Let’s focus on real harassment in workplace
I just want to warn you I have to get a little bit crude here in order to tell you a personal story of sexual harassment, so send the kiddies out of the room.
My first newspaper job was at newspaper in New Jersey, 1968-1979, and for the first couple of years I was the only woman who worked at night.
After 5 p.m., the only way to get to the lady’s room was to walk through the composing room, the room where the pages were assembled to put on the press in the old days of hot lead.
So every night, sometimes two or three times a night, depending on how much coffee I drank, I had to walk through the composing room, nearly the entire length of the building, to get to the bathroom and back.
And each time I did, the composing room exploded like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
A dozen or so guys would go nuts with wolf whistles, whoo-whoos, and “hey, girlie, gimmee some of that” as they pantomimed holding up two breasts while they pretended to flick their tongues between them.
But the real prize winners were the guys who would leap from behind their typesetting machines, clutch their crotches and scream, “Hey, baby, you want some of this?”
This went on for four or five years. By then a few other women also worked in the newsroom at night and were subjected to the same abuse.
We complained to the all-male union leaders and they laughed. We complained to the all-male corporate management and they laughed.
We begged to be able to use the men’s room, which was right there in the newsroom, but they wouldn’t hear of it. Later we commandeered it.
Eventually the problem was solved when corporate decided to move the newsroom into the business side and we women got nighttime access to the lady’s room.
This was during the “women’s liberation” years when we women were fighting so hard for education, employment, financial and reproductive rights (and not to be viewed merely as sex objects). Gradually the culture changed. Women became firefighters, mail carriers, police officers, combat soldiers, construction workers, engineers, submarine sailors and CEOs.
Around the mid 1970s, the newspaper made me a desk editor, armed me with a pica gauge (a metal ruler) and sent me into the composing room to work with those same guys – which worked out fine.
We worked together without the catcalls and some of them even apologized to me.
In class action suits against big companies like Sears and Mitsubishi, the courts found that the chief culprits were not just the harassers but corporate management that looked the other way.
Now, nearly all big companies have annual mandatory harassment and discrimination training for all workers, a hot line to report harassment and detailed stepby-step policies for how to deal with it.
But one place that apparently hadn’t gotten the message was Silicon Valley, the technology sector, where small, male-operated startups suddenly mushroom overnight into gigantic global businesses.
Uber, a $70 billion company that operates in 70 countries (many of them nowhere near as enlightened as ours), has a culture of encouraging brutal “always be hustlin’” competition among workers that started when the company was 10 people.
That culture, which also encourages sexism and mistreatment of drivers, now infests Uber offices throughout the world where thousands of men and women work together.
The women fought back and just this week the company instituted a complete overhaul of its employment policies.
Its founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick, “stepped back” in part due to the harassment charges, and its board of directors Tuesday adopted a 13-page, 40-point legal blueprint for protecting women and minority employees.
That was an excellent things went sideways.
Lone female board member Arianna Huffington remarked that one woman on a board often leads to more women joining the board.
To which another board member, hedge fund manager David Bonderman – who had been working diligently to institute changes in the corporate culture – responded:
“Actually what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking.” start, but then
That was the mildest, sexist joke ever spoken at
It should have prompted mild, “Oh, shut up, David,” there.
It was light years away from, “Hey baby, you want some of this?” or Bill Maher’s use of the “N” word.
But the employees erupted in self-righteous anger, causing an apologetic Bonderman to resign by the end of the day, though his company retains the seat. That episode just makes me cringe. I know what real workplace sexism looks like and it’s not some offhand, easily handled comment about how one’s female peers may talk more than men.
I can’t help but think that Bonderman was the one who was bullied here, and I don’t like it coming from the left any more than from the right. lamest, oldest a public meeting.
an equally and ended