There is something profoundly disturbing about encountering the denial of gender-based violence from women who occupy positions of institutional authority. Not because women should be presumed to possess an instinctive understanding of one another's experiences, nor because their gender imposes upon them an obligation of unconditional solidarity, but because such denial exposes one of the most uncomfortable contradictions of contemporary equality discourse: the possibility that those who have benefited from institutional progress may eventually become incapable of recognising the inequalities that persist beyond the boundaries of their own protection. When equality is experienced primarily through professional stability, institutional recognition, legal safeguards and access to decision-making structures, it can cease to be understood as an unfinished political and social struggle and become, instead, a condition that those who possess it mistakenly assume has already been achieved for everyone else.
Some time ago, during a meeting with a woman occupying a senior leadership position at a higher music education institution, I experienced a particularly painful expression of this contradiction. As our conversation turned towards gender-based violence and the inequalities that continue to shape women's professional lives, I encountered a response that, to my understanding, minimised the persistence of these realities through an appeal to the institutional and legislative protections that now exist. What disturbed me was not the acknowledgement of legal progress, which is both necessary and legitimate, but the apparent inability to recognise the distance between the existence of those protections and the circumstances of women whose professional lives unfold outside their effective reach. I left that conversation with the uncomfortable impression that the language of equality had become a means of defending an institutional narrative rather than an instrument for examining the conditions of those who remain vulnerable.
The experience was particularly difficult because it came from another woman. This is not an argument that women are naturally more empathetic, more ethical or more capable of recognising injustice than men. Such expectations would merely reproduce another set of gendered obligations. Rather, the encounter exposed the fragility of a widespread assumption: that increasing the number of women in positions of power necessarily produces a more profound understanding of the inequalities experienced by women as a social group. Representation is indispensable, but shared gender does not imply shared material circumstances, and access to institutional authority does not guarantee a critical understanding of the structures through which that authority is exercised. A woman can occupy a position historically denied to women while remaining profoundly disconnected from the conditions of those whose professional independence, economic security or capacity to resist abuse remain precarious.
The distinction between formal equality and material equality is central to understanding this disconnection. Legislation can establish rights, prohibit discrimination, define mechanisms of protection and oblige institutions to adopt procedures intended to prevent violence. These achievements are neither superficial nor dispensable. They represent the result of sustained political, legal and social struggles, often undertaken by women who faced considerable personal and professional consequences. Yet the existence of a legal framework does not establish that the realities it seeks to address have disappeared. A right may be formally recognised while remaining practically inaccessible. A complaint procedure may exist without eliminating the fear of retaliation. An institution may adopt an equality plan while continuing to operate through informal relationships of dependency, professional silence and unequal access to opportunity. The distance between legal recognition and effective protection is not a marginal imperfection of equality policy; it is one of the fundamental questions that determines whether equality has become a lived reality.
This distance is especially significant in professional environments characterised by precarious employment, personal networks and concentrated institutional authority. The classical music sector provides a particularly revealing example. Artistic careers frequently depend upon recommendations, auditions, invitations, commissions, teaching opportunities and access to individuals capable of influencing professional trajectories. The boundaries between artistic mentorship, personal loyalty and professional dependency can become difficult to distinguish, particularly when institutional prestige is concentrated in relatively small professional circles. Under these conditions, the capacity to identify discrimination or violence is not equivalent to the capacity to challenge it. A woman may understand perfectly well that she has been subjected to unacceptable behaviour while also recognising that speaking publicly, filing a complaint or confronting a person in authority could jeopardise the opportunities upon which her livelihood depends.
For those occupying secure institutional positions, such vulnerabilities may be difficult to perceive in their full material significance. A stable salary, recognised professional status, access to organisational resources and the authority to participate in institutional decisions do not make a woman immune to sexism or gender-based violence. Nor do they guarantee that she will be protected when she experiences them. They do, however, alter the resources available to her and the consequences she may face when negotiating professional conflict. The independent artist, freelance consultant, temporary lecturer or early-career researcher may operate under substantially different conditions. Their ability to refuse an opportunity, challenge an abusive relationship or disengage from a powerful professional network can be constrained by financial necessity and the absence of institutional security. To speak about equality without acknowledging these differences is to risk confusing the protections associated with a particular professional position with the general condition of women working in the same sector.
There is a further danger when institutional privilege becomes invisible to those who possess it. Privilege does not necessarily imply that an individual has obtained a position undeservedly, nor does it invalidate the effort, competence or discrimination that may have accompanied their professional trajectory. It describes, among other things, the relative advantages and protections associated with a particular location within a social or organisational structure. A woman may have worked exceptionally hard to reach a leadership position and still occupy a position of considerable advantage in relation to women whose work remains economically insecure or institutionally unprotected. These realities are not contradictory. The difficulty arises when personal achievement becomes the primary framework through which structural conditions are interpreted, making the inequalities experienced by others appear exaggerated, exceptional or insufficiently substantiated.
