What is severe and pervasive sexual harassment?
To me, this op/ed by a female law professor about sexual harassment is bit puzzling. In the first part of the piece she says that men and women shouldn’t worry about accidentally harassing someone. She hangs her argument on the fact that one of the determinants is whether the unwelcome behavior was severe and/or pervasive enough to create a hostile work environment. A judge or investigator would rely on the “reasonable person” test. That is, would a reasonable person find the behavior hostile or abusive? My unease comes from wondering who this “reasonable person” is whose judgment seems to be beyond reproach. Given the gender inequality in terms of number women in positions of power in most organization and professions, is the reasonable person a man or a woman? Women often get blamed for being strident or unreasonable when they assert their rights or call out unwelcome behavior. And in the case of Harvey Weinstein’s jury, the majority of them are men.
Worried about accidentally harassing a woman? Don’t be
One of the consequences of the #MeToo movement is a simmering male anxiety that a harmless chat by the water cooler might somehow end in a harassment complaint to HR – or worse. Harvey Weinstein’s criminal trial may reinvigorate those fears.
New Data Establishes the Business Case for Global Gender Equality
In 2018 McKinsey & Company reported that companies in the US that are more gender and ethnically diverse outperform their competitors in the market by 15% and 35% respectively. Businesses don’t seem to get it, though, judging by the number of women CEOs (26) in the Fortune 500 companies.
Unfortunately, as this article shows, the picture is much bleaker globally–girls are denied equal access to education, many are married off before they become adults, women and girls are trafficked, and in 10 countries, if a woman is raped, the law says she must marry her rapist to avoid dishonor.
If women had equal access and opportunities in education, jobs, and salary (i.e. treated like human beings under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), global GDP would grow by $6 trillion by 2030. It’s sad that one has to make a business case for what is a moral case for equality.
#genderequality #harassment #sustainabledevelopmentgoals#womensrights #humanrights #Business #sexualharassment #heforshe#metoo #metoomovement
Appalling: Sexual Harassment at UNAIDS
Who supervises UN agencies? It took years of inaction on allegations of sexual harassment before donors finally threatened to pull the plug. WHY DO WE HAVE TO WAIT FOR ECONOMIC PRESSURE TO STOP SOMETHING THAT IS A VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS?
We need more women in politics
The midterms elections raised the number of women in congress to 23%. That is progress.
(figure from Axios: https://www.axios.com/women-in-congress-2018-midterm-elections-a04f5e80-1d5e-4211-9ece-259037035dd0.html)
Statistics say that worldwide, women comprise 49.6% of the world’s population. Having equal numbers of women in political positions is something we should all be fighting for, not for “window dressing” but because it leads to better societal outcomes for everyone. For example:
* Gender diversity in leadership correlates with higher performance, improved policy outcomes, and less corrupt societies.
* Female politicians are more likely to reach across the aisle
* When parliamentary representation of women increases by 5%, a country is five times LESS likely to respond to an international crisis with violence
* When the proportion of women in parliament rises, the state carries out fewer human rights abuses–like torture, killings, political imprisonments and disappearances.
These stats come from: https://www.cnn.com/…/year-of-woman-goes-global…/index.html…
There are few studies that show that women in powerful positions (since historically there have been so few women in powerful positions) are less corrupt than men, but there are many recent studies about the benefits of gender diversity to a company’s bottom line. If the moral imperative doesn’t convince you, shouldn’t the business case?
#MeToo And Gender Parity
WeWork Sued for Firing Woman Who Reported Sexual Harassment
On October 12, 2018, Vox News reported that a woman who was employed as an IT project manager by WeWork since 2014 filed a lawsuit against the company in Manhattan, New York, for retaliation because she made a sexual harassment claim. The woman was allegedly groped by two different male colleagues at two different company organized events for employees and guests. Each time she filed a complaint with HR. HR interviewed one of the men who said he didn’t remember because he was “black-out drunk.” The suit also alleges that after she filed the report, the company quickly brought up allegations of poor performance against her, which they used to terminate her.
This is a corporation’s typical response when employees raise allegations of misconduct. In the case of sexual harassment, companies usually close ranks against the complainant and then make up a reason to fire him/her. Sexual Harassment is hard to prove (since there are often no other witnesses). However, it’s easier to find a paper trail in the case of retaliation, so that’s why this lawsuit is for that.
Wage Disparities Between Men and Women
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a great online portal where anyone can search for, display and download data after querying it by demographic categories. Very rich. For example, I was interested in the numbers of men and women in certain position and the pay gap between them. I got these two graphs. If you compare them you’ll see that in most professions, there are more men than women, but even in those where there are more women, men still make more money.
Unconscious Bias in the Hospitality Industry
Having taught unconscious bias workshop, I know there’s a difference between bias (which often shows up thoughts that end up in micro-inequities) and discrimination (which is often associated with racism and shows up in more overt behaviors. Usually training is focused on eliminating bias in the workplace. But what about in service and hospitality industries? A casual search of google shows that it’s common. For example, there was the Starbucks incident in April, which had an immediate financial impact–boycotts and protests–and which led to diversity training. So is anyone doing training on interactions with the client or customers and how damaging incidents of bias or outright discrimination can be to a corporate brand? This NYT articles discusses the risks:
Think unconscious bias training is a fad? Think again.
