April 7, 2025

Performing Customer Service: Femininity, Professionalism, and Patriarchy in the Workplace 

by Jessica Lu & Dylan Grace, SASC Volunteers

Note: mention of sexual harassment and rape

Front-of-House, Front-of-Harassment — Jessica

I work at a theatre, and though I am not an actor, dancer, nor spokesperson, I am constantly performing for others. Whether it be in retail, food service, or front-of-house management, there is always a sense of catering to those around me. The cultures and expectations surrounding service work have always been pervasive in my mind, leading me to reflect on my personal experiences and attempt to connect to broader social structures.

Women in the service industry are more likely to experience negative pitfalls of work (alongside those who are gender non-conforming). Despite making up the majority of service workers in entry-level positions, women are disproportionately underrepresented in management in the service industry. This leads to patriarchal norms dictating so many aspects of the customer service experience. In 2024, the percentage of women in combined retail, accommodations, and food services sectors was about 54%, compared to 46% of men (Statistics Canada, 2025). However, nearly half of all women in the workplace (47%) report experiencing harassment or sexual assault, compared to about a third of all men (31%) — a significant difference (Statistics Canada, 2024).

Another thing to consider is that the power imbalance between staff and customer can often be overwhelming and feel punishing. While the service associate is the one with the occupational power, when they are perceived as a minority group with less social power (e.g., young, female, BIPOC, etc.), a customer on the opposite end of the power spectrum may feel entitled to making demands or comments that they otherwise wouldn’t make against a socially-privileged associate (e.g., a White male). This phenomena isn’t limited to staff-customer interactions either; even between colleagues, gender plays a role in perception of leadership, skills, and reliability, which has consequences for who deserves a raise or who to trust in a dispute.

Without a true passion for your career or trade, these objectifying experiences and the lasting feelings of self-doubt and anxiety can lead to hatred towards your job or identity dissociation while you are working. Like many others, I put on a “customer service” persona the second I clock in. It gives me confidence and the ability to switch my inner monologue off during working hours. When patrons start flooding through the doors, expecting ready-made drinks and a cash transaction speedrun, there is nothing that a pretty smile and high-pitched greeting can’t fix. Unfortunately, I also become privy to inappropriate remarks — heavily weighted “compliments” — which I can only shrug off and reject politely, lest the scene escalates. After all, how can I balance the “professional” look pitched by my employers with the “conventionally attractive” look sought by patrons, with my desire to impress the higher-ups countered by my positional advantage to earn more tips? Embarrassingly, though it has saved my ass many times, my go-to strategy for conflict resolution in customer service is to lean into the young, naive, girl facade and hope people spare me some empathy (or pity, if you would call it that).

Systems of gender oppression conveyed through unequal expectations for femme, genderqueer, and masc workers are evident and can act as a segue for other types of microaggressions and harassment (e.g., racism, lookism, ableism, etc.). As a young, 5’1” Asian woman working front-of-house, I often have assumptions made about my age, appearance, and ethnicity. These unsolicited comments range from “You look like [random Asian ethnicity]” to “I think it’s cute that you’re so short” to “Where do you live? Are you a student? Where do you go to school? What are you studying? When is your next shift? [and more…]”. The reality is, thinly veiled predatory remarks and offhand interrogations are not uncommon experiences amongst the female and minority staff I’ve worked with.

I find that settings such as (though definitely not exclusive to) the professional theatre scene, which has historically catered to the White, leisure-seeking middle-upper classes, exposes customer service workers to a plethora of degrading attitudes rooted in gender inequality. Normalization of these attitudes towards service workers — more often than not young femmes — extend beyond physical or sexual harassment and perpetuate intersectional systems based on patriarchy and cisheteronormativity.

Serving Food, Face, and Anticapitalist Realness — Dylan

I worked in the restaurant industry from when I was 14 until I was 21. Beginning in the dish pit, moving up to the host stand, and eventually becoming a server. Harassment, aggression, and a pervasive sense of fear inflicted by colleagues and customers alike persisted in each of these roles over the years.

I was 14 when I was first verbally and physically abused by a customer who threw a mug of coffee at me for not adding enough sugar (clearly she needed it!). I was 15 when my adult male managers and coworkers, all of whom were significantly older than me, placed bets on who would “take” my “virginity”. It was one of them who later raped me.

