Beyond the horror stories and investigations into allegations of sexual abuse in the humanitarian field is the broader problem of workplace culture and the sexism and toxic masculinity at the heart of many NGOs’ operations.

In the humanitarian sector there is a subset of aid workers – usually white male international staff – who remain blind to the way gender impacts on their work. They consider the issue an annoying detail that NGOs should be allowed to leave at the door when the context is an emergency and bombs are falling. The problem is seen as especially trivial when raised by young women who management and HR assume simply can’t handle the “hardship posting”.



At one dinner party … the lead medic said he knew 'what size speculum to use for each woman at the table'

When you work and socialise on the same compound with the same people, and upper management continues to be male dominated, professional and personal boundaries are inevitably blurred. When you are sick in the field, your doctor is your boss. When you go drinking at the weekend, it is with the same man. This results in subtle and unsubtle power plays in the field, often with much poorer behaviour than is seen in other professions.



Sexual harassment and sexual “ownership” of new expatriate female staff is a significant part of this story. In rural Africa we saw that visiting HQ managers liked to discuss the foolishness of past (female) staff whose dalliances with local men had led to pregnancy, redundancy and humiliation. These “lessons” were apparently aimed at coaxing isolated or lonely female staff into the arms of HQ visitors.

However, the double standards run deep. It was an open secret that male staff often visited brothels or impregnated local women, leaving them without child support in situations of poverty.



Then there was the tale of the senior manager who repeatedly asked female staff to tell him where their bedrooms were and telephoned them in the middle of the night. After constant pressure, some staff have sex with men like this, and those who reject them face the possibility of being undermined in their workplace. At one dinner party, conversation turned to maternal health, and the lead medic announced that he knew “what size speculum to use for each and every woman at the table”. This was apparently laughed off by senior management present.

In my experience, this kind of workplace culture means that many young women working in the humanitarian space find themselves able to move ahead only through compromising on their values. HR responds by listening sympathetically and taking no action, maintaining the status quo and pacifying whistleblowers. In many cases the male staff were retained, promoted and moved countries. We were told that the organisation knew they had sexually harassed women or behaved inappropriately previously but hoped they would “grow out of it”.

Overall there is little understanding on how to change workplace cultures in the aid sector to make them a safe place that values female staff. Although these incidents are nothing new and sexism in the workplace hardly shocking, it is an important next step in the debate on sexual abuse in the sector. If the humanitarian space is to practise what it preaches in terms of gender equality it needs to go further than investigating serious abuse and consider the sexism at the heart of many NGO work cultures.