This is where institutional blindness can become particularly consequential. A person who has acquired authority within an organisation may gradually begin to perceive its procedures as reliable evidence of its ethical commitments. The existence of protocols becomes proof of institutional responsibility; the adoption of equality legislation becomes evidence of social progress; the presence of women in leadership becomes a visible demonstration that historical barriers have been overcome. Each of these developments may indeed represent progress. The problem emerges when their existence is used, consciously or otherwise, to diminish the significance of experiences that contradict the institution's preferred understanding of itself. In such circumstances, the institution no longer approaches testimony about inequality as information requiring attention, but as a disturbance to a narrative of improvement that it has already accepted as true.
The consequences of this inversion are profound. Women who describe experiences of discrimination, coercion, professional marginalisation or gender-based violence may find themselves required not only to explain what happened, but also to overcome an institutional presumption that the necessary protections already exist. Their experiences are measured against the formal architecture of equality rather than against the material circumstances in which the harm occurred. The burden of demonstrating the persistence of inequality falls upon those most exposed to it, while those who possess institutional authority retain the privilege of treating the problem as exceptional until sufficiently persuaded otherwise. This does not require an explicit intention to silence anyone. It can emerge through ordinary administrative reasoning, defensive institutional communication or a sincere but inadequate understanding of what legal protections can accomplish.
What makes such encounters particularly painful is the absence of recognition that can accompany them. When a woman attempts to describe the vulnerability of those working beyond institutional security, she is not necessarily asking another woman to identify with every aspect of her experience. She is asking for the possibility that her circumstances be taken seriously without first being translated into the assumptions of someone else's professional reality. There is a fundamental difference between disagreeing about the interpretation of an event and responding from a position that appears unable to acknowledge the conditions under which the event became possible. The former can produce meaningful discussion. The latter can leave the person speaking with the impression that the reality she is describing has been rendered invisible before it has even been examined.
The question of internalised misogyny enters this discussion, although it must be approached with conceptual precision. Misogyny should not be treated as a convenient explanation for every conflict between women, nor should women in leadership be presumed to reproduce patriarchal values whenever they exercise authority in ways that others experience as exclusionary. Institutional defensiveness, bureaucratic rigidity, class privilege, professional hierarchy and gender bias are distinct phenomena, even when they interact. Nevertheless, women are not situated outside the social structures that shape attitudes towards authority, legitimacy and the credibility of other women's experiences. They may reproduce assumptions that diminish the significance of gendered vulnerability, particularly when those assumptions have become normalised within the institutions through which they have acquired professional recognition. The relevant question is therefore not whether a particular woman is sufficiently supportive of other women, but whether her exercise of authority challenges or reinforces the structures that make some women's experiences easier to dismiss than others.
This distinction also exposes the limitations of a feminism concerned primarily with access to positions of power. The advancement of women into leadership is an essential component of equality, but it cannot be its final measure. If institutional progress is assessed principally through appointments, representation and compliance with formal obligations, the experiences of women who remain outside stable organisational hierarchies risk becoming peripheral to the discussion. A woman occupying a senior position may become a symbol of equality within an institution while women working in less secure conditions continue to encounter forms of dependency and exclusion that institutional indicators struggle to capture. The visibility of one woman's success can then coexist with the invisibility of another woman's vulnerability, without the institution necessarily recognising the contradiction.
This is not an argument against women's leadership. It is an argument against treating leadership as an adequate substitute for structural transformation. The presence of women in positions of authority should expand the possibilities for institutional change, but the significance of that change must ultimately be evaluated through the conditions experienced by those with less power. Does the institution provide meaningful protection to individuals whose careers depend upon informal professional relationships? Can a precarious worker raise concerns without facing disproportionate economic consequences? Are complaints treated as opportunities to identify organisational failures, or primarily as reputational risks to be managed? Are women outside permanent institutional structures recognised as legitimate professionals whose experiences deserve attention? These questions reveal dimensions of equality that cannot be answered through representation alone.
A different experience, also involving a woman in a position of institutional authority, later led me to consider how similar mechanisms of recognition operate beyond explicit discussions of gender-based violence. In my professional capacity as an artist manager, I had spent several weeks facilitating communication and coordinating aspects of international academic collaborations involving musicians I represented. My work included maintaining contact with international partners, following up on pending decisions and helping projects progress through organisational difficulties. I had explicitly acknowledged that academic and institutional decisions belonged to the relevant teaching staff and departments. Nevertheless, after substantial professional effort had already been invested, I was informed that the institution preferred to communicate directly with its teachers and international partners and did not envisage a need for my involvement. My professional role was characterised in terms that I experienced as dismissive, and the clarification of institutional boundaries arrived only after the coordination work had been undertaken.