I believe that what happened to me was facilitated by the ways in which restaurants function as boys’ clubs, reinforcing eurocentric gender roles and toxic masculinity. For example, male customers assert dominance by ordering attractive female servers around, harassing them as they see fit. They bring their “boys” in to gawk at female staff, order medium rare steak, drink beer, and indulge in performative masculinity. If they bring a woman in on a date, it’s often to demonstrate financial power and reinforce traditional gender roles, showing her off as “arm candy”. This is not necessarily true of every restaurant, but the ones that I have worked at have seemed to be a breeding ground for these behaviours, bleeding into the behaviour of staff alike.

Ultimately, the restaurant industry is notoriously toxic. Employees are encouraged to grin and bear it (literally) in the face of emotional and physical abuse from customers because, as we all know, “the customer is always right”. The restaurant is its own capitalist regime, fostering a hyper-competitive, individualistic environment among staff whilst preaching the value of teamwork and community. Hiring and promotions also often depend less on performance and more on a eurocentric ideal of “sex appeal”: Beauty standards that are exclusionary and perpetuate narratives about one’s value primarily based on their physical attractiveness, synonymous with being white, thin, cis-gendered, and of a particular class.

Now, I understand that this is a highly binary analysis of the restaurant industry, but then again, the restaurant industry feeds off of these binary sex and gender roles. This is one of the many qualms I have with the industry, as there isn’t really an intended space for people who fall beyond the sexual and gender binary within the industry. I personally fall outside of these categories, which I believe has allowed me a nuanced perspective by which to observe the industry, and I have ultimately found that the restaurant industry largely ignores intersectional identities, prioritizing profitability over workers’ wellbeing and lived experiences. It is true that in every restaurant that I have worked in, kitchen staff have been predominantly people of colour, while front-of-house employees have been overwhelmingly white. This stark racial divide is not a mistake. In fact, one restaurant I worked at had a new manager who came in and very intentionally fired many people of colour from front-of-house positions and replaced them with conventionally attractive white women, citing that he wanted to “take the restaurant in a new direction”. The divide also means that generally, people of colour are making less money than white people in the industry. Back-of-house staff in restaurants typically make much less than front-of-house staff because front-of-house staff take the majority of the tips. True intersectionality in the workplace would require the much larger project of dismantling the very systems that produce these inequities to begin with.

In the service industry, harassment is often dismissed as “part of the job.” It is on this basis that when I have reported incidents of harassment to managers, I have been told to accept it or ignore it. But it is not part of the job. Sexualized violence is unacceptable and deplorable in every context. I want to implore everyone in the restaurant industry to fiercely reject this narrative as a means of challenging the prevalent rape culture that we live in. Your boundaries and well-being are valuable and important and should not be rendered somehow worthless when you clock in. No one should have to tolerate mistreatment in the name of a paycheck, though that seems to be a trend in our society.

It’s time for a shift in the industry. One that prioritizes compassion, community, and safety over profit. If you or someone that you know is experiencing harassment or abuse in the workplace, especially if you might be in a situation where you cannot leave your job, there are resources available to support you and help create change:

SASC

Open on the third floor of the AMS Student Nest:  

  • Monday–Friday: 10:00 AM – 8:00 PM  
  • Weekends & Stat Holidays: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM  
  • Phone support is available during these hours: 604-827-5180  

SASC provides crisis and emotional support, advocacy, and accompaniment to workplaces, police stations, hospitals, and court proceedings. They also offer support groups and urgent care for victims of sexualized violence. Workshops include:  

  • Sexualized Violence 101 (SV101)
  • SV101: Consent, Power, and Healthier Masculinity
  • Responding to Disclosures of Sexual Assault (R2D)
  • Workplace Sexual Harassment & Sexual Assault
  • Anti-Oppression 101  

WorkSafeBC

  • You have the right to report workplace bullying or harassment. If your manager does not respond appropriately, you can contact WorkSafeBC at 604-276-3100 or fill out their Bullying and Harassment Questionnaire (https://blhr.online.worksafebc.com/default)

Other Legal Support & Workers’ Rights:

You are not alone, and no one should have to endure mistreatment in the name of a paycheck. Support is available.

Reflection Questions

  • How does the normalization of harassment and exploitation in the restaurant industry reflect capitalistic values as well as subsequent societal constructions of power, gender, and race?
  • What systemic changes would need to happen, beyond just DEI initiatives, to truly dismantle the toxic culture of the restaurant industry?
  • In what ways can individuals, both workers and customers, actively challenge and disrupt patterns of harm and exclusion?
  • How can we challenge exploitation in the service industry in ways that center the safety and agency of its most vulnerable workers?

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