The Subtle Sexism of Your Open Plan Office

I suspect the panopticon effect is an incentive for the open office designs and the trend towards glass. The incentive would be that there can't be any false claims in either direction if everyone can see each other all the time.

Open floor plan is so horrible. I have said no to a few positions from it.

I don't mind working in team rooms, but that is still a bit distracting. The second it becomes two teams or more, I start looking for new opportunities.

Even given that open-plan offices are disproportionately harmful to women, it's part of an absurd whack-a-mole to enumerate and eradicate the myriad specific cases of "women are harmed by being in contact with men" instead of either (a) finding ways to reduce the mistreatment in the large, or (b) calling for segregation. If you put people in individual offices, you'll likely be able to do studies showing "men don't visit women's offices, freezing them out of the informal social hierarchy", or "women feel threatened when men visit their offices to talk to them in private".

(The "calling for segregation" bit is interesting because, of course segregating men and women would be sexist too ("Old boys' club"), but if putting men and women together is bad, and segregating men from women is bad, then we need to stop arguing about how to shuffle up the men and women, and instead argue more about how to make men and women get along together.)