Does work have sex?", An invigorating documentary on the long march towards equality at work

Does work have sex?", An invigorating documentary on the long march towards equality at work

Do not look for a new production on the subject of sexual harassment at work that feeds the debates of newspapers like those of conversations in the coffee machine for a month. Martin Meissonnier's documentary, broadcast on France 5 on October 26, does not talk about sex, but focuses on equality between women and men in their daily production activity. Based on an uncompromising starting point, he develops a frankly invigorating vision nourished by amazing personalities whose fate, commitment and creativity are discovered.

Martin Meissonnier is interested in the question of work. A very legitimate subject for a "workaholic" like him: at the same time musician, composer of BO, director of albums, organizer of festivals, author, journalist, documentary maker, producer ... "Does the work have a sex" which will be broadcast on France 5 Sunday, November 26 is the second film he made on this theme after the excellent "Happiness at work" in 2015. This time tackles the issue of equality in the professional world . As important as it is, the subject is pretty rebuttled and often does not escape the cinema as in documentaries to an avalanche of clichés, complaints, indignant statements. Especially since most filmmakers often have a rather caricatured corporate vision that results in employers being pillorized and portraying the professional world as hell not even paved with good intentions. But Martin Meissonnier is not like the others and as we have already said, he works, so he makes finds.

Work in secret

The interest of his film is therefore not in the description of the situation well understood by the innumerable "high-council", "Observatory" and associations dedicated to equality but the way in which it puts it in a historical perspective ( positive) and unearths great characters who tinker with solutions to escape the collective destiny that society offered them. A lesson of emancipation that illustrates that advances will not come from laws but from individuals and that the fight is cultural. From this dive you will find the delightful and invigorating old Englishwoman, Stephanie Shirley, who in Great Britain of the 60's created an all-female computer company to allow women to work in this sector from home. Colleagues who worked almost in secret of the company, their spouse and have conducted projects no less ambitious than the programming of the black box Concorde. Paradoxically, she was sentenced for sex discrimination in 1975 ... and forced to hire men too.

We also focus on the conductor Claire Gibault who after an international career, unhappy not to find her place in the very macho world of conducting in France, became a member of the European Parliament to advance the cause of women . She then returned to her first love, music, to create her own orchestra with her own rules of extremely participatory female leadership.

We also go to Finland to understand the conditions of the arrival of the first woman President of the Republic and the way in which she cleaned up a country pushed along the precipice by a class of greedy bankers who remained essentially male in the country of legality. We enter the daily Cornelia Findelstein, busy director of an administration in Pau while her husband, the homemaker, raises their three daughters. The two members of the couple do not mask the fulfillment or the difficulties sometimes of this situation: a suspicious social look for one, social isolation that must be broken for the other. We still see in this documentary companies that have adopted modes of organization, not feminist but in which women flourish as much as men, or an extraordinary couple of Belgian restaurateurs, an astronaut ...

Reinventing roles and organizations

It is finally the word of the experts that is the least interesting declaiming a truth more abstract even untruths like this doctor in social psychology which explains learnedly that one notes "an exponential increase of the number of girls in the schools of engineers. " The annual study we have been doing for over ten years on these schools shows that this is not the case. Like the statistics available on higher education. Because culture, stereotypes, are at work everywhere, including in the individual choices of girls on their own orientation, sometimes depriving them of access to better paid positions in companies.

With this reservation, we must not deprive ourselves of this richly illustrated documentary with archive footage and editing alert, whose message is clear. The égali