Sexual harassment at work

“I SPENT a great deal of time on my knees,” Marilyn Monroe once said of how she became a film star. “If you didn’t go along, there were 25 girls who would.” The “casting couch”—the film industry’s cosy euphemism for the extortion of sexual favours from movie hopefuls by Hollywood power-brokers—has been under renewed scrutiny in recent days, after allegations of sexual assault and harassment against Harvey Weinstein, a producer, published in the New Yorker and New York Times earlier this month. More than 40 women, many of them famous, have now added their names to the list of victims of crimes they say ranged from demands for sex in return for roles, to indecent exposure, to groping and even rape. Police in America and Britain are investigating. Mr Weinstein has been expelled from the Academy, the institution that awards the Oscars, and sacked by the Weinstein Company, the studio he co-founded in 2005. It is now likely to be bought out (see article).

The scandal seems to be making other media-industry executives look again at their responses to complaints about sexual harassment. In 2015 Isa Hackett, a producer at Amazon Studios, told managers that Roy Price, its head of programming, had propositioned her and made lewd remarks. An internal investigation went nowhere, and an article in August about the allegations on the Information, a tech-news website, gained little attention—until the story about Mr Weinstein broke. A few days later Mr Price was suspended. He resigned on October 17th.

But the clear-out may not go much further. Mr Weinstein and Mr Price were already diminished figures, Mr Weinstein after some poorly performing movies and Mr Price because of a shift in Amazon’s video strategy. And though women around the world took to social media to share their stories of sexual harassment and assault at work, many using the hashtag #metoo, a similar outpouring preceded last year’s presidential election, inspired by a video showing Donald Trump boasting of committing sexual assault. That was hailed at the time as a turning point. But Mr Trump went on to win the election.

Most sexual harassment in the workplace is less serious than the acts Mr Weinstein is accused of. But there are several similarities. One is a power imbalance between the perpetrator and victim. Another is that the victims stay silent, fearing that their careers will be harmed if they speak out, and that they will be disbelieved. A third is that bystanders do nothing to stop it happening. And fourth, the harm caused is often underestimated.

Physical assaults such as groping, and demands for sexual favours made by work superiors, used to be widely regarded as a working woman’s lot. That is rarer now—though some of the actresses accusing Mr Weinstein of serious assaults say they stayed silent for so long partly because they feared being characterised as “sleeping their way to the top”. And the subtler types of harassment, such as suggestive remarks and lewd jokes, are still widely tolerated, though they can make a workplace so unbearable for a woman that she decides to leave. Much of it happens behind closed doors, meaning that even if a manager understands a victim’s distress, there may be no corroborating evidence.

All this means that sexual harassment is startlingly common, and harassers are rarely punished. In surveys over the past few decades in a range of industrialised countries around half of women, and a smaller but significant share of men, say they have experienced it (the perpetrators are usually male). The overall rate does not seem to be falling, though it is hard to tell. Some think that rising awareness of verbal harassment as a serious issue may be masking a decline in the physical type.

She said, he said

It is likely, though, that any survey understates the reality. Many people describe various hypothetical acts as sexual harassment, but do not think of themselves as victims even though they have experienced the same things. A woman who feels threatened by co-workers’ sexual remarks but certain that saying anything will only make matters worse may prefer to minimise the problem, even to herself.

There are no reliable figures from the developing world, but it is likely, if anything, to be even more common there. In the fields and factories where poor women work, managers can prey on them knowing that they have no other way to make a living. Though multinationals often set policies governing safety and working hours at their suppliers, those policies rarely, if ever, cover sexual harassment.

In most rich countries, firms are required by law to have formal complaint procedures. But human-resources departments may try to discourage reporting; victims may feel that their experience was not sufficiently serious to warrant official action. Most fear reprisals. There is rarely supporting evidence. Of the few who make formal complaints, hardly any see them upheld.

Victims who turn to the courts face further obstacles. In Britain, for instance, employment tribunals are likely to regard an allegation as less plausible if an internal complaint has not been made first, or if the alleged incident happened more than three months before the complaint. The harm caused is classed as “injury to feelings”, which attracts relatively low damages since there is no financial loss, as with discriminatory pay or hiring practices. All this means that few cases are heard, says Dee Masters, a barrister at Cloisters in London, except those tagged onto other complaints, such as discriminatory dismissal or an allegation that a woman received a lower bonus than her male colleagues.

Then she will be asked why she did not complain earlier. “The honest answer”, says Ms Masters, “is that it didn’t make financial sense.” Any civil e-mails between a woman and her alleged harasser are likely to be used to undermine her story, though the reason for these is equally obvious: “She was trying to keep her job.”

