Harassment

Ailes resigned amid allegations that he pressured female employees to have sex. Now, the company and top-rated host Bill O’Reilly are under fire for paying women to drop lawsuits accusing him of much the same.

In February, a former Uber employee posted a detailed account accusing the company of ignoring complaints by her and other women of managers pressuring them for sex. CEO Travis Kalanick issued a statement declaring there was “no place for this kind of behavior” in the company, then soon after came under scrutiny for a report he took employees to a Korean escort bar.

But they are hardly alone.

Corporate culture

The parent company of the Kay and Jared jewelry chains is battling complaints filed by more than 200 former employees in private arbitration that executives fostered a workplace where managers groped female subordinates and push them to have sex in exchange for better job opportunities.

The company has labeled news reports about the complaints inaccurate, saying they involve a small subset of 69,000 workers who have alleged gender discrimination in pay and promotion in a class action, accusations it believes are unfounded.

“We do not tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind,” Todd Stitzer, the chairman of Signet Jewelers Limited, said in a statement last month announcing the formation of committee of directors to conduct a review of company policies.

The Marine Corps is trying to clamp down on private Facebook groups set up by current and former servicemen who collected and shared nude photos of their female colleagues.

Sexual harassment has always been most common in workplaces with relatively few women compared to men, researchers say, particularly in fields where jobs themselves are considered masculine. Industries where top performers bring in big dollars will sometimes overlook their behavior.

But tolerance by top managers is the single biggest factor.

It’s hard to know how prevalent sexual harassment is in workplaces, but it is widespread, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission task force concluded in a report last year.

Statistics kept by the Department of Defense show that more than 6,000 sexual assaults were reported in the service branches in 2015, a slight decline from the previous year, but more than twice the figure recorded a decade ago.

That is despite more than three decades of attempts to identify sexual harassment and weed it out of U.S. workplaces.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that sexual harassment is a violation of civil rights, in a case pitting a bank teller against a Washington, D.C., bank and the boss she said coerced her into sex.

The Navy was enveloped in scandal over accusations that aviators assaulted dozens of female colleagues at their Tailhook Association gathering in Las Vegas in 1991. That same year, government lawyer Anita Hill testified that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had talked to her graphically about sex during work; Thomas vehemently denied it. A few years later, women who had worked at broker Smith Barney filed a lawsuit alleging harassment by male colleagues, some of whom retreated to a raucous party chamber, the Boom Boom Room, inside a branch office.

The attention fueled a sharp rise in complaints of sexual harassment, and saw many companies mandate behavioral changes by employees and pledge to treat women more fairly. But longtime observers are skeptical about how much change has really occurred.

“There’s a big difference between