspires, informs and empowers others around us to lead themselves too. If we assume that a good leader is empowering others to succeed rather than instructing and micromanaging, it ties in with wanting their team to be independent, responsible, self-aware and growing too. 

A rising tide lifts all boats, and who wouldn’t want their leaders to have excellent self-leadership skills, in order for this to lift everyone around them and below them.

Developing Your Self-Leadership Skills

Balanced self-awareness is the first vital step in developing your self-leadership skills. Compassionate self-appraisal will take you far when you marry it with a growth mindset; be  willing and humble enough to take steps to grow in the areas where you notice that you would like to show up differently. 

The ability to ask for help and embrace the value of others on our journey can be a vital, courageous step that accelerates your self-leadership too.  It could be from colleagues, family and friends for a 360 view. It could be working with a coach, therapist or mentor to support you to move beyond limiting patterns of feelings, thoughts or behaviour. 

Great self-leadership happens deliberately when you choose it and move towards it, and I invite you to do that right away!

How can I help you with this? 

Are you an ambitious woman who would love to see a radical shift in their confidence and leadership over the next 3 months and are ready to take action? And you are ready to step into a whole new level of self-leadership, respect and success, book a complimentary call consultation on this link: https://harrietwaleycohen.as.me/schedule.php