Disclosure and the Fear of Women in the Workplace

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed radical changes to gender identities and gender roles in America. In the 1970s and 1980s, specifically the professional and sexual identities of women underwent socio-political changes as part of the movement that has come to be known as second wave feminism. In the 1980s and 1990s, the simultaneous rise of computer technologies and of women in the corporate workplace prompted the articulation in film of social fears regarding how the latter might make use of the former. Both computer technology and women acquiring post-secondary education posed a threat to the job security enjoyed by a predominantly male workforce in the face of ongoing recession. At the same time, Michael Douglas was at the peak of his career. In the late 1980s and 1990s he starred in a string of films which all seemed to articulate fears regarding women with professional identities or who were exercising a new sexual liberation, including Fatal Attraction (1987) with Glenn Close, Basic Instinct (1992) with Sharon Stone, Disclosure (1994) with Demi Moore, and A Perfect Murder (1998) with Gwyneth Paltrow. Perhaps what is most startling about these films is the list of successfully professional female actors who chose to participate in them. In Disclosure, for example, Demi Moore is a rising executive in a computer technologies firm who is coded as both sexually and professionally malicious. Disclosure is a film that reacts against the social changes resulting from second wave feminism and that articulates social fears in the early 1990s regarding women’s sexuality and women in the workplace.
The late twentieth century was an era that saw the renegotiation of gender roles in the workplace. In a discussion of constructions of masculinity in the 1980s, Yvonne Tasker refers to “the changing definitions, within a shifting economy, of the roles that men and women are called on to perform, particularly in that critical arena of gender definition, the world of work” (Tasker 111). In addition to gender roles, gender demographics were also changing. In 1970, the Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. case in a U.S. Court of Appeals was pivotal in securing equal pay for women in the workforce as articulated in the Bennett Amendment on Chapter VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Luna 371). In 2009, New York Times columnist Casey Mulligan observed a polarity between the domestic sphere and the professional sphere in the shifting work roles assigned to women.
Years ago, women were a small percentage of the work force (outside the home). During much of the 20th century — especially the 1970s and 1980s — women’s share of the labor force increased. By 1990, the work force was 47 percent female and 53 percent male, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many view this as one of the most important and desirable social and economic transformations of our lifetimes (Mulligan).
In “The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family,” Claudia Goldin reports that the late 1970s was a period which saw massive increases in the number of women acquiring post-secondary education in such fields as medicine, law, dentistry, and business (10-11). Goldin goes on to report how women were increasingly moving into more lucrative professional positions traditionally held by men.
[E]arnings of women relative to those of men began to increase around 1980 after remaining flat since the 1950s . . . Much of the increase was due to women’s greater job experience and to their more market-relevant skills as reflected in the increased return to experience. Occupations shifted, not surprisingly, from those that had been considered traditional ones for women, such as teacher, nurse, librarian, and social worker, to a varied group of professions including lawyer, physician, professor, and manager (12-13).

The professional sphere was no longer an all-male enclave and movies such as Disclosure dramatized the social fears that resulted from such sweeping demographic changes.
Disclosure centres its narrative around the interruption of employment security and domestic harmony to a high-ranking male employee by a female executive in a computer technologies firm. It is not surprising that Disclosure was released when it was in 1994; both computer technologies and women’s participation in the corporate workforce were at an apex.
Female labor force participation rates . . . for women of almost all ages, education levels, and marital statuses seem to have leveled off since around 1990 after rising nonstop for at least the last century (Goldin 14).

In addition, an article entitled “History of Computers in the Workplace” published by ehow.com reports that between 1986 and 1990, “Many businesses began to realize computers could increase productivity and eliminate tedious manual tasks performed by employees” (History). Both women and computers represented a threat to the employment security enjoyed by the predominantly male workforce. However, computers are not measured as a threat to the job security of men in Disclosure. Instead, Disclosure focuses its narrative around the upper-middle classed, bourgeois, executive hero, Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas). The threat of job loss posed by computers is recast as the vehicle through which Tom maintains lucrative employment, albeit precariously, in a cut-throat corporate environment that is increasingly infiltrated by women.
