Ethical review of the study design was carried out by the University of York Department of Education Ethics Committee. Interviewees were given the opportunity to edit their interview transcripts, and to comment on the final draft of the report and this chapter. All names given below are pseudonyms, and minimal detail of roles/sub-sector/identity are given in order to aid confidentiality.

Interactions of Workplace Culture and Content

The wider study on which this chapter draws outlined how gender inequalities in the UK screen industries contributed to creating workplace cultures that enabled or worked against sexual harassment and violence (Bull, 2023). The workplaces or settings where sexual harassment or violence took place were almost all described as being gender unequal, in different ways. Six overlapping types of workplace culture relating to gender inequality were identified, including both horizontal and vertical segregation (Acker, 1990; Hirdman, 1990; O’Brien, 2019), as well as cultures where gendered harms were invisibilised; supportive cultures despite gendered inequalities; and finally actively anti-sexist cultures. In addition, in some workplace cultures other hierarchies, inequalities or risk factors contributed to enabling sexual harassment (for example, hierarchies between ‘talent’ and crew).

Below, I focus on the intersection between workplace cultures where sexual harassment occurred and the content relating to gender-based violence that was produced across three themes, as described above. The first theme outlines ways in which workplace cultures influenced the content produced. The second theme explores examples where content related to gender-based violence and sexuality acted back on workplace culture and women’s agency in different ways, both positive and negative. Finally, the third theme describes examples where there was a stark contradiction or disjuncture between workplace culture and content.

How Culture Influenced Content

The first theme examines how workplace cultures influenced content relating to gender-based violence. One example of this is how sexual harassment experiences and a culture that normalised sexual harassment within the workplace could impede women’s creative freedom. Abby, in her twenties, worked as a development producer, a role that involved developing and pitching script ideas. She described her company as having a toxic workplace environment and had been subjected to sexual harassment by a senior male colleague and by a peer, as well as from men outside her company. The impacts of this harassment she described as ‘heavy, relentless and exhausting’ as well as time-consuming. I asked whether she thought that these experiences had affected her creative freedom; she was clear that they had. She explained that:

In order to get anything I want to get made, made, or for us to invest in it, or for us to pay for it as a company, in order for me to work with the people I want to work with and who I think will bring us business, I have to pitch to the person who described me the way that he described me [referring to a repeated incident of sexual harassment]. He’s the one with the money bag and the one who makes the ultimate call on pretty much everything. […]

Having previously been targeted for humiliating sexualised comments from this senior man, Abby was wary of pitching work ideas that included sexualised content for fear that they could lead to further sexual harassment. Indeed, women subjected to sexual harassment sometimes describe feeling complicit in what happened (Bull & Page, 2021). Avoiding pitching sexualised content was therefore a self-protective mechanism against the idea that she had invited or encouraged this behavior.

Abby was particularly interested in working on content related to sexuality and sexual identity, so she persisted with doing so. But there was a further reason that such ideas were complicated to pitch in this workplace:

If I did and when I do [pitch content related to sexuality]—because that’s what I’m interested in—I have to sort of grit my teeth through it, because there will be a virtue signaling response like, ‘Brilliant, that sounds amazing, yeah, we need more stories like that’, and I’m like, […] ‘Oh my god, if he stands up and takes credit for this, I’m going to die inside’. So, creatively, that does sometimes put a block on me.

The awareness that her senior colleague might take some of the credit for her ideas was extremely galling to her, as this would let him appear progressive and supportive of women’s stories in contrast with the reality where he would verbally harass her. This situation required a complex balancing act of weighing up her desire to work on the material she was interested in, against the risk of sexual harassment and the possibility that credit for this content would go in part to this man.

By contrast with this example of workplace culture impeding women’s creative freedom, there also existed counter-cultural possibilities where women could make the content they wanted to—together. In her study of the Irish screen industries, O’Brien (2019, p. 119) describes how women sometimes operated outside of industry hierarchies, for example working with other women in collaborations that would allow them to create a different kind of workplace culture, for example with ‘relational’ rather than hierarchical modes of leadership. Kate, an experienced journalist, described taking this approach to put together all-women teams to produce content on gender-based violence. For example, with the same two women producers:

We’ve done seven or eight films on rape, we’ve done domestic violence, we’ve done child sex abuse; those tend to be all-women teams and that’s great. And there’s always been a degree of conspiratorial phoning around: ‘Hey, are you free? When are you going to be free? I’m going to pitch this; can we work on it together?’

