Cesar Chavez’s sexual assaults were horrific. Sexism in organizing persists and requires the attention of leaders. I’ll present stories and analysis of this sexism from nearly 200 organizers we spoke with at The Women’s Organizing Network.
The Women’s Organizing Network supported women and nonbinary organizers in New York City, particularly BIPOC, to advance their leadership, to integrate an intersectional gender analysis into their community organizing work, and to press for organizational change toward those two goals. I co-founded and led The Women’s Organizing Network together with a multiracial team of women and nonbinary organizers, from 2015 to 2023.
We did this work primarily through a leadership cohort program and open workshops. We closed our doors two and a half years ago, and I want to take this opportunity to share our learnings. This article summarizes the original one to ones that formed our vision and the collective analysis that emerged from our work. I write this article primarily for organizational leaders with the power to shift culture, norms and policies in their organizations, and for women, nonbinary and other organizers who may find support in hearing their experiences reflected here.
The Cesar Chavez revelations are shocking in that such severe and pervasive assaults on women by a revered leader took place without seeing the light of day for so long. It may also be shocking that such a powerful leader as Dolores Huerta never spoke up about years of emotional abuse, sexual assault, and even two children that she had as a result of those assaults. But sexual assault, sexual harassment, misogyny, sexism, and unconscious bias have been an integral part of most of our movements over time, and the fear Huerta had of damaging the movement is quite common.
Misogynist attitudes ran rampant in the 1960s within New Left organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, and prominent civil rights organizations were known to relegate brilliant, highly capable women to secretarial roles. Women leaders like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, who often led from behind, doing deep grassroots leadership development work, did not achieve the recognition that Dr. Martin Luther King and other men did. As recently as 2018, Ed Chambers, who led the Industrial Areas Foundation from 1972 to 2009 and developed the core organizing philosophy for congregation based organizing there, found it appropriate to include a story in his book, Roots for Radicals, where he told a member to stop her housework strike because “actions are for the opposition, not your husband.”
Our movements have never fully reckoned with this past and thus it continues to weaken our organizations. Many have certainly made important attempts though.
White women left the New Left organizations to start feminist organizing, which continued to perpetuate racism and other forms of exclusion. Black radical feminists formed the Combahee River Collective to “develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men.” In the 1980s, a group of women organizers connected with the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College ran a collective that unearthed sexism and defined feminist principles in organizing. Women have formed caucuses and networking groups, and some organizations have made internal changes, but a more systematic, top-down reckoning, still eludes us.
The first step is for more men and organizational leaders to listen to the stories and understand the problem. At The Women’s Organizing Network (WON) we documented one-to-one conversations with nearly 200 women and nonbinary organizers about how sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression held back their leadership. We heard from diverse cisgender women and a smaller number of trans women and nonbinary organizers, all staff at organizations doing grassroots organizing in New York City (tenant organizing, low-wage worker organizing, and immigration rights, for example). Participants ranged from entry-level to veteran-level organizers.
For all of the challenges I share below, Black, indigenous, and all women of color face unique and compounding challenges at the intersection of racism, sexism, and other identities, while white women benefit from white privilege and also contribute to the oppression of BIPOC in the workplace. Finally, internalized sexism also plays out among women, often as a result of the culture and structures offered to us.
Valuing women’s work
The most salient and commonly repeated challenge was at once simple and profound: The challenge to be taken seriously. Women find we must repeatedly prove our value, with bosses expressing frustrations, for example, with someone’s ways of communicating but ignoring the fact that she met her organizing goals. We may struggle with men talking over us in meetings, taking credit for our ideas and failing to acknowledge our accomplishments. Men repeatedly rely on women to organize event logistics or improve management systems, without acknowledging the value of that work or improving their own capacity. “Buddy-buddy” relationships among men spill into informal decision-making over after hours drinks. Men and white women often rely on Latinas to do more than their fair share of housework in the office. Women managers repeat habits learned from male bosses, often treating women more harshly. The story below, from one of the organizers interviewed, illuminates these common threads for a single mother and person of color we spoke with.
“My supervisor doesn’t really take me seriously. I work really hard: even in COVID as a single mom, my work has not suffered. So it seems to me that when I express my feelings about how he continues to pile work on me while the guy on my team usually has a pretty light load, he would listen. Before COVID they used to get drinks together. They have a close relationship, even outside of the office. I didn’t get a chance to do all that. I do my job and then go home to my kid. It’s really frustrating but I’m in the process of building an exit plan.”
Her story also raises the issue of BIWOC organizers, particularly from immigrant families, who are more likely than cis-men and white women to have familial expectations to care for older relatives or younger siblings in addition to disproportionate motherhood responsibilities. Young women often approached us to ask about the experiences of women organizers with children, fearing their future career prospects in organizing. Confirming mainstream research on women in the workplace, we also heard that women often left organizing years before attempting to have children or struggled to juggle children and their organizing work, feeling guilt and tension about how much energy to give to each without completely burning out.