(In fact, it’s good for business.)
Having delivered Cook/Ross Unconscious Bias workshops for international staff, I know how defensive people can get when you state they have biases. I used to be one of them. I think that is because in most people’s mind, the word “bias” is equated with “prejudiced” and to be called that feels like being called a racist.
Websters, though, defines bias simply as a preference, an inclination, or a tendency. That sounds pretty innocuous, doesn’t it? My wife prefers chocolate ice cream; I prefer “Cherry Garcia.” Neither of us were born with those preferences, but over time, we learned what tasted good, and now those are our preferences.
What this means is that biases are learned through life experiences.
(Variety is the Spice of Life)
In fact our mind is hard wired to form biases as a way of dealing the overwhelming amount of sensory stimuli we are bombarded with every moment of our lives (which is 11 million, by the way). With so much information, our mind has to use shortcuts to get us to act at all. For example, at some point you learned that a car bearing down on you is dangerous. An older person might have once grabbed your hand as a toddler to keep you from stepping into a busy street. Nowadays, if you look up and see a car barreling toward you, you don’t stop to think, “Oh a red car. It looks like it’s moving fast. It’s a Honda. I like Honda’s. It looks like a hybrid. They get good gas mileage. I wonder if he’s going to stop…” In fact you have a bias (a preference, a tendency, an inclination) to look both ways before crossing the road.
Biases are often shaped by where we grew up. For example, if you’re from the United States, you learned to greet people by shaking their hands or asking them how they are. In another culture you might instead say hello and ask how the other person’s family is. If you didn’t know that and met that other person for the first time, you might think they were rude or impolite.
So in and of themselves, biases are learned and really in a way arbitrary. Your biases are totally shaped by your own unique experiences which only you have lived.
But in some situations, our biases can have problematic outcomes. For example, in the United States, there seems to be a preference to trust taller people. A Fortune 500 study from the 1980 found that more than half of CEOs were higher than six feet tall. This is odd, because men over 6 feet only make up about 15% of the men in the US. Do tall men make better CEOs? Do they make better business decisions? What is an company missing by not hiring shorter CEOs. Or women for that matter: this year Fortune magazine reports that only 21 companies on its 500 list has a female CEO–that is 4%. Aren’t there more women than men? In 2017, only 16 of the 500 disclosed its diversity profile of executives and when tallied it was revealed that 73% were men, white and women and the rest were “21% Asian, 3% Latino/a, 2% black, 0.6% two or more races, 0.2% Native American and 0.1% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.”
Men are sometimes asked why there seems to be disparity between the number of men and women certain fields, like STEM. The most biased say it’s because women aren’t as smart as men; the more thoughtful might say it’s because the STEM fields are predominantly male dominated and women self-select not to go into those professions. But really the answer is plain old bias.
Unfortunately, it appears that our brains activate our biases before we can even stop it. In a famous study, researcher submitted resumes to job ads in Boston and Chicago using names that were either “black” or “white” sounding. Guess which ethnic group members got called back for interviews more often than the other. White to a tune of 30% more frequently.
Biases are really bad when they form the basis of business decisions, especially regarding hiring, promotion, salary increases and so on. A recent study by McKinsey and company found that organizations that have greater gender equality do 15% better in the market place than their competitors. What’s more, ethnically diverse companies out peform their competition by 35%.
Thus a publicly traded company that does not address unconscious bias is actually not honoring its obligation to maximize profits for its shareholder. Shareholders of the world unite and demand gender and ethnic diversity in the companies you invest in!
Pro-feminist Professor Accused of Sexual Harassment
Not to be flippant, but in the words of Paul Simon, “who’ll be my role model now that my role model is gone?”
Here is a blog post commenting on sexual harassment allegations by the very vocal proponent of gender equality, Michael Kimmel who is professor emeritus at Stony Brook University, NY. This is particularly difficult for me because I developed a barbershop talk for men at my former employer based on the MeToo toolkit (which was based on work by Promundo) and referenced Michael’s work. The talk was to dialogue with men (and men only) about why gender equality in the workplace is good business and also benefits them. I conducted a train-the-trainer for men who had volunteered to be champions, conduct these workshops, and identify actions in their spheres of influence where they could make decision that improved gender equality targets. Michael had reviewed my slide deck and given good feedback. Later, we brought him to my employer for a talk and he was brilliant.
This blog post also has links to articles for people who might know, be related, or married to someone who committed harassment. In the blog post, the author says that acts of sexual harassment fall on a severity spectrum. I don’t buy that argument when the person doing the harassment is in a position of power and has the ability to make decisions that might affect the harasee’s grades or career. And if a person raped someone, they should turn themselves in.
While I know we all have feet of clay, (mine are size 10), how a person chooses to handle an allegations of sexual harassment are a proof of whether he should maintain his authority and power. Al Franken ran away. Most of the other scumbags attacked the accusers. I haven’t heard any who have said, yes, this happened, and I will do everything in my power to devote the rest of my life to wiping out sexual harassment not only in the workplace, but on earth.