As such, Kate could (sometimes) pull together an all-women team with whom she wanted to make this content. However, this possibility was less open to more junior women such as Abby who didn’t yet have Kate’s networks or experience. Age and experience therefore contributed to women’s ability to resist creatively. However, this space for creative resistance was still very limited by wider gendered conditions of production, even for women such as Kate.

Across both Kate’s and Abby’s experiences, gendered workplace cultures affected the content it was possible to make safely. While previous literature has debated whether there is a female ‘sensibility’ in film aesthetics (French, 2018; O’Brien, 2019), such a discussion assumes that the conditions of cultural production allow women to work in ways that will allow such a ‘sensibility’ to be realised. The accounts from Abby and Kate (as well as other chapters in this book) reveal the conditions that impede—as well as allow—any potential gendered sensibility to emerge in the creation of content on sexuality and gender-based violence. Abby is unable to fully explore the creative directions she would like to, and if she does, any success of her work might end up legitimising the feminist credentials of her harassing boss. By contrast, Kate—being more experienced—can sometimes put together the team she wants to work with. These examples shed light on an under-discussed topic in relation to gender inequalities in creative labor: how sexual harassment shapes women’s creative voices.

How Content Acted Back on Culture

As well as workplace cultures shaping content relating to sexuality and gender-based violence, the content itself could act back on those producing it, sometimes in unexpected ways. The first example of how gender-based violence content acted back on workplace cultures was through helping interviewees to recognise or get support for their experiences. Roz, who worked in factual entertainment, described how being involved in creating such content could equip women with knowledge that helped in labelling and recognising their own experiences. She was experiencing sexual harassment and gendered bullying from her boss, which included ‘weird, sort of sexual comments’ as well as remarks undermining her work, for example telling her, ‘I think we’re paying more for you than what you’re worth’. As she explained:

the irony of it is the scripts that we were writing are about intimate partner homicides and so, often these forensic psychologists are talking about this kind of coercive, controlling relationship where the men, not always, but [usually] the men are sort of constantly tapping away at [women’s] confidence.

As part of her work for this series, they drew on expert knowledge from criminologists or forensic psychologists. Roz was:

learning more and more through this program about coercion and control and knocking people’s confidence constantly, the effect that that can have on someone. I was writing these scripts not really understanding what these psychologists were saying until suddenly I felt like my confidence was so low that it wouldn’t have taken much to knock me over.

Roz eventually realised that the behaviors they were analysing for the program she was making were related to what she was experiencing from her boss. In this way, the content that she was producing on gender-based violence—alongside sessions with a private therapist who she found to cope with the harassment—helped her to make sense of what was happening.

Working on content related to gender-based violence could also open conversations in this area between colleagues. For Abby, introduced above, having worked on content in this area meant that she had discussed her previous experiences of gender-based violence with a female colleague. Later, when she was groped at a work social event, her colleague noticed her reaction and took her aside to check if she was ok. As Abby described, their previous work together on a program about sexual violence had created a shared understanding of this issue which enabled her colleague to support her after the assault. Previous discussions of sexual violence in the workplace made it more possible for her to draw on such support. This topic therefore became less ‘unspeakable’, adapting Rosalind Gill’s (2014) argument that gender inequalities are unspeakable, in contrast with accounts of the screen industries from earlier studies (North, 2016).

A second way in which the content acted back on the culture was through catalysing interviewees to act on their experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace. Vanessa was a journalist making a story about sexual harassment. At the same time as this was occurring, she was being subjected to sexual harassment from her boss. As she describes:

When I found out that he was doing it to another woman, I was like, ‘Oh crap. This is a pattern of behavior’. Not only that, but I found out about it in the weeks before our own investigation into that very subject was about to be aired. And me and my colleague were very aware we had a responsibility to do something about it because you can’t spend two years uncovering the very same issues or criticising the behavior of other people and bystanders as well, and then do the exact same thing yourself. So, that’s why we were like, ‘Okay, we need to do something’.

The expertise she and her colleague had learned from working on this story—as well as from their previous work on gender-based violence—informed their decision to act, as well as how they tried to get action taken in their workplace (attempts that were, however, ultimately futile and damaging to themselves (Bull, 2023). In this way, the content they were producing acted back on the workplace culture. If other journalists react in similar ways to Vanessa and her colleague, such experiences could be contributing to wider shifts in workplace cultures. Sara De Benedictis et al. found a high level of press coverage of sexual harassment and violence in the UK during the six months after #MeToo (2019). The increasing amounts of content on this topic being produced post -#MeToo suggest that there is the potential for widespread resistance to workplace sexual harassment due to others finding themselves in the same position as Vanessa of reporting on this issue while being aware of it occurring in their own workplaces.

