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State Senator Gayle Goldin: Why Speaking Out Against Sexual Harassment Backfires for Women in Office

When #MeToo started filling up my Facebook feed, I wavered about whether to join in. As a Rhode Island state senator, I know I’m already judged by the clothes I wear, the tone of my voice, and if I’m likable enough. I’m expected to be a fierce champion and a team player—all while wearing lipstick and nice shoes.

I don’t have a salacious story of sexual harassment at the State House. What I have is the story of sexism that permeates our daily lives.

Politics is all about relationships. We aren’t just making friends at work; we’re building rapport to advance our legislative agenda. When you call out your colleagues for everyday sexism, you earn a reputation of being “difficult,” “sensitive,” or worse. Too many men who are not perpetrating this behavior often turn their colleagues’ comments into jokes or simply shrug. This creates an internal struggle for elected women: Is it more important to gain your colleague’s support on legislation than to remind him that he should stop calling you “one of the girls” when he’s talking to you?

Sadly, for many women in office, if you start speaking truth to power, power talks back—by killing your bills, changing your committee assignments, and smearing your reputation.

In politics, your reputation and your word are everything. When women legislators raise the issue of sexism among our male colleagues, the price we pay is often subtle. We aren’t included in impromptu social gatherings. We’re passed over as bill sponsors. No one asks our opinions on legislation. Suddenly, a colleague who pledged to support your bill changes his mind. We risk losing our colleagues’ trust for not keeping their secrets.

When women in office start speaking truth to power, power talks back—by killing your bills, changing your committee assignments, and smearing your reputation.

And when sexism crosses the line and becomes sexual harassment, an elected woman must face a harsh truth: questions about the credibility of her story often lead to questions about her credibility as a legislator. If our male colleagues decide it just isn’t worth the “hassle” of working with us, it can be fairly easy to work around us. After all, three-quarters of all state legislators are men.

While we may be effective fighters for our policy ideas, confronting everyday sexism is exhausting.

When I was first elected to the state Senate, a strong woman leader who had been in office for decades gave me a piece of advice that made my stomach turn: Smile more, it’ll make some of the men more comfortable. A male colleague once stopped me in the middle of a policy discussion with another senator to tell me I looked pregnant. Work-related events involve alcohol served by women in low-cut shirts and plenty of “locker room talk.” Colleagues interrupt me and tell me to stop asking questions, to calm down, to be helpful. I am often one of the only women in the room.

PHOTO: Courtesy of Gayle Goldin

Senator Gayle Goldin (left) attends a bill signing with Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo (center).

Individually, these incidents can seem small. Collectively, they are a relentless reminder of how hard women must work to earn basic respect. Sexual harassment and sexism are used to make the victim feel powerless. We learn to quickly calculate the repercussions for speaking up and keep our opinions quiet. We serve as advocates, but we spend too much energy and time trying to placate our colleagues and please the public.

The trouble is, the impacts of this behavior reach beyond me and my female colleagues. When men are not challenged to address their biases, the laws they make reflect them. Equal pay becomes “too difficult for business.” Child care subsidies are “not a priority.” Paid family leave is a “nice perk, but not a necessity.” Threats to reproductive rights are “not worth worrying about.” Removing guns from domestic abusers takes a back seat to guarding a man’s Second Amendment rights.

As more stories of sexual harassment come pouring out, I have thought about why, as women, we pick our battles. I’m finally realizing we shouldn’t have to. We should be able to do our jobs without getting comments about our looks, without having to avoid going into certain rooms alone, and without having to fear for our safety. And we shouldn’t have to mollify our male colleagues and tolerate their bad behavior in order to get a shot at passing legislation that improves the well-being and health of half the population.

We shouldn’t have to tolerate our male colleagues’ bad behavior in order to get a shot at passing legislation that benefits women—like equal pay or paid family leave.

We are elected to be powerful voices, but the reality is we must work twice as hard to be heard. It’s time that women in politics—regardless of party—stand together. I was lucky enough to be elected at a time when the Rhode Island Senate had its first woman president, who hired smart, talented women for our staff and moved women senators into committee chair positions. But the toxic environment won’t change until women are equally represented in every level of government. We need to recruit more women, elect more women, and pledge to support women in office. We need to hold men accountable for their actions and stop electing sexist men, and sexual predators, to office. We need our male colleagues to feel uncomfortable and insulted when a woman is discriminated against or harassed—and to stand up with her.

Mostly, we need to change not only our laws but also how we make them. Yes, we need laws that help create gender equity. But we also need to pay attention to how those laws are made — and to who is in the room. Let’s see state houses where at least half of all committee chairs are women, where every committee has equal representation. Let’s have transparent bill hearing processes and open access to information. Let’s have a government that represents all of us, equally, so that the next generation of women leaders has no reason to join me in saying #MeToo.

