Cleaning Up Sexism at UEA

As a first year, I live on campus and every morning, looking above the mirror to avoid my bleary-eyed reflection, I see this sign above my sink:

As a pretty reasonable human being, I’m fine with clearing up my stuff, and our flat has been lucky enough to have lovely cleaners, who we’ve never fancied inflicting horrible messes on. My problem with the sign is its pronouns.

Out of the three cleaners our flat has had (perhaps we haven’t actually been such a dream to clean up after), two have been male. And when the male cleaner is around, for some unexplainable reason this sign sometimes appears to warn us:

Initially, our flat couldn’t fathom that a man could be a cleaner, but thanks to the signs we’ve adjusted, and it’s merely a nasty shock now.

It’s a pity that these signs are up, because a dip into staff statistics at UEA shows that we’re generally pretty equal, staffing 56.2% women and 43.8% men. The breakdown within this mostly stands up to, with a 50/50 gender balance in middle management and little variation at other levels.

The exceptions to this are in Senior Management, 16.7% being female, and in ‘traditional areas such as Secretarial and Clerical’, 85% female.

With UEA’s ‘Do Different’ motto, their support of diversity in most professional facets, and the exciting recent appointment of our first female Chancellor, Rose Tremain, it’s disappointing to see the lingering allusions to ‘traditional’ gender roles.

Last month, around the time of Tremain’s appointment, was the one year anniversary of the Everyday Sexism Project’s launch, a project which exists to catalogue instances of sexism which might have become normalised, and aims to raise them as valid problems in society.

UEA is a fantastic university, and I can’t say I’ve ever felt like a victim of prejudice here, but anything that pushes away from gender equality, no matter how seemingly minute, is something that an establishment of this calibre should resist. In response to these signs, and any implications of sexism still present within UEA – please, do different.