These more positive accounts of the ways in which gender-based violence content acted back on workplace cultures can be contrasted with ways in which the content sometimes facilitated the perpetration of sexual harassment. Creating content relating to sexuality—which could include exploring ‘grey areas’ around consent—could create an uncomfortable or potentially unsafe workplace environment by requiring sexualised conversations that occurred without any oversight or ground rules. For actors, the rise of ‘intimacy coordinators’ post -#MeToo for choreographing sex scenes (Sørensen, 2022) has been hailed as a hugely positive step for creating safer workplace environments on set or on stage (although, as Chapter 2 in this book reveals, sexual harassment and violence can still occur despite the presence of those in such roles). However, as Abby noted, there is no parallel role for those working on pre- or post-production sexualised content. She described how generating ideas could involve highly sexualised conversations, personal disclosures or being asked about sexual experiences. She described how her work involves discussing stories, including stories about characters’ sexual relationships, with colleagues, which can draw on their own experiences. These conversations involve ‘incredibly personal and open conversations’ (echoing Bleuwenn Lechaux’s discussion, in Chapter 7 of this book, about the openness demanded from actors). However, Abby noted that ‘part of the problem with that is that there’s no training for anyone to be able to have those conversations’ and there are ‘people who would take advantage of that’ for example by asking questions that ‘are not appropriate for a workplace but just about appropriate considering the context of the conversation you’re having’. These ‘grey areas’ can be uncomfortable for some people:

So, there’s this kind of informal environment in a lot of meetings that makes for some uncomfortable conversations for young women to be around, and like me personally, I have always been incredibly comfortable talking about those things […] but I know for a fact that there have been people—young women—sat in meetings who have been talking about, you know, sex acts and personal anecdotes […] and I know they have been uncomfortable, and I don’t even have the tools to make sure that that doesn’t happen, or to debrief them afterwards about that, other than to say, ‘Are you okay?’

In this situation, discussion of sex and sexuality is required for the job role. Kirsten Dellinger and Christine Williams, in their study of work cultures at two US magazines that publish material about sex and sexuality, argue that what constitutes sexual harassment varies according to organisational culture; sexualised behaviours have different meanings in different contexts (Dellinger & Williams, 2002). Nevertheless, it is clear that in Abby’s workplace, which was characterised by gender relations of power with senior roles dominated by men (Bull, under review; Connell, 2006) sexualised discussions could contribute to an intimidating environment. Such instances are captured by the UK legal framework, within which someone sharing information about their sex life or talking about sex in acts constitutes sexual harassment if it creates a humiliating, degrading or offensive environment for anyone present (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2017).

In order to create a safer environment for these discussions, Abby thought that if an initiative along the lines of intimacy coordinators was proposed in her workplace to address this risk,

I think you would find a lot of resistance to it if that was something that was suggested or recommended for development, because people would very easily be able to say, ‘Well, we need to be able to have these open conversations. We need to be able to let the writer say what they want to say […]—it’s a safe space’. We weaponise safe space language.

The informal working environment that Abby describes within her workplace was also commented on by other interviewees in this study (see also Conor et al., 2015, p. 10). Similarly, the screen industries more widely are characterised as valuing people who are ‘fun’ (Swords & Johns, 2023). Abby’s experience shows how this informality creates an environment where sexual harassment is enabled by normalising the sharing of intimate personal details, but also by pre-empting any objections through arguing that this sharing is required by the creative or artistic process, as has also been documented in theatre (Kleppe & Røyseng, 2016). The informality—and the value that is placed on it—also potentially acts as a way of resisting putting in place any protocols to avoid sexual harassment occurring. The irony is that ‘safe spaces’ or ‘safer spaces’ initiatives usually involve setting ground rules in order to enable people from different positionalities to participate in a particular discussion in ways that allow for difference (UCL, 2020). However, here Abby shows this terminology being ‘weaponised’ to do the opposite—to argue that there is no need for such care.

There was also evidence that gender-based violence content could be used directly to carry out sexual harassment. Journalist Kate noted that she had previously worked successfully and safely with an all-male team on a story about rape, but it was clear that this was not something that could be taken for granted:

There’s a guy in our industry, lauded, […] and as far as I can tell from having done one film [that he was working on], he has a pornographic interest in women being executed, tortured and raped and that’s why he makes the films. […] I sat in edit with him when he basically became aroused by an execution sequence, about how wonderful it was, how fantastic it was, and could we find more and could we do more about women being beheaded and were there women hanging from cranes and what else did they do to women? And he’s still making films like that.