The two experiences were not identical, and it would be misleading to present them as evidence of the same discriminatory intention. One concerned the recognition of gender-based violence and the limits of formal equality; the other concerned professional representation, institutional boundaries and the recognition of independent labour. Yet both prompted a related question about the exercise of institutional authority: what happens when those who possess organisational power interpret the limits of their own institutional perspective as the limits of professional reality itself? In the first case, the existence of legal and institutional protections appeared to overshadow the vulnerability of women beyond their effective reach. In the second, the institution's preference for direct communication appeared to take precedence over recognising the professional work that had already contributed to advancing its collaborations. The common element was not necessarily misogyny, but a form of institutional self-reference through which the organisation's understanding of its responsibilities seemed to determine which external experiences and contributions deserved recognition.
The second episode also raised questions about the relationship between authority and invisible labour. Cultural and educational institutions depend upon extensive forms of coordination, communication and relationship management that are often less visible than the artistic or academic achievements they support. Such work can involve sustained attention, negotiation, administrative judgment and the maintenance of professional relationships across institutional boundaries. When these activities are performed by independent professionals, their value may become evident through the results they produce without necessarily being acknowledged as a distinct area of expertise. An institution may legitimately establish limits on external participation, but the legitimacy of those limits does not eliminate its responsibility to communicate them clearly and in a timely manner. When boundaries are invoked retrospectively, the resulting disagreement concerns not only who is authorised to participate, but also whose time, expertise and professional initiative are considered worthy of institutional consideration.
There is a historical gender dimension to the undervaluation of organisational and relational work. Activities associated with care, support, communication and the anticipation of others' needs have frequently been treated as secondary to forms of authority regarded as more visible or prestigious. This does not mean that cultural management is inherently feminised, nor that every failure to recognise such work constitutes gender discrimination. It does suggest, however, that the distinction between professional expertise and supposedly auxiliary assistance deserves scrutiny, particularly when women working independently must repeatedly establish the legitimacy of responsibilities that would be more readily recognised within formal institutional positions. The capacity to coordinate a complex international collaboration is not less professional because it is exercised outside an institution's hierarchy, just as the right to professional representation does not disappear because an artist also holds an academic appointment.
Both experiences therefore led me towards a broader concern with the relationship between institutional authority and the recognition of realities beyond its immediate control. In one case, the question concerned the vulnerability of women whose professional circumstances were not adequately reflected in the language of formal equality. In the other, it concerned the legitimacy of independent professional work that did not fit comfortably within an institution's preferred organisational boundaries. Neither experience establishes, by itself, that the individuals involved were motivated by misogyny. But together they illustrate why the presence of women in institutional leadership cannot be treated as sufficient evidence that an organisation has developed a more inclusive understanding of power. The decisive question is how authority responds when confronted with experiences, forms of expertise or material conditions that challenge its established assumptions.
There is also an ethical problem in the way institutions sometimes respond to criticism by emphasising intention rather than consequence. The assurance that no disrespect was intended may be sincere and relevant, but it does not necessarily resolve the professional implications of language that diminishes someone's contribution. Similarly, the assertion that an institution possesses equality protocols may be factually correct without addressing whether those mechanisms provide effective protection in practice. In both situations, the institution may respond to a challenge by reaffirming the legitimacy of its own position rather than examining the discrepancy that gave rise to the criticism. The result can be a conversation in which the person raising the concern is required to acknowledge institutional authority repeatedly, while the institution remains under no equivalent pressure to reconsider the limitations of its perspective.
This asymmetry becomes particularly troubling when institutional equality discourse is used as a shield against criticism. The purpose of equality legislation is not to certify the moral adequacy of the organisations that implement it. Its purpose is to establish rights, responsibilities and mechanisms through which inequality can be prevented, challenged and remedied. The existence of these mechanisms should therefore increase an institution's willingness to examine evidence of continuing harm, rather than diminish it. An equality plan that cannot accommodate criticism of the institution's own practices risks becoming a document of organisational reassurance. A protocol that is invoked primarily to demonstrate compliance may fail to address the conditions that discourage individuals from seeking protection. And a leadership culture that interprets challenges to its assumptions as challenges to its legitimacy may gradually lose the capacity for the self-examination upon which meaningful institutional progress depends.
The most uncomfortable implication is that institutional privilege can sometimes produce not only material distance, but also epistemic distance: a separation between the conditions under which people experience the world and the conditions under which their experiences are judged credible. Those who occupy positions of authority possess greater opportunities to define organisational priorities, interpret procedures and determine which problems warrant institutional attention. Those who remain outside these structures may possess detailed knowledge of vulnerabilities that formal mechanisms fail to capture, yet lack equivalent authority to establish the significance of that knowledge. When institutional leaders confuse their capacity to define a problem with a superior understanding of the problem itself, the experiences of less powerful individuals can be dismissed without ever being meaningfully considered.
