Catching up with sexual harassment SWOT

So #MeToohas finally cost a politician a US Senate election. Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for the Alabama Senate seat, lost narrowly following appalling revelations of stalking and assaulting teenage girls. So far, the spontaneously revelatory campaign has taken its toll on senior politicians, star journalists, and artistes of all political shades.

Wonder why corporate America remains an oasis of calm as far as sexual harassment is concerned? And by extension, what’s going on in corporations in India — a world-renowned centre of entrenched misogyny to which foreign corporations hesitate to send their women employees?

Unlike Indian corporations, USA Inc has been at the forefront of lobbying for enlightened social change in recent years. For instance, most large corporations lent support for Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) rights, which eventually acquired country-wide legal sanction. They were at the forefront of opposition against President Donald Trump’s crude antiimmigration rhetoric and spoke out openly against the ban on cherry-picked Muslim majority nations.

But the gathering avalanche of sexual harassment accusations against leading public figures, including a sitting president, appears to have passed corporate America by. Even more remarkably, its normally quoteready top brass appears to have little to say on the subject. Yet, American corporations are scarcely havens of gender equality. According to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 75 to 80 per cent of workplace harassment incidents go unreported.

That’s a sit-up statistic in supposedly progressive USA.

Incredibly, this figure is about the same as the incidence of unreported episodes in India.

Why is the reporting rate so feeble in the USA Inc? No less interestingly, the reasons set out by the EEOC and those revealed through recent surveys in India align quite closely too. The proximate causes: “shame, fear and cultural norms,” to quote a Vox report.

Leading the ranks is a lurking fear of retaliation. Powerful movie producer Harvey Weinstein’s MO was to threaten to end the careers of upcoming actresses if they rebuffed his overtures. The complaints against him snowballed only after several women, seeking safety in numbers, came out of the shadows to add their voice to the original complainant. In a hierarchical corporate set-up, the disincentive to complain is exponentially higher.

In India, 70 per cent of women said they did not complain for fear of reprisals, according to a survey this year by the Indian Bar Association. The fact that the pace of reporting has accelerated considerably since the 2013 Act against sexual harassment in the workplace was passed by Parliament.

This problem permeates the HR departments of most organisations, which are usually the first stop in the process of the formal complaint process. If the offender in question is a deemed “star performer,” good luck with getting HR to record the complaint.

The sexual harassment complaints committee, now mandated by law in India, is meant to be the institutional mechanism to deal with just this problem.

Hurdle #one: More than a third of Indian corporations admitted they lacked internal complaints committees and the figure for multinationals was about a fourth. More than half of corporations in India said they also lacked trained people in these committees.

Hurdle #two: The same problem of hierarchy applies.

The solution embedded in the guidelines of 1997 and carried over into the law of 2013 was that every complaints committee would have an external member, a representative of an NGO dedicated to women’s causes. The idea as set out by subsequent judgements is that the independent member should be a respected personality in her own right, offering impartial counsel without fear or favour.

Companies have found an ingenious way of getting round this provision by strictly observing the latter of the law. In a recent eye-opening article*, Anagha Sarpotdar, who has specialised in research on violence against women, explained how. “Certain moves are being done ( sic) to nullify the provision by inviting graduates of any discipline to be trained as external members with an assurance that a ready list of names would be shared with employers for choosing external members...,” she writes.

As she points out, the “presence of a novice or a person not having relevant field experience could lead to lack of just and fair Committee proceedings”. Which is another way of saying that the process has been reduced to a pro forma exercise.

Given the disabling environment that prevails, an amendment to the 2013 Act altered the name of the Internal Complaints Committee to Internal Committee, widening its ambit from a passive complaints-receiving body to one that would be responsible for developing a women-friendly workplace. This is a considerably more progressive step than the US.

The social environment in the US has changed sufficiently to threaten men in public positions. Indian society at large is a long way from there still. But it will be a matter of time before the #MeTooriptides lash corporate America — and the binding ties of globalisation that all businesspeople so admire may well ensure that they engulf India Inc faster than it bargains for.