Disclosure valorizes and normalizes a social construction in which the work of women is appropriately located within the domestic sphere. The film opens with shots that pan through an upper middle-classed suburban home. Traditional gender roles are established through the disembodied voices of Tom Sanders and his wife Susan. She verbalizes her observations that he is inept in domestic duties. “You can't take care of getting the kids ready for school. Don't say you can.” He responds by ceding the responsibility for domestic duties to his wife; to his children he says, “Listen to your mom.” As the good wife she is the domestic strength and doting mother. When we finally do see Tom and Susan on the screen, she is obviously responsible for taking the kids to school. Tom is only along for the ride while he heads off to the office. In the car Susan continues to chastise Tom for his disheveled tie, but she is complimentary of his position with DigiCom and characterizes him as one of the “top guys.” When she later learns of Tom’s involvement in a sexual scandal, she pretends to have known everything. “I support him 100 per cent.” She is maternal, domestic, and supportive of Tom, even in the face of his suspicious fidelity. From this point of departure the character of evil professional woman is readily imposed.
Disclosure polarizes the traditionally domestic sphere of the female worker against its professional counterpart. In an abrupt juxtaposition against the domestic bliss of Tom’s family life, the film promptly and unambiguously articulates the threat to male job security and established sexual politics that is posed by women in the workplace. While Tom is on his way to work a fellow commuter ironically predicts the outcome of Tom’s expected promotion. "You don't see it coming. You're just going right along and then one day there's no room.” As the good, hard-working breadwinner, Tom remains distracted by his business-based cellular telephone conversation. The unnamed man continues, “Boom. No more room for you. Smaller, faster, cheaper, better.” Tom offers to help this recently unemployed friend find work. Tom tells him to contact a woman in his office named “Cindy.” The man responds, “Cindy. Pretty name. Used to have fun with the girls. Nowadays she probably wants your job.” The changing sexual politics in the corporate environment have shifted in such a way that no longer provides for a coding of women as sexually subordinate and that has resulted in job loss for Tom’s misogynistic friend.
Tom initially appears unaffected by these shifting sexual politics. His professional misogyny is characterized as typical and harmless. As Tom enters his office building his attention is distracted; his eyes follow the bare legs of a young woman in a skirt ascending a stairwell. He grins at the delightful image and she is apparently none the wiser. The scene acts to mitigate his misogyny as victimless and locates women as the objects of sexual spectacle. In the next scene, Tom instructs his subordinate Asian female assistant “not to worry” about the status of his employment and gives her a smack on her backside. The inappropriate physical maneuver is immediately mitigated when he does the same to a male co-worker, although the focus of the camera framing renders it far less obvious. On the elevator the two men dismissively discuss the health of their respective wives. All of this condescending behavior towards women, however, is rendered trivial in the superseding context of Tom’s increasing suspicion that he will not achieve the promotion he had been expecting.
Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) is cast as Tom’s nemesis. Tom discovers that his boss, Garvin (Donald Sutherland) has decided to offer the promotion Tom was expecting to Meredith. There are even hints that Tom’s job has become redundant and that he might get fired. In this context, Meredith not only robs Tom of his hopes of advancement but also poses a threat to his ability to maintain his role as breadwinner for his family. When Tom’s wife, Susan, suggests he quit, he is uncomfortably dismissive. “I'm perfectly capable of supporting our family.” Later, during an argument regarding the difficult situation he faces at work, Susan questions Tom’s claim that he is most concerned about their children. Tom responds in a way that clearly articulates the construction of masculine identity in the film that is threatened. “Yeah my children, my children that I provide for.” Susan’s domestic innocence is set in direct opposition to Meredith’s professional malice as well. Meredith is entirely condescending to Susan’s sexual appeal and domestic station when she suggests that Susan “looks like she always has food in the refrigerator. Obviously she made a home for you.” Later, when the conflict between Tom and Meredith heightens, Meredith blames Susan for the misinformation that Meredith intentionally fed her. “If your wife can’t take a message then get a fucking answering machine.” Meredith poses a threat to both Tom’s professional security and his domestic harmony.