Kate’s and Abby’s experiences reveal how content on gender-based violence or sexuality was being created without any codes of conduct or conversations about workplace safety. These conditions of production are high-risk environments for sexual harassment, but this risk is entirely unrecognised, with no safeguards in place. More positively, Roz and Abby were involved in producing content that helped them to recognise their experiences and get support when they were targeted for violence or harassment. However, not all identities are equally depicted in the content that is being produced. As De Benedictis and colleagues (2019) note, while there is a higher volume of media content relating to gender-based violence being produced post -#MeToo, it tends to centre ‘the experiences of celebrity female subjects who are predominately White and wealthy’. This means that there are more cultural resources for certain groups to recognise and label their experiences than others, compounding the perceived impact of #MeToo as supporting white, middle-class women rather than other groups (Fileborn & Loney-Howes, 2019). More generally, the increase in production of such content means there is an even greater need to interrogate its impacts on those making it.

Disjunctures between Content and Culture

Finally, for some interviewees working in journalism, there was a stark disjuncture between content and culture, where the content they were producing belied the experiences of sexual harassment that were occurring during its production. For two of the journalists in this study, in the workplace where they were speaking up about or being subjected to sexual harassment, they were also being encouraged to produce content on this topic. Vanessa, introduced above, was a journalist working on an investigation about sexual misconduct. I asked if her boss—who was sexually harassing her and others—was supportive of that investigation. Vanessa explained that he had commissioned the investigation himself:

On the night where he took me back to his hotel room, he commissioned that investigation the next morning. […] Yeah, it’s really confusing. We went for drinks at the time, and he kept on saying like, ‘Oh, these guys are truly disgusting. They’re terrible. I’m not like that’. I was like, ‘It’s so similar. How do you not see it?’

Vanessa—who collaborated with one of the few other women in her workplace on this story—didn’t describe her creative freedom being impeded by this situation. In fact, her boss saw himself as a champion of women, and was supportive of the investigation on sexual harassment that Vanessa was working on. In this, her experience can be contrasted with Abby’s as described above who found that having to pitch to, and report back to, a sexually harassing boss affected the content she produced. What is similar across both situations, however, is that the senior man responsible for the harassment was receiving some of the credit for Vanessa’s and Abby’s work.

Sarah, also a journalist, found a similar contradiction between the culture in the newsroom and the content that was being reported on. In Sarah’s workplace, there had been calls for staff to report harassment, but then when they did so they found themselves silenced, and in her case losing her job and career and obliged to sign a non-disclosure agreement. She contrasted this silencing with her employer’s aggressive seeking-out of stories on sexual harassment in other sectors:

I’ll tell you what’s changed [since #MeToo]. They hunt down the stories because they know that the stories are appealing, that there is a zeitgeist. But has it changed anything in the newsroom? […] I mean, look, how could it get much worse? […] if the truth was known about this newsroom, the damage to them would be so huge and you’re just like, ‘Can none of you see this?’

In these instances, by contrast with the examples in the previous section, the content was emphatically not ‘acting back’ to influence the culture of the workplace in which it was being produced. The hypocrisy of cultural organisations failing to deal with sexual harassment while producing more and more content about it should not come as a surprise; various authors have documented sexual harassment in news organisations (North, 2016; Barton & Storm, 2014) and it would be surprising if this culture had changed simply because more media content in this area was being produced. Nevertheless, the weight of the contradiction between culture and content is stark, and confirms that there is no necessary relationship between workplace culture and cultural content.

Conclusion

This chapter has described the ways in which five interviewees who had experienced or reported sexual harassment or violence at work since 2017 described producing content relating to gender-based violence or sexuality in workplaces where sexual harassment was occurring. It has outlined three ways in which the interaction between content and workplace culture occurred. First, workplace culture influenced the content by impeding women’s creative freedom through creating a humiliating, degrading environment where they felt less able to talk about issues relating to sexuality in the workplace, and where senior men perpetrating harassment could take the credit for content in this area. Another way in which workplace culture influenced content was through women creating counter-cultures by collaborating in order to produce content relating to gender-based violence.

