On World Whistleblower Day 2024: What about the Women?

By Kate Kenny, lecturer in Political Science and Sociology at University of Galway and a member of the Work, Society and Governance research cluster and Gender ARC.

When Nathalie, an executive in a large Parisian bank, questioned her boss about secret parallel accounting systems supporting a vast system of tax evasion, she could not have predicted the response:

“He asked me if I was having a fit of jealousy because one of the colleagues who participated in the fraud was a woman.”

Our research published this year  shows how women whistleblowers can find their gender is used against them when employers retaliate. Even senior executives with years of experience find being female is interpreted as a weakness, affecting their capacity to reliably detect wrongdoing. Gender is weaponized as a form of discrediting.

As our senior banking executives discovered to their dismay, women whistleblowers can be excluded twice over: first as unwanted truth-tellers upsetting a secrecy regime that benefits many in the employer organization, and also as women in a macho organization.

In another recent study I showcase how Irish female military professionals are speaking out about gender-based harassment and sexual violence. For years, it remained a hidden yet system-wide feature of the defence forces. These Irish ‘Military #MeToo’ whistleblowers, under the collective name the ‘Women of Honour’, join with similar movements across the world. 

They have experienced abuse and exclusion, followed by retaliation for speaking out, yet these women are still waiting for a proper investigation. By now, many have been forced to leave the military profession they loved.  But their committed aim remains the same: to make things better for future recruits. As a Women of Honour spokeswoman told a recent Irish Times journalist:

‘If we can make a change, if we can make things different and better for the girls coming in, and coming ahead, it would be worth all the fight we’ve put in.’ 

It is World Whistleblower Day on June 23rd.  But, as we mark the occasion, do we really celebrate and value all whistleblowers equally?

As these examples show, for women whistleblowers, the experience of speaking out can be challenging. Research from the European Institute for Gender Equalityconfirms that, across Europe, women whistleblowers can face various forms of gender-specific retaliation including sexual harassment.

With colleagues at the EU Commission-funded BRIGHT project, we are researching ways to address these concerns, and to build gender and other relevant categories into how we protect and support whistleblowers.

We know that the situation is complex. Gender rarely plays a straightforward role in whistleblower reprisal, as research makes clear. The exclusions can be subtle and pernicious. Gender-based harassment can often be downplayed as mere humour. Meanwhile cultural norms from wider society that require women to be more passive and acquiescent, and thus avoid ‘assertive’ behaviour like whistleblowing, are difficult to overcome in a workplace setting. 

Gender-based retaliation often comes down to power discrepancies: an aggressive employer will retaliate using any perceived weakness on the part of a worker being targeted.  Therefore our research extends to a range of other categories: race, ethnicity, class, job status, disability and others. Working with researcher Taymi Milan, an anti-corruption expert from Ecuador, my role is to develop a framework to understand how the impacts of these characteristics intersect with each other to shape the experience of whistleblowing for a worker. 

It is rarely a situation of mere victimhood. In reality, individuals navigate the challenges and opportunities for action in their own immediate setting, as the studies of Irish soldiers and French bankers clearly show. These women whistleblowers found ways to fight back, defending their disclosures, and subverting attacks by aggressive employers.

The aim of our research at BRIGHT is to bring out these subtleties and challenges, developing research frameworks that others can use in the future. We are creating systems for measuring and evaluating whistleblowing culture along these lines.

We are – overall -- working to bring about a more inclusive whistleblowing environment that considers the unique experiences and challenges of individuals across all genders, identity categories, and backgrounds. We can then move to educate organizations, institutions, and the public about the importance of an intersectional approach to whistleblowing.

On future World Whistleblower Days, we may be able to claim equal support for all workers speaking up.

This post is part of the project 101143234 — BRIGHT — CERV-2023-CHAR-LITI, founded by the European Union