Disclosure conflates the threat represented by the professional female with a dangerous, unleashed sexuality. Meredith is unambiguously characterized as salacious and scheming. In the first scene in which Meredith appears, she verbalizes petty motives for her malice towards Tom as vengeance on romantic grounds. “He broke my heart.” Tom’s co-worker Mark (Dennis Miller) defines Meredith in almost exclusively sexual terms. “She's attractive. Great rack. Nipples like pencil erasers.” Mark goes on to reveal his suspicions that Meredith’s otherwise inexplicable rise to power was sexually motivated. “You think she's sleeping with Garvin?” Once Meredith has secured her authority in the company, she immediately makes aggressive sexual advances towards Tom. During her seduction she mounts him and moves his hands onto her bosom. She proceeds to perform fellatio on him while he protests, “No, no, no,” the whole while. The scene works to displace the sexual assault typical of patriarchal power onto women and characterizes men as always already victimized by their normal, natural, sexual drives. Poor Tom can’t resist her. He succumbs and becomes aggressive himself. “You wanna get fucked?” Her response is clear. “I want you inside me.” However, at the point of penetration, he recovers his senses and announces, “I'm not gonna do this” before fleeing her office. She threatens him. “You get back here and finish what you started or you are fucking dead.” The next morning, it is Tom who finds himself accused of sexual harassment.
Disclosure presents women in power as a dangerous perversion. Tom’s lawyer clearly states that “Sexual harassment is not about sex. It's about power.” Through Meredith, women are cast as unable to wield power without abusing it. During their interaction in Meredith’s office, she points out to Tom, “You have a lot more to lose than I do.” Later Garvin articulates the most sexualized fear that emerges with this new professional hierarchy. When Tom suggests that it is he who was sexually assaulted, Garvin is incredulous. “I never even heard of such a thing, a woman harassing a man.” At the moment Meredith’s harassment scheme is revealed, Tom’s lawyer states, “The only thing you've proven is that a woman in power can be just as abusive as a man. - You controlled the meeting.” Within the narrative, Meredith’s power is safely contained under Garvin’s superior authority. However, Garvin’s complicity with Meredith displaces the threat to Tom’s employment from a masculine source onto a female one. Garvin is never punished for his role in Tom’s professional dillemma. All of the punishment is visited on Meredith. Through Meredith, Tom is fully emasculated. Tom’s emasculation eventually manifests itself in a nightmare. In it, Garvin and Meredith are condensed into a single individual; Tom is sexually assaulted by Garvin in an elevator that visually echoes an interaction Tom had in the elevator with Meredith in which she condescendingly taunts him. “Don't tell me you're scared of me.” The homoerotic dream is shocking in the otherwise highly conservative narrative. It is offered as the nightmarish side-effect of the perverse situation in which women wield corporate power.
The remainder of the film follows the intrigue of the legal conflict surrounding the counter-claims of sexual harassment made by Tom and Meredith and Meredith’s attempts to professionally discredit Tom. Meredith unscrupulously employs such conservative stereotypes of ‘dangerous femininity’ as ‘crocodile tears.’ Her false accusations are exposed when an answering machine recording reveals that she was the sexual aggressor in the harassment case. She then plans to discredit Tom for weaknesses in DigiCom’s flagship product as a result of production shortcuts that she authorized in order to secure her promotion. Tom uses his superior computer savvy to expose her negligence and thwart her abuse of power, assisted by an anonymous “friend” online. Tom publicly exposes Meredith as a liar and a fraud using electronically collected surveillance information. In this way the film enacts a male fantasy of superiority in the use of technology – from answering machines to computers – and isolates such technical knowledge exclusively to the realm of men. The film also enacts a larger political fantasy of male dominance over women in the corporate sphere. Triumphal music underscores the scene in which his job is secured once again. In order to placate the disturbed male viewers mind even further, and warn women not to tangle with their male superiors, Tom gloats, “Did it ever occur to you, Meredith, that maybe I set you up?” Apparently, he was in control of the situation the entire time. The film concludes with Tom’s victory over Meredith as she is vanquished from the corporate environment.