Hollywood is an extreme example of a work environment that facilitates what America’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal agency, calls “quid pro quo” harassment. This is when accepting sexual advances, or tolerating lewd remarks, is made an implicit or explicit condition of getting or keeping a job. It relies on disparities of power—in the case of Hollywood, between the hordes of would-be starlets and the handful of (mostly male) agents, producers and directors who can deliver fame and riches.

It is also endemic in other countries’ media industries. Some producers in Bollywood, as India’s Hindi film industry is known, keep hotel rooms for castings, and young actresses know only too well what a late-night script-reading will involve. The occasional public allegation is easily hushed up: Indian newspapers rely on access to Bollywood players to fill their entertainment pages, which attract lucrative advertising. In 2009 Jang Ja-yeon, a South Korean soap star, killed herself, leaving behind a letter in which she alleged that her agent had forced her to have sex with a string of directors and producers. In a national survey of actresses a few months later, three-fifths said that they, too, had been pressured to have sex; half of those who refused said their careers had suffered.

Similar power imbalances feed sexual harassment in universities. Young academics are at the mercy of star professors, whose goodwill and references they need when they start the hunt for a scarce permanent job. Universities may sack a a junior staff member they find guilty of harassment, says Lauren Edelman, a professor of law and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. But they often protect faculty members by paying off their accusers and insisting on non-disclosure agreements. In Silicon Valley, too, firms may be reluctant to discipline men who produce or own valuable intellectual property. Several senior executives at Uber, a ride-sharing platform, resigned earlier this year after Susan Fowler, a former engineer at the firm, wrote a blogpost detailing widespread sexual harassment at its head office.

Show business for ugly people

Politics is another problem industry. Most senior people in parties and parliaments are men, and some target young interns and researchers hoping to be selected as election candidates or hired by think-tanks. But though professional women are more likely than those in manual jobs to make a formal complaint about sexual harassment, they are no more likely to experience it. Waitresses, hotel staff and agricultural workers are particularly vulnerable. In 2010 researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, interviewed 150 female farmworkers, and found that almost all had suffered sexual violence on the job. Just 7% of working American women are employed in restaurants, but a third of all those who bring sexual-harassment cases to the EEOC are. Waitresses in states where restaurants may pay below the minimum wage bring an outsize share of cases. Their reliance on tips makes it harder for them to stand up to lustful customers and bosses.

The other type of sexual harassment recognised by the EEOC is that which creates a “hostile environment”: for example, crude remarks and persistent innuendo. The perpetrators are often colleagues rather than superiors. It may even be directed at senior women, with the intention of taking them down a peg or two. In male-dominated industries it may be used to signal to women that they are not welcome.

Though such verbal harassment is widely regarded as minor compared with physical intrusions such as groping, the victims report feelings of vulnerability, fear and powerlessness. A report for the European Commission in 1999 found that those subjected to either sort of harassment experienced a wide range of symptoms, including anger, depression, humiliation and mistrust.

The idea that a hostile environment can constitute harassment gained legal currency in America after a case in 1989. Teresa Harris brought a claim against Forklift Systems, the firm where she had worked in Tennessee. The facts were not disputed: that her boss made frequent remarks about her breasts and buttocks, once asked whether she had won a contract by offering to have sex with the customer, and on occasion made female employees fish for quarters in his trouser pockets. Ms Harris asked him to stop. He apologised but continued, so she resigned. Lower courts ruled that though a “reasonable woman” would have found his behaviour unpleasant, Ms Harris’s job had not been at risk and her work performance should not have been affected. There had been no quid pro quo and sexual discrimination had not occurred. The parties eventually settled, but not before the Supreme Court decided that such remarks and actions could create an atmosphere hostile to female employees.

Few would now argue that a “reasonable woman” should have to put up with such behaviour. Michele Paludi of Excelsior College in New York State has been training managers to deal with allegations, and carrying out independent investigations for companies and universities, since the 1980s. She has seen a big shift in attitudes. “Firms have moved from thinking it’s not a big issue, or that it’s just a personal matter between two staff, to seeing it as relevant for them,” she says.

The costs for firms include legal and reputational risk, as well as poor staff morale and higher staff turnover. Surveys asking about sexual harassment find that victims blame their companies for not putting a stop to it. Typically some respondents say that it made them change jobs. Other women see what is happening, and decide that their employer does not care about them. A large analysis in 2007 of 41 American studies came up with an estimate of $22,500 per year in lost personal and team productivity for each harassed employee.

Studies show that men and women hold different opinions as to what constitutes sexual harassment. A situation that many men perceive as a normal expression of sexual desire may be regarded by many women as a threatening expression of masculine power. Men may dismiss a filthy remark as a joke when women hear it as an intentional humiliation. Men are more likely than women to say that the victim is to blame.

