Sexual harassment policies remain stuck in the past

As long as workplaces have existed, so has workplace sexual harassment. But as a problem companies have to manage, sexual harassment “started” in the 1980s in the US, when judges ruled it could be prohibited under existing civil rights legislation.

The Financial Times first used the phrase “sexual harassment” in 1981, in a dry legal analysis of US cases that stressed the difficulty for UK employers of applying evolving standards. It was illustrated, I regret to say, with a cartoon of a male judge telling a young female plaintiff: “Your chances of winning your sexual harassment case would be greatly improved if you’d have dinner with me afterwards.” How British CEOs laughed.

In general, our columnist concluded, “the degree of awareness of these problems is very low”. More than 30 years on, companies are struggling to respond to a new wave of allegations. The #MeToo movement, given new life by the sex-abuse allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, prompted more victims to come forward.

The movement also highlighted how the sorts of policies and procedures instituted in the 1980s and 1990s have fallen short, and may have served to bury the problem rather than expunge it.

Many new allegations relate to old cases, but Ripa Rashid, copresident of the Centre for Talent Innovation (CTI) in New York, says companies “don’t even know how to deal with the present, let alone the past”.

CTI surveyed more than 3,000 workers in white-collar jobs for a study published last week. It found just more than a third of women and 13% of men had been harassed.

As an indication of how slowly some businesses have evolved, in the media sector where Weinstein worked the figure were 41% of women and 22% of men. That is virtually the same as the percentage of US female federal employees who said they had experienced harassment in 1981, according to a poll published that year in the Harvard Business Review.

Thirty-year-old policies have had an effect. The one in four women in US finance and insurance who said they had been harassed is at the lower end of the scale, compared with media, technology and consulting. CTI says that may reflect the effect of lawsuits against bad behaviour in the 1990s, which prompted banks and others to tighten processes.

But evidence from Wall Street and the City of London suggests even if overt hostility and misconduct have diminished, discrimination persists.

In any case, many victims and witnesses of harassment and assault are not using the decades-old mechanisms on which their companies have relied. Even before the Weinstein scandal, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was worrying about the number of harassment cases it was handling. In 2016, it found threequarters of victims “never even talked to a supervisor, manager, or union representative” about the misconduct. CTI found that while white-collar staff did talk to workmates, only three in 10 spoke up when they saw a colleague being harassed, or reported the incident to human resources.

Nobody would suggest scrapping rules. The absence of basic policies was one reason the harassment complaints of Susan Fowler, the former Uber engineer, went unheard. Deliberately or inadvertently, though, protocols can shut down reputational risk at the expense of justice for the victim. Worse, they can protect valuable but predatory members of staff. Ubiquitous nondisclosure agreements, which shielded Weinstein from scandal, are the most notable and unwelcome legal excrescences of a rulesbased system.

Culture is notoriously hard to change and measure. Still, the combined strength of many individuals, for too long illserved or isolated by mechanisms to curb harassment, is starting to achieve what protocols and policies could not: at last dragging companies — and harassers — out of the 1980s and into the open. /© Financial Times 2018