Jennifer O’Connell: Every woman has met a Charles Michel who looks the other way

The political world was convulsed this week by revelations about Boris Johnson's furnishings. The £840-a-roll gold wallpaper designed to eviscerate the "John Lewis nightmare" left behind by Theresa May! The allegations of a Bertie Ahern-style soft furnishings digout! The snobbery! The red-faced denials!

But if that was the high-drama boxset we all needed to binge on, it was a chair in the Turkish presidential palace that said more about the state of contemporary politics. Rather, it was the absence of a chair.

The "um?" uttered by Ursula von der Leyen when she realised there was no seat for her at a meeting in late March with president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the European Council president Charles Michel came out somewhere between a mild rebuke and a silent scream. Or maybe the scream was me.

This was not a mere oversight, and it was about more than simmering tensions between the European Union and Turkey. As von der Leyen predicted, every woman will have been able to identify with her experience, but for women in politics, these humiliations and micro-aggressions just happen in public.

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Sometimes it is as overt as the men at the meeting "forgetting" she's coming. Or it's subtle, like our own Oireachtas Golf Society, which doesn't have a gender barrier but might as well do judging by the line-up at Clifden last year. All too frequently it's there in the casual hatred of the social media comments directed at women in politics. "Pig in lipstick"; "Opportunistic hack"; "Very very fat"; "F*cking lefty do-gooder" – just a sample of the comments directed at female politicians on Twitter in recent days.

It's about all the women TDs and ministers we didn't have because they were sidelined or discouraged or diminished or otherwise dissuaded along the way

And sometimes it’s institutional, like becoming the first ever Minister to give birth while in office and having to patch together your own “sticking plaster” system to allow you to take maternity leave.

Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, who gave birth to a baby boy this week, only managed to take leave facilitated by a complicated arrangement necessitated, this newspaper reported, “due to caps on the number of ministers a government can have”. Actually, it was necessitated due to the failure of many ministers and governments to grasp the possibility that one day one of them might actually become pregnant while in office.

Sometimes, like the chair, it’s about what you can’t see. It’s about all the women TDs and ministers we didn’t have because they were sidelined or discouraged or diminished or otherwise dissuaded along the way.

Some people are quite happy for politics to continue to be shaped by these invisible barriers, failures of imagination, accidental omissions or unofficial boys’ clubs.

Von der Leyen understands this, which may be why she decided to make what the New York Times called "an unusually frank" – and what others more dismissively called "emotional" – statement about the incident at the European Parliament last Monday.

"I am the president of the European Commission. And this is how I expected to be treated when visiting Turkey two weeks ago, like a commission president, but I was not . . . I have to conclude it happened because I am a woman."

She said she felt “hurt and left alone: as a woman and as a European. Because this is not about seating arrangements or protocol. This goes to the core of who we are . . . how far we still have to go before women are treated as equals.”

What makes him dangerous is his baseline conviction that if he's not the direct source of the problem, he is part of the solution

It's tempting to say that if all powerful women stopped trying to lean in and started being more "unusually frank" and even "emotional" about these blatantly sexist power plays, change would come faster. But this problem doesn't exist because women aren't bothered to fix it; it exists because of all the Recep Tayyip Erdogans and Donald Trumps still out there, using bully-boy tactics to hold on to power. And all the Charles Michels who look the other way.

Just as every woman has had her own version of the disappearing chair moment, every woman has met a Charles Michel. Most of us, I bet, could name several. There is a more insidious enemy to women than the Erdogans and the Trumps because you almost never see them coming. You know the type. He regards himself as one of the good guys. He is not a creep, a lech or a thug. He believes sexism exists (probably) and he’s (definitely) not sexist himself; he just never seems to see it happening. What makes him dangerous is his baseline conviction that if he’s not the direct source of the problem, he is part of the solution.

After von der Leyen’s speech, Michel complained to the German newspaper Handelsblatt that he hadn’t slept well since. “My fear was that if I had reacted in any way, I would have triggered a much more serious incident,” he said, which is a version of the refrain of decent guys caught in awkward situations everywhere. They don’t want to make a scene. Maybe the other guy didn’t mean it. Maybe she’s just being emotional. “I understand the images will have offended many women,” Michel went on as though men would know better than to be upset by such nonsense.

He was right about one thing. The images did offend many women and quite a few men too. Von der Leyen got lots of public support, but according to Politico, (male) EU ambassadors fretted privately that her complaints were “causing serious reputational damage on the world stage” while (male) diplomats worried anonymously that she was making the EU look dysfunctional.

The EU has bigger issues than looking silly if it can’t see why this – a female commission president left standing, while the two men in the room grabbed the chairs during a meeting about violence against women – is not just a problem of optics, but a symptom of a deeper rot.