Gotta say, seeing Jessica Rowe and Ita Buttrose defend John Laws this week was as perplexing as it was disappointing.

Laws seems not so much a veteran broadcaster these days as a monument to a vanished broadcast culture. He’s increasingly like an Easter Island head, bellowing into his microphone from a far-away era whose traditions are forgotten and whose ways we no longer understand. This week the great relic announced in his ancient, gravel tones the women he employs must wear skirts to work to please him.

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These metaphors are not overdone: we’ve since learned from his former employees Rowe and Buttrose that Laws refers to said women as “handmaidens”. Is there a gendered word with more alarming connotations at present? Laws may be unaware but it’s not believable that Rowe and Buttrose are. Buttrose’s decades of achievement have blazed a trail for women to escape the sexist cultures of the past. Rowe’s a visible activist for equality, unafraid to show solidarity with women in marginalised communities.

Studio 10 (@Studio10au) The panel discusses John Laws' comments about insisting women in his office wear skirts and show bare legs. #Studio10 pic.twitter.com/XLgcBsvMWl

Yet there they were, excusing Laws’ sexist ways and tone and skirt diktat on TV. “He’s actually a really good, decent man,” Rowe said.

No, he’s not – he’s someone treating professional work colleagues as objects of decoration.

“He’s a lovely man,” Buttrose echoed.

This is what Laws says of ogling his female staff: “I love them to look feminine. A skirt on a beautiful body is a very, very feminine thing.”

That’s not lovely. That’s the exploitation of a power dynamic in which workers are obliged to service the skeezy pleasure of the boss on top of doing their day job. Australian law says sexual harassment is not on, and the community knows anything close to sexually questionable behaviour at work is not on. But while Laws’ behaviour has a museum-piece character, contemporary examples are not too hard to find. It happens, and some women exposed to it bear it, minimise or even apologise for it. Why?

One reason is easily understood. As it turns out, I have a friend who worked for Laws as a younger woman. She’s a feminist but she wore the skirt. She didn’t like it, but she was young, broke, building her career, she needed a break and she needed the money. It was a survival trade-off that is common for young women, but rarely expected of young men.

Four times as many women as men report incidents of sexual harassment in the workplace, and everyone knows the spectrum of sexualised experience of women at work is underreported. Because women earn less, are more likely to work casually, and less likely to own property, they’re more vulnerable both to workplace exploitation and to financial disaster if complaints engender retribution. They’re obliged to risk-assess. “Laws wasn’t around much but I don’t think he ever called me by my first name,” my friend told me, “always darling or sweetheart.” She chose not to stay there that long.

'Feminine' role-playing by women helps to perpetuate the ancient, untrue stereotypes of what it means to be female

Buttrose and Rowe may be former colleagues of Laws but they’re hardly in that same situation. The academic Jacqueline Yi from New York University poses an interesting framework that may explain why some women –often otherwise admirable women of great achievement – defend sexist cultures or behaviours.

Yi identifies a phenomenon of “benevolent sexism” in which men with power over women in relationships or the workplace aren’t hostile or combative but coerce women into subservience by rewarding them for their performance of “feminine” roles. Wear the short skirt, be told that you’re beautiful and loved, you’re good at your job or you’ve “got what it takes” to advance. Rewards can be compliments, or the appearance of protection, or the provision of assistance, promotion, recommendation and it’s a neat way of depersonalising women as individuals, and rendering us as competitors for male favour.

“Feminine” role-playing by women helps to perpetuate the ancient, untrue stereotypes of what it means to be female – that we’re soft, weak, feeble, indecisive, unsuited to leadership or even personal agency, which has destructive consequences in the workplace and beyond. Worse, we get recruited into the propaganda of our own gender inequality by coercion masquerading as generosity because we’re convinced by our comparative power disadvantage that there is no other way. Note that both Buttrose and Rowe praised Laws for the help he provided their careers.

There are, of course, alternatives. Sisterhood, collectivism, solidarity and unionism redress power imbalances between powerful men and powerless women, but betrayals and excuses are often instinctive. Yi explains that in the emotional distress provoked by challenging roles or fighting authority, human psychology perceives “system threat” and attacks what it thinks is the source.

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“Women are adaptively able to convince themselves that the society they are part of is desirable and acceptable,” explains Yi of the gendered context. “Women justify the patriarchal social systems that they belong to” and facilitate their own disadvantage, she says, because it can be too emotionally distressing to accept that the system is unfair. When such a system is personalised by a familiar – even “nice” or “kind” – individual, one can imagine a resistance to distress that’s overwhelming.

So while tempting to condemn Buttrose and Rowe for indulging the sexist nonsense of John Laws, to do so is itself a feminist betrayal. Defences, excuses and even apologies are rational responses to insidious, ancient systems of gender exploitation.

If we ever want to emerge from shadows cast by the statues of our patriarchal past, we have to force ourselves to understand the complex structures standing over us. The issue here is not the skirts, or Buttrose and Rowe, or Laws, or even the workplace – although it is indicative of how unfair the workplace remains for women despite the mirage of progress. It’s the whole artifice of male power, and the reminder of just how much work lies ahead if we’re ever to finally smash the old stone men who leer over us into bits.