It’s not sexist to tell a woman to ‘grow a pair’

Of all the professions, you’d like to think that the members of our armed forces are more resilient than your average Joe or Jane. Not so, apparently. This week, it emerged that a female officer in the Royal Air Force (RAF) who was told to ‘grow a pair’ by her male colleagues has won a £2,000 payout.

This bizarre saga started in 2018, when squadron leader Anne Rubery, who has served in the RAF for over 30 years, submitted an official complaint of ‘bullying and discrimination’ within her unit. Apparently, two senior male colleagues then dismissed her complaints, calling her ‘ballsy’ and saying that she needed to ‘grow a pair’ – two statements that, you would think, are somewhat contradictory.

An internal RAF investigation followed, in which Rubery also raised the ball-related remarks, but she was once again brushed aside. One investigation found that the comments could have applied to ‘both genders equally’. Undeterred, she appealed. But her case was once again dismissed.

Refusing to admit defeat, Rubery tried the official Service Complaints Ombudsman for the Armed Forces (SCOAF). Finally, this body looked over Rubery’s mounting list of complaints and decided, perhaps out of exhaustion more than anything else, to uphold her case. Not, however, ‘on the grounds of discrimination or harassment’, although it did criticise the RAF’s ‘overly masculine culture’, which apparently showed ‘disregard for the female workforce’. The SCOAF recommended that the RAF apologise to Rubery and pay her a pitiful sum of up to £2,000 – presumably just to make her go away.

Incredibly, Rubery also tried suing the Ministry of Defence for sex discrimination. Her case was allowed to proceed by an employment judge in Watford, before it was decided this was a mistake. It looks, we can all hope, like this will be the end of it.

Rubery’s seemingly unending quest to sue her employer for sex discrimination might look bizarre to most people. Telling a female colleague to ‘grow a pair’ is obviously not sexist. It’s a figure of speech that is widely understood. But who can really blame Rubery for doing what so many aggrieved people seem to be doing these days.

After all, the ‘grow a pair’ affair isn’t even the weirdest workplace-discrimination case of recent times. Last week, the courts finally gave us an answer on whether it’s sexist to call a man ‘bald’.

Back in 2019, electrician Tony Finn was called a ‘stupid bald cunt’ by his supervisor, Jamie King, during an argument. Finn then sued his employer for sex discrimination (although King was also a man, it should be said).

In 2021, Finn’s case was dismissed. But like Rubery, he seems to be far more tenacious than his cries of discrimination and harassment might have made him appear. He then took his employer, a West Yorkshire-based manufacturing firm, to an employment appeals tribunal, which ruled in his favour in 2022.

His employer immediately appealed the decision but, in 2023, a tribunal upheld the case in Finn’s favour. After four years of back-and-forth tribunals, unable to decide whether or not baldness is an exclusively male affliction, Justice Naomi Ellenbogen finally ruled that remarks about hair loss were ‘inherently related to sex’. She reasoned that commenting on a man’s baldness is the equivalent to remarking on the size of a woman’s breasts. Justice Ellenbogen’s full ruling was published last week, leading to widespread mockery and derision.

The time, energy and expense given to these two cases is extraordinary. In a sane world, tribunals, ombudsmen and judges would have better things to do than decide whether it’s sexist to call someone bald or ballsy. Yet these cases are just the tip of the iceberg. This week, for example, a tribunal suggested that not saying hello back to a colleague could be a breach of employment laws. Earlier this year, a tribunal found that sending an unsolicited birthday card constituted harassment. And shortly before that, a judge suggested that offering an older colleague a chair could be counted as age discrimination.

Things are only set to get worse under the new Labour government. Keir Starmer’s incoming Employment Rights Bill could, among many other things, force employers to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent harassment and discrimination in the workplace, including from ‘third parties’. And by ‘harassment’ it seems to just mean offensive speech. Hospitality bosses have warned that this could stretch as far as making pub landlords liable for their staff overhearing any off-colour banter from members of the public.

This culture of offence is turning working adults into over-sensitive crybabies. It’s time for everyone to grow a pair, grow a backbone and grow up – no matter how sexist, ableist or ageist that might sound.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.