However, women are not banished entirely from the professional environment in Disclosure. Instead, the film attempts to resignify appropriate roles for women in the new socio-political landscape that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. In “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’” Claire Johnston outlines the symbolic position she feels women occupy in popular cinema. “Within a sexist ideology and a male-dominated cinema, woman is presented as what she represents for man” (Johnston 33). Johnston explains that
woman represents not herself, but by a process of displacement, the male phallus. It is probably true to say that despite the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema, woman as woman is largely absent (Johnston 33).
Johnston clarifies that “phallus” as a signifier of patriarchy need not specifically identify male genitalia, but it is interesting to note how the narrative of Disclosure is substantially concerned with descriptions of Tom’s penis. In melodramatic terms, Meredith has been moved out of the typical female lead-role position of love-interest and into the position of villain, both of which remain subordinate to Tom’s narrative of threat and redemption. Her professional future remains in question at the film’s closure. Women in the film who maintain their professional identity include Tom’s wife, who remains subordinate to Tom’s narrative and a signifier of domestic harmony – only once in the film is her profession even mentioned – and Tom’s lawyer, who remains subordinate to Tom’s narrative as a helping agent. Within Tom’s own professional environment the only woman who is superior to him in the corporate hierarchy that remains is the company’s chief financial officer, Stephanie Kaplan. She is entirely desexualized and visually coded as androgynous in contrast to Meredith’s hyper-sexualization; Stephanie wears an unflattering, flat, grey pantsuit and she is approaching her golden years. Furthermore, Stephanie is maternally subordinated to the interests of her son, and just as subordinated to Tom’s narrative as another of his helpers. Throughout the film she remains apparently aloof to Tom’s dilemma. In the film’s final moments she reveals that her son was the “friend” who helped Tom online in an effort to advance his own career. Stephanie goes so far as to openly state that the only reason she remains in Tom’s office is to spend more time with her son in University. She is rewarded for her role in Tom’s narrative. In his closing speech Garvin announces, “I have probably focused too much on ‘breaking the ceiling’ in hiring a woman when I should have been looking for the best person. That person is Stephanie Kaplan.” Garvin’s speech seems to be an attempt to offer a mitigating voice at the end of the misogynistic narrative. However, Stephanie’s power is even more powerfully mitigated. Signified as both sexually androgynous and maternally subordinate, Stephanie is safe. If she is the only woman with any authority, the corporate world is safe once again.
In the end, Disclosure presents a fantasy which delineates the right kind of woman for the professional workplace. The film valorizes the professional woman who is androgynous, maternal, and operating in the interests of her male co-worker. All wrongdoing within Disclosure’s fantasy of sexual intrigue and corporate politics is displaced onto the only sexualized female in the narrative. Meredith is duly punished with humiliation and banishment. Tom is characterized as morally, politically, and technically superior. Moreover, the threat to his masculine identity as it depends on his ability to maintain gainful employment and provide for his children is rendered benign. As the film ends, one of Tom’s children says, “Daddy I never believed what they said about you.” His role as father and provider, respected by his children, is re-secured. Disclosure speaks to the viewer with the recuperative language of the patriarchal system – a debate that is already won and with which the indoctrinated viewer is already complicit. From a patriarchal perspective, Disclosure may seem entirely common-sensical. From a feminist perspective it is simply ludicrous.




Works Cited
Disclosure. Dir. Barry Levinson. Perf. Michael Douglas, Demi Moore. Warner Brothers Picture, 1994. Film.
Goldin, Claudia. “The ‘Quiet Revolution’ That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family.” A.E.R. 96, May 2006: 1-21. Web. 1 April 2012.
"History of Computers in the Workplace." eHow. Demand Media, Inc., n.d. Web. 1 April 2012.
Johnston, Claire. “Woman’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. 31-40. Print.
Luna, Gaye. "Understanding Gender-Based Wage Discrimination: Legal Interpretation and Trends of Pay Equity in Higher Education". Journal of Law & Education (19), 2000: 371. Print.
Mulligan, Casey B. “A Milestone for Working Women.” The New York Times. 4 January 2009. Web. 1 April 2012.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.