Valuing women’s safety
“I was getting sexually harassed by my members all the time. When I complained about it to my boss, he said I should be glad that my cuteness helps me get high turnout for my meetings. That felt so gross, and he didn’t help address the problem!”
Sexual harassment from men toward women and nonbinary organizers is extremely pervasive, and we heard many stories about staff, community members, organizational members, and elected officials and their staff harassing or attempting to assault women. Yet leadership rarely addresses these risks or shows awareness of them. This treatment adds to the challenge of organizing work for women, and it can also lead to physical assault.
We did hear a story of a male organizational member who sexually assaulted a woman organizer during a 1-1 home visit. Infuriatingly, her large, well resourced organization did nothing to improve safety precautions in response. Organizations should acknowledge this danger in organizer training and onboarding, offering safety tips and encouraging organizers to bring it up with their boss or other designated person if it happens. Asking another staff member to call an organizer after her late night meeting or 1-1 with a man to make sure she gets home safely could be helpful, for example. And, managers should be prepared to respond professionally and supportively, and should step in directly to address the problem with members who harass staff.
We’ve heard too many stories of inappropriate behavior from male bosses — a boss regularly referring to the staff as “ladies,” which made them painfully aware of gender differences in the room right before staff meetings; a man who conducted an interview for a prospective organizer at a bar, followed by an invitation to stay for the live music. One interviewee was asked by a male interviewer many years ago to prove her boldness as an organizer by going skinny-dipping with him.
In 2017, four prominent male leaders of the national Fight for 15 campaign to raise the minimum wage were either fired or resigned from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) over accusations of sexual harassment accusations and sexual relationships with younger female staff. Lawsuits were filed against some of those claims, but SEIU stood firm in acknowledging that predominantly female employees did experience abuse in the workplace. It should go without saying that community organizing is a professional job and managers must adhere to sexual harassment laws.
How our identities impact our leadership
Another hurdle women face is the extra work it takes to overcome how people treat us based on our gender and racial identity and expression. Coworkers, supervisors, community members, and elected officials and their staff tend to judge women based on a spectrum of typically feminine or masculine gender norms and based on racial stereotypes. They may respond to their advocacy positively or negatively, and they may harass, follow, or ignore them based on these perceptions.
This treatment can affect women’s organizing outcomes. It also adds to mental clutter as they choose an outfit for the day, notice themselves onscreen in a virtual call, or consider whether to codeswitch. Queer and trans organizers grapple with the potential ramifications when deciding how to present themselves or to come out in various situations.
Here’s an example of what this can look like, as described by a highly skilled organizer who typically comes across as brave and bold:
“I would like to speak in my straightforward way to the guys in my leadership committee, but the men don’t respond well to that. I have to put on a sweet girly voice and act very passive to get them to listen to me and do what needs to get done.”
No strategy is a full solution here, and we can just as easily get judged for speaking in a “girly, passive” way as we can for sounding “harsh, aggressive,” etc. Playing this game, one participant said, leaves her feeling “exhausted, resentful, angry, bitter.”
What women do need is support to develop their own authentic leadership styles that work for them. And because women and nonbinary organizers can internalize these oppressive messages, we may also struggle with confidence. So it helps when managers understand this picture of what some of us may be carrying inside and the dynamics we may face with others.
How taking these problems seriously could transform our movement
This gender equity failure that is pervasive in movement organizations often leads women, particularly BIPOC, to leave organizing or to stagnate in their positions. In other cases, highly experienced organizers shared stories with us of senior positions that they almost held or held briefly but left, squarely laying the blame on male directors who they didn’t want to or couldn’t work with, because of their attitudes toward women. These women continued to do organizing work but did not achieve the same level of power and recognition as the men who prevented their ascension.
Without gender equity blind spots, membership development and campaigns could be stronger too.
If we value the voices and strengths of women organizers, we might prioritize, with real time and metrics, typically gendered work like deep leadership development with members, in addition to the straightforward work of winning campaigns and demonstrating power in numbers. More organizers would perform the emotional labor required to support the development of quiet or less confident members. It means that organizations might have to make meeting times convenient for single moms with leadership potential, for example. Instead, far too often the loudest, most confident and available members become leaders rather than the inclusive leaders who develop other people, and this often means men.
The lack of discussion about sexism also allows major blind spots in our campaign analysis to persist. To give a very broad example, the wage gap between men and women that keeps BIPOC women and children in poverty is deeply related to workers’ rights, good jobs, housing, and racial justice. Yet groups working on these issues rarely include this wage gap in their analysis or work on this issue directly. For a more specific example, a group of women tenants decided to do a rent strike, but then they all quietly paid their rent anyway, because when they got home, their husbands disagreed with them, and they were the ones writing the rent checks. We heard this story from a participant in our program. We then heard the same story from another woman organizer working on the same problem in the same building a few years later, because the organization still hadn’t addressed it. Finally, the lack of a reckoning with sexual harassment, assault, and sexism within the farmworkers movement coexisted with extreme and persistent sexual harassment and assault in the fields toward women farmworkers. So the farmworkers’ movement also failed to address women’s unique oppression as workers.