For women working in classical music, this question is inseparable from the sector's longstanding relationship with hierarchy, prestige and professional dependency. Artistic excellence does not eliminate structural inequality, and cultural sophistication does not guarantee ethical awareness. Institutions devoted to the interpretation of complex artistic traditions may remain remarkably resistant to examining the social relationships through which their own authority is maintained. The capacity to recognise nuance in music does not necessarily translate into the capacity to recognise vulnerability in professional life. Indeed, the prestige associated with artistic and academic institutions can make their internal contradictions more difficult to challenge, precisely because criticism threatens an image of cultural refinement that the institution has a strong interest in preserving.
What I found most painful in my encounter with institutional leadership was not the discovery that another woman held a different perspective. Disagreement is unavoidable, and no meaningful conception of equality should require women to think alike. It was the impression that the material distance between our positions had become almost impossible to discuss. From my perspective, the language of legal progress was being invoked in a way that failed to acknowledge the insecurity experienced by women who cannot rely upon comparable institutional protections. The experience was not merely frustrating. It felt insulting because it seemed to transform the conditions of relative security enjoyed within a position of authority into an implicit measure of what other women should reasonably expect from the world around them.
The word privilege is often resisted because it is mistaken for an accusation of personal wrongdoing. Yet recognising privilege does not require denying individual achievement or suffering. It requires acknowledging that professional experiences are shaped by unequal access to security, resources, influence and protection. A woman in institutional leadership may have encountered discrimination throughout her career and still possess advantages that profoundly distinguish her current circumstances from those of an independent professional whose income, opportunities and reputation remain exposed to the decisions of others. Both realities can be true. The ethical challenge begins when the recognition of one's own struggles becomes incompatible with recognising the different and continuing vulnerabilities of other women.
A more substantive understanding of equality would require institutions to move beyond the demonstration of compliance and towards the examination of lived consequences. It would require leadership capable of distinguishing between the existence of a right and the practical conditions necessary to exercise it, between institutional procedure and professional recognition, and between the authority to make decisions and the responsibility to understand their effects. It would also require abandoning the assumption that women who have reached positions of influence necessarily possess a more comprehensive understanding of gender inequality than those whose experiences remain largely invisible within institutional structures. Authority may provide access to information, but it does not automatically produce insight; professional security may provide protection, but it does not establish that protection is universally available.
The challenge is therefore not simply to ensure that more women occupy positions of institutional power, although that objective remains necessary. It is to ask what kind of power they are entering, what assumptions they are expected to reproduce and whether the structures themselves are capable of responding to experiences that contradict their preferred narratives. Women should not be held to a different ethical standard because of their gender, but neither should their presence in leadership be used to exempt institutions from scrutiny. Equality cannot become an unquestionable attribute of an organisation merely because its senior positions are occupied by women or because its policies formally recognise the existence of discrimination.
Perhaps the most dangerous moment in the pursuit of equality arrives when progress becomes so closely associated with institutional identity that acknowledging continuing inequality begins to feel like a threat to the institution itself. At that point, the language originally developed to expose injustice can be repurposed to defend the structures through which injustice remains insufficiently addressed. Legal protection becomes a substitute for listening, representation becomes a substitute for transformation, and institutional authority becomes a substitute for understanding. The problem is no longer simply that inequality persists, but that the mechanisms intended to confront it can be invoked to explain why the experiences of those who continue to suffer its consequences should no longer disturb the prevailing narrative.
Equality cannot be understood as a privilege that becomes complete once it has been secured by those who occupy positions of authority. Its meaning must remain inseparable from the circumstances of those who lack comparable protection, whose professional autonomy remains fragile and whose experiences challenge the reassuring language of institutional progress. A woman reaching a position of power is an achievement. A woman exercising that power without recognising the vulnerability of others is not, by itself, evidence of collective emancipation. The transformation of institutions requires more than the redistribution of authority among different individuals. It requires the willingness to question the assumptions through which authority has traditionally been exercised, including when those assumptions are reproduced by people who have themselves experienced the consequences of inequality.
The existence of equality legislation is an achievement. The presence of women in leadership is an achievement. Neither should be confused with the disappearance of the violence, dependency and professional exclusion that made those achievements necessary. If institutional progress is to mean anything beyond the consolidation of security for those who have already reached positions of influence, it must preserve the capacity to recognise the experiences that remain outside its protective boundaries. Otherwise, equality risks becoming something profoundly different from the principle it claims to embody: not a transformation of the conditions under which women live and work, but a privilege whose existence is most confidently proclaimed by those least exposed to its absence.