Men are also more likely to say that a degree of sexual banter and horseplay at work is pleasurable. But some women say they enjoy it, too. One study in 1994 of waiters and waitresses in Austin, Texas, found that almost all engaged in a great deal of groping and fondling, and frequently told sexual jokes and anecdotes. Most regarded this as unproblematic—as long as it was with colleagues they regarded as peers. When it came from a supervisor or customer, a colleague of a different race or sexual orientation, or one of the kitchen staff, they did not hesitate to call it harassment.

Such ambiguities point to two difficulties for firms keen to stamp harassment out. Whether sexual words or actions are welcomed depends on their source, context and perceived intent. A man who makes personal remarks about his female colleagues, or frequently touches them, may mean no harm, but be unaware that his actions are unwelcome. Or he may be carefully calibrating his actions to allow him to claim innocent intent. Further complicating matters, the power and wealth that make it easier to get away with harassment can, in other situations, be aphrodisiacs. In 2005 a student at New York University asked Mr Trump’s third wife, Melania, if she would have chosen to be with him if he had not been rich. “If I weren’t beautiful,” she replied, “do you think he’d be with me?”

Many American firms have tried to bulldoze their way through such subtleties by introducing no-dating policies. Employees who start a sexual relationship with each other are supposed to notify their managers; one of the couple may have to resign. But most workplace harassment is not within a mutually acknowledged relationship, even one that has ended. And no-dating rules, as well as being intrusive, can have perverse consequences. If one party has to quit, it is usually the more junior one, who will more often be the woman. In Europe broadly drawn workplace-dating bans fall foul of privacy laws.

America also has some of the world’s most detailed anti-harassment laws. A vast training industry has grown up around them. But much of what firms do is what Professor Edelman calls “symbolic compliance”: paper policies that mean little in practice, and training done mainly to convince courts that the firm takes harassment seriously, thus reducing any damages. Training may involve identifying instances of sexual harassment in an online questionnaire, or attending a talk, perhaps with a video outlining the legal definition. Some unfortunate employees are made to engage in role-play.

The examples presented can be so absurd that they are worse than useless, says Robyn Swirling, the founder of Works in Progress, a new organisation that aims to improve anti-harassment training. She asked her friends and professional contacts to tell her about any training they had received. One said “having a candle-lit dinner with the intern” was given as an example of what was forbidden; another offered, “Don’t take your pants off at a work event.” A third said, sardonically, that he had learned how far he could go without getting into trouble.

Several studies have shown that poor training can even backfire. Justine Tinkler, a sociologist at the University of Georgia, gave an “implicit association” test to men, designed to reveal their hidden biases. Before the test half of them, randomly selected, were presented with anti-harassment material similar to that used by many firms. Judging by their responses, the material activated stereotypical ideas of men as powerful and women as vulnerable.

This is troubling, since such notions are associated with a propensity to commit sexual harassment, and to dismiss it as trivial. Other studies suggest that training can widen the gap between men’s and women’s conceptions of harassment, or make men less likely to view coercion of a subordinate as harassment and more likely to say that many complaints are ill-founded or malicious.

Mediated conversations between small groups of men and women could help forge consensus about what constitutes sexual harassment, suggests Professor Edelman. Anonymous “climate surveys” that include questions about employees’ experiences of harassment have been shown to be useful—if managers take note of the results. Training senior women to offer confidential advice might encourage junior ones to report problems earlier, says Ms Masters, though she cautions that such women may be “complacent” about their own workplaces, since it is younger women who are more likely to be targets.

Training needs to debunk common myths about harassment, says Ms Paludi, in particular the notion that a delayed complaint is probably false. The trick, she says, is not to present trainees with a third-party scenario, but to ask what they would do themselves. Typically, they shift from saying that harassment should be reported immediately to worrying about retaliation and the possible harm to their careers.

Firms need to be transparent about how they will respond to a complaint, says Ms Swirling. In her informal survey, some women said that if harassment was “inappropriate, but in the grand scheme of things minor”, they might stay silent for fear of ruining the perpetrator’s career. They want to know that complaints will be dealt with proportionately. Making it acceptable to “call out the small things” should help shift a work culture over time. She recommends that managers encourage staff who witness an unwelcome off-colour remark or sexualised gesture, even if it is directed at someone else, to say immediately that it is inappropriate.

Friendly environments

Such intervention will be more effective if it is not only women who are doing it. Ms Tinkler cites another study in which a presentation about sexual harassment did not activate stereotypes when the voiceover was male rather than female. The point is not that training should be done only by men, she says, but that when men speak up it gives the issue legitimacy and makes it less polarised. “It’s less likely to be perceived as women against men.” If firms are to go beyond legal compliance and make sexual harassment rarer, they need to insist that it is everyone’s problem.

Correction (October 20th 2017): Lauren Edelman of the University of California, Berkeley, said that universities may sack a junior staff member they find guilty of harassment. She was not referring to an administrator, as the original version of this article claimed.