By contrast, content relating to gender-based violence also acted back on interviewees and their workplace cultures in several ways: through helping interviewees to recognise or get support for their experiences; through catalysing them to take action on their experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace; but also through creating an uncomfortable or potentially unsafe workplace environment by requiring sexualised conversations that occurred without any oversight or ground rules; or through gender-based violence content being used to carry out sexual harassment. Finally, for some interviewees there was a stark mismatch between the material on gender-based violence they were being commissioned or encouraged to produce as part of the post -#MeToo zeitgeist, and the sexual harassment and silencing on this issue that they were experiencing within their own workplaces.

These findings reveal a complex picture of how cultural production and content relating to gender-based violence and sexuality are intersecting in the UK screen industries. There is clearly not a one-way or deterministic relationship between workplace culture and creative content; while Abby found that the sexual harassment she experienced at work ‘put a block’ on her creatively, for Vanessa her sexually harassing boss saw himself as a supporter of women and indeed enabled her to work on acclaimed content revealing sexual harassment in other industries. Instead, the intersections between workplace culture and content relating to gender-based violence are multiple and non-linear. The content itself can create increased opportunities for sexual harassment to occur but can also serve as a cultural resource for women to talk about this issue and label their experiences. Even in the final theme, which revealed a stark disjuncture between workplace cultures that enable sexual harassment and critical content being produced on this topic, a relationship between the two existed in the minds of women experiencing the contradiction, and this contradiction might be able to be used as a creative resource for their future work. In presenting this analysis it is important to note the narrow set of social profiles of women’s experiences covered in this study. While interviewees had a wide range of levels of experience and ages, their whiteness and in some cases, their class privilege, affected how they felt able to respond to the situations they found themselves in. Nevertheless, all of the women—regardless of their class, race or other forms of privilege—felt harmed by the experiences they had had.

This discussion raises questions around what safer conditions of cultural production that better enable creative freedom for women would look like. The wider study that this chapter draws on found that in the UK screen industries it was rare for employers to take an actively anti-sexist approach to workplace culture (Bull, 2023). Similarly, O’Brien describes the ways in which women in the Irish film industry could thrive despite the biased structures and culture, for example by resisting the individualised male-genius director/auteur tradition (2019, chapter 5). One step forward would be to draw on the model of intimacy coordinators, as well as practices developed by gender-based violence organisations and sex educators on holding safer spaces, to devise guidance for areas of cultural production where risks are heightened. In this study, such areas include script and production development (as outlined in Abby’s experience) and editing (as in Kate’s experience). Some examples discussed above could also fall within the remit of workplace health and safety protocols, as editing violent content could be triggering to those with post-traumatic stress disorder developed as a result of gender-based violence. Working with such content should also require strategies—which already exist in other workplaces—for ‘holding’ the space to be able to work safely with difficult material, or to allow people to try out risky stories. It should also be possible for survivors of gender-based violence, if they choose to, to refuse to look at material depicting such violence, as Rebecca Harrison argues (2023). For such protocols to be effective, however, a significant shift in culture is clearly still needed, moving beyond attitudes that minimise sexual harassment and violence (Bull, 2023) towards taking this issue seriously.

There is one final way that content about gender-based violence may be influencing gendered workplace cultures that this chapter has not discussed. This is whether the post -#MeToo focus on gender-based violence in cultural and media production challenges what O’Brien (2019, p. 67) calls the ‘gendering of content’. O’Brien (2019), Natalie Wreyford (2018) and Louise North (2014) in the screen industries, screenwriting and journalism respectively, have all described the gendering of genre hierarchies, whereby men get to cover high-profile stories or work on the most prestigious genres of film/television, while women are assigned to ‘soft’ news or ‘women’s genres’ such as romance or the family. However, gender-based violence appears now to be a prestigious, high-profile content area; it is no longer a ‘soft’ topic but it is still unarguably a ‘women’s’ topic. The ‘genre’ of gender-based violence may therefore be disrupting the gender/genre hierarchies that the authors above have described. As such, content in this area may be contributing to a culture where women are given more opportunities; indeed Vanessa’s break into broadcast journalism came through the story on sexual harassment described above—but then the experience of sexual harassment and reporting it forced her out of this career. Overall, if content about gender-based violence is to challenge these genre-gender hierarchies, it needs to be produced in conditions of safety that support women’s and other survivors’ creative freedom to tell these stories in complex and varied ways.

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1 In 2006, African American activist Tarana Burke set up Me Too as a movement to address sexual violence, enabling young women of color to share their stories (Brockes, 2018).