Now in her third term in office, Senator Gayle Goldin represents District 3 in Rhode Island. She is one of only 254 Democrat women state senators in the country. She also serves as the family and medical leave insurance campaign advisor to Family Values@Work, a national network of 25 state coalitions leading the movement for better family-friendly workplace policies.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren: Attacks on Birth Control Access Are Attacks on Women's Freedom

If anyone told a young woman today that she was expected to quit school after eighth grade or leave her job once she got married, most Americans would be outraged. Not fair! Women should have the same range of economic choices as men.

Through the years, one door after another has opened, as women have become astronauts and neurosurgeons, run Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations, and started their own businesses. Sure, there’s still a lot of ground to make up, but the country has headed in the direction of greater equality for decades now.

Despite this progress, near-constant attacks on safe and cost-effective women’s health care have become a regular part of our political debates. The latest front in this battle? Access to contraception. The Affordable Care Act required employer-sponsored health insurance policies to cover birth control without additional costs. On October 6, in one of his series of reckless attacks on health insurance in America, President Trump ended that protection.

These fights are often framed as ideological discussions. But for millions of women, access to health care isn’t about ideology at all—it’s about economics.

Americans, at least in private, agree that using birth control is a no-brainer. The vast majority have used it, including ninety-nine percent of women (and by extension, their partners) who have had sex between the ages of 15 and 44.

Some of the reasons for this are obvious. Contraception prevents unintended pregnancy and reduces the abortion rate. Certain forms of birth control prevent sexually transmitted infections, and others help control debilitating health conditions. But contraception is not only about health; it is about economic security as well.

Americans, at least in private, agree that using birth control is a no-brainer.

As every parent knows, the decision to have children is momentous—and carries massive economic consequences. Because the United States does not ensure that parents have access to paid family leave or affordable childcare, new costs add up quickly. The totals are striking: middle-income parents with two kids will spend an estimated $230,000 to raise a child born in 2015 from birth through age 17, amounting to roughly $13,000 per year. Starting a family is a big commitment, and millions of people use contraception until they decide to do so.

But the out-of-pocket costs for baby cribs and car seats are only the tip of the iceberg. A mother experiences a measurable decline in earnings immediately after having a child—a decline that continues throughout her lifetime. And women don’t have to be mothers to benefit economically from contraception—just ask college students, or women with crippling endometriosis, how contraception helps them land and hold down jobs.

The arrival of the birth control pill in 1960, later joined by other effective contraceptives, gave Americans more control over if, when, and how they chose to grow their families. That control, in turn, helped fuel economic opportunity for American women, American families, and the American economy. After the widespread introduction of birth control, the number of women in professions once closed to them increased dramatically. And without the movement of women into the workforce since 1970—a trend partly enabled by the availability of effective birth control – our country’s GDP would only be three-quarters the size it is today.

Contraception helps level the economic playing field for women.

Contraception helps level the economic playing field for women. With birth control available, women have more chances to go to school, get jobs, create businesses, and grow our economy. They can more reliably plan their economic futures. But birth control offers these benefits only when women can access it—and when their bosses can’t dictate what types of birth control it’s appropriate for them to use.

While 99% of women have used birth control at least once, cost is a big factor restricting consistent access. Prior to the ACA, one in three women struggled to afford the out-of-pocket costs of prescription birth control. These costs put additional strain on the finances of workers already struggling to make ends meet—and also reduced contraceptive use. According to a 2010 Centers for Disease Control report, hundreds of thousands of women who tried various forms of contraception gave up because the methods were “too expensive,” “insurance did not cover it,” or because contraception was “too difficult to obtain.” The ACA’s birth control protections helped level the playing field: women in America saved an average of $255 a year on birth control pills and saw cost reductions for other contraceptive methods.

For millions of women, President Trump’s edict isn’t some abstract, ideological debate. For a working couple with modest wages and piles of student loan debt, the ability to decide when to have children is an economic issue. For a student working towards her college degree and financial independence, access to birth control is an economic issue. For a woman working two jobs with two kids in daycare, affordable contraception is an economic issue.

This isn’t the Trump Administration’s first attack on women’s health. Efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, repeal the ACA and Medicaid, and block access to safe, legal abortions have put women on the economic defensive. But those efforts require Congress—and so far, despite the best efforts of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, they have failed. Now, President Trump has turned to a decision he can make without Congress: make it harder to access birth control. With the stroke of a pen, the President shrunk the economic futures of millions of women. He should reverse this decision—and if he won’t, Congress should force him to.

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