If we do take these problems seriously and address them consistently, then good organizers will stay in organizing and advance, and the people closest to the problem will have more of a voice, because we will be listening to women in the community better.
Recommendations for lifting up the leadership, voices and needs of women and non-binary people in organizing.
- Prioritize strong management and take the time needed to do it well. Use strong structures, communication, and thoughtful accountability and feedback processes that include appreciations. Our analysis showed poor management was the number one underlying factor that could change most of the problems we identified. Use clear and explicit standards for staff development and performance evaluation to reduce bias. Help new staff understand you may manage them more closely for the first couple of months. But when the time is right let go and trust them, rather than micromanaging.
- Listen to individual staff about their needs to help them to do their best work. Whether it’s flexible hours to attend to caregiving duties, a mentor who shares important identities with them, or more training, if they’re asking for something to help them thrive, don’t dismiss it.
- Get in touch with your own feelings and learn how to identify and manage them. “Movement work is by nature emotional, and just because your emotions aren’t on the surface doesn’t mean they’re not steering your ship,” as one Black woman veteran organizer shared. Understanding your own emotional state can help you to be more prepared to listen to staff when they express their emotions at work — a common tension between men and women. We have also seen many examples of men taking their anger out on women without even realizing that they are doing it. Given the trauma so many of us have experienced from men in our lives, working for angry men does not create an environment in which women typically thrive.
- Address sexual harassment proactively. Organizational leaders have a legal obligation to address sexual harassment that staff might face at work, whether it is coming from community member or other staff. They can go further and proactively warn organizers about this possibility and check in periodically with staff to ensure they are not experiencing harassment from members or being put in unsafe situations such as meeting alone with a man at night. Use staff sexual harassment training as an opportunity to go deeper and train staff on unconscious bias.
- Budget for outside capacity building. Organizing cohort programs can provide safe spaces for organizers to vent frustrations about their workplaces or their bosses, and to workshop ideas to address them strategically. When such spaces are carried out carefully, people can be supported to raise issues in constructive, nuanced ways that help their organizations to grow. This kind of valuable peer support also tends to take place informally within programs focused on building organizing skills.
- Learn to consider intersectional gender analysis as an integral part of your issue campaigns alongside race, class, and other forms of analysis. Simply asking the right questions to uncover women’s needs in a community or asking how your campaign issue might impact women, men, trans people, and other identity groups in different ways can make a big difference.
Offerings from our experience at The Women’s Organizing Network
At WON, the main thrust of our work was the WON Leadership Circle, a six-month program for women organizers at social justice organizing groups and unions across New York City. Participants built relationships of mutual support in order to advance their own leadership, support the leadership of women and non-binary members in their organizations, and take action to bring an intersectional gender lens into their work. WON also held open workshops and networking events. Our broader vision was for the movement to integrate an intersectional gender analysis into the way they support staff, develop member leaders, and build issue campaigns.
In the Leadership Circles, participants developed strategic, thoughtful ways of raising the challenges that they confronted in their organizing workplaces. They carried out “organizational action projects” to affect change within the organization where they worked, with the support of peer coaching. These projects were a way for our organization to affect organizational change without having to get buy-in to our broader mission from organizational leaders, and at the same time to support organizers who were trying to make change. For the most part, their organizations were not aware that the change was part of a project they were doing in our program. The peer accountability and support encouraged participants to follow through, act strategically, and avoid a combative stance while pushing for change.
As a result, participants achieved important changes in their organizations.
One participant carefully banded together with her female co-workers to press their male boss for improved supervision, resulting in the successful replacement of another male manager. Another achieved more participatory, reflective processes for staff meetings, embodying feminist principles.
A woman of color engaged her white female colleagues in understanding the ways their biased attitudes toward her impeded her leadership.
One participant significantly increased the number of women in her member committee by seeking them out more intentionally and scheduling meetings at convenient times for them. Two participants unionized their organizations soon after participating in our program. Another participant got the confidence boost she needed to speak up more with her male bosses and to convince them to end a stagnating campaign. They did, leading to a more participatory and successful campaign with factory workers.
Conclusion
But to achieve the broader vision we sought — for a movement with an intersectional gender analysis woven into staff support, leadership development of members, and campaign strategy — more buy-in from leadership is needed. Organizational leaders must prioritize this, with self-reflection, time, and budgets.
At The Women’s Organizing Network, we sought to change organizations through women and nonbinary staff organizers affected by these dynamics, because that change was in their immediate self-interest. However, we didn’t end up growing sufficient organizational power to influence leaders more directly and the movement more systemically. We did achieve a good amount of success with those who participated. But ultimately change must come from the top.
What we’ve learned about Chavez and the oppression of women in United Farm Workers should remind organizers and movement leaders of the imperfect foundation from which today’s movement organizations grew. I hope this article motivates more leaders to undergo a reckoning with themselves and their organization to strengthen the way they value and lift up the leadership and needs of the women and nonbinary people in their organizations, particularly BIPOC. And when in doubt, listen.
More tools and resources for intersectional gender analysis and other topics are available at womensorganizingnetwork.org.