The handshake vs. the kiss on the cheek.
I come from Australia and work in the hospitality industry (which has enough implicit and overt sexism issues as it is). One thing I have come to notice through my profession is how certain forms of human contact play an important role in delegating women to a lower position in the work environment, with offenders being coworker and clientele alike.
Now what I am referring to here is not the obvious ‘accidental’ bum grab, the rubbing of the small of one’s back or inappropriate questions being asked; but rather the subtle and more nuanced aspects of interaction. The best example being the greeting/goodbye of a handshake vs. a kiss on the cheek. In Australia, it is often customary to greet a man with a handshake, I imagine this practice is standard across a great deal of western society. Conversely women, even women we meet for the first time, are greeted with the more casual and certainly more personal kiss on the cheek.
Why is it, that after conducting the same operational task as one of my male coworkers, that I get a kiss on the cheek and he a handshake as a departing gesture? Immediately it suggests that my relationship with the clientele is different to that of a man’s, simply because of my ‘femininity’. It displaces the legitimacy of of my professionalism and replaces it with a sense of informality and personal connection – both of which in this context come from one side of what should be considered a strictly business relationship.
It is also considered to be completely appropriate to lay hands on waitresses, whether it be on the back, shoulder or arm (or more uncomfortably still – the top of the hip). To do the same to a waiter would be largely unheard of in Australia. As the old saying goes, human beings are visual creatures; we absorb and interpret the body language of those around us constantly. When our body language (because that’s what it is, language – It is a way of communicating with one another) changes between men and women solely based on their gender, we create a divide between the two implicitly.
What I am basically trying to get at here is that I am sick of being spoken to as an ‘equal’ but quite obviously not viewed as one. What you say with your body and how it interacts with mine is telling – and currently men of Australia, you’re telling women in the hospitality industry ‘keep up the good work you pretty little thing, now go get me that beer’.