SEX HARASS CLAIMS SHOOT UP
#MASSTOO:
Sexual harassment complaints in Massachusetts are skyrocketing — up 400 percent so far this month alone compared to 2017 — as the state’s anti-discrimination agency braces for an unprecedented year of investigations and requests for workplace training in the #MeToo era.
“This is just the beginning — we’re going to see months and months of higher numbers compared to years past,” said Sunila Thomas George, the chairwoman of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. “We think it’s going to be recordbreaking.”
In the first 16 days of February, MCAD received 25 sexual harassment complaints — up from just five during the same period in 2017.
For the period from Jan. 1 to Feb. 16, the number of sexual harassment complaints tripled — from 18 in 2017 to 54 in 2018 — to a rate of more than one a day.
“It’s a direct response to the #MeToo movement and the courageous victims who now feel emboldened to come forward,” George said.
“We also feel the media coverage has done an excellent job identifying MCAD as the proper venue where victims can safely go to.”
Requests for MCAD to conduct sexual harassment training sessions in the workplace are also soaring and on pace to break a record.
Since Jan. 1, mostly small and mid-sized employers have asked the organization to stage sessions for a total of between 1,000 and 1,500 people.
Gov. Charlie Baker signed a supplemental budget Friday giving MCAD $250,000 to hire two more staffers and an additional investigator. The agency is also seeking a $500,000 bump to bring in more workers next fiscal year.
“We’ve reached an important
moment in our culture where people are feeling that if they step forward, they won’t be alone and there will be serious attention paid to sexual misconduct and other wrongdoing,” said Dan Schorr, a managing director at Kroll, which investigates sexual misconduct at universities, ranging from sexual harassment by employers to student-on-student assault.
“In the past, people felt their claims would go uninvestigated or there’d be retribution for speaking up, and that kept a lot of people who were victimized from coming forward.”
Pam Jeffords, a partner at Mercer, the largest HR consulting firm in the world, told the Herald that reports of sexual harassment are increasing “across the globe” and in “every industry,” and she traced the “epicenter” to claims that rocked venture capital firms last spring before spreading into entertainment and media industries.
Since then, she estimates that every publicly traded company has looked at their own sexual harassment policies in the wake of #MeToo. Some have found they didn’t even have one, she said.
And while a company’s legal department likely knows the sexual harassment policy inside and out, many managers simply don’t know what’s benign, just obnoxious and strictly illegal, she said.
Facebook and Google have dating policies that allow co-workers to ask each other out — once — and never again if turned down, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Still, the confusion over what constitutes harassment as well as the fear of becoming the subject of a career-ending allegation is producing its own backlash, Jeffords added.
She said she’s now hearing from many male leaders who are vowing to no longer mentor or travel with women to avoid even the appearance of sexual harassment.
“That’s actually illegal behavior,” Jeffords said.
“You could say I’m not going to mentor anyone, period. You can’t say, ‘I’m not going to mentor women.’ ”
While that might be news to many men, it should be alarming to women, too, she added.
“To have men now say, ‘I’m stepping away from that conversation because of sexual harassment concerns,’ that’s disconcerting,” Jeffords said.
“We need men. We need white, heterosexual men in the conversation with us.”
Still, a CareerBuilder survey released last month found that, for all the rising harassment reports, 72 percent of those who have been sexually harassed did not report the incident and 54 percent didn’t confront the aggressor.
“Every organization is going to have to change now, and create a workplace culture that women want to be in, where they’ll be treated with respect and have equal pay and positions,” said Rosemary Haefner, the chief HR officer at CareerBuilder.
“Companies will also have to stress a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment.”
‘It’s a direct response to the #MeToo movement and the courageous victims who now feel emboldened to come forward. We also feel the media coverage has done an excellent job identifying MCAD as the proper venue where victims can safely go to.’ — SUNILA THOMAS GEORGE, chairwoman of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination