Starts at the top

“Corporate culture matters,” said Emily Martin of the National Women’s Law Center, an advocacy group. “That idea that this is how we do things here is really quite powerful. It affects what both supervisors and supervisees understand as normal behavior.”

A little history

what companies say and what they do,” said Susan Antilla, whose book “Tales from the Boom Boom Room” chronicled sexual harassment at Wall Street firms in the 1990s and the legal battles to curb it. She says talk of diversity initiatives and employee training ring hollow.

“I think that companies hide behind these things,” she said. Some things have changed. Many companies now require employees to sign agreements not to sue if subjected to harassment, and to instead pursue a remedy in private arbitration. That such complaints are kept out of the public eye may contribute to an impression that fewer allegations are being made.

The rise of social networking has created new means of intimidating and belittling fellow workers. At the same time, cellphones that record audio and video, and computers that easily capture screenshots of messages give victims of harassment a way to seize on proof that could force an employer to act.

“The shocking thing is that after decades of sexual harassment being illegal, such dazzlingly open sexual harassment continues to emerge in both companies and the Marines, and in other arenas,” said Joan Williams, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California. “The thing that’s changed is that once these allegations become public, they become a very public embarrassment.”

And that can rapidly have an effect on a company’s finances. That is evident in the announcements by more than a dozen companies that were pulling their advertising from O’Reilly’s show on Fox.

Fitzgerald, the researcher, said it’s hard to know whether there is more or less sexual harassment than a generation ago. But the newest headlines, with accusations of executives who knew of harassment and took little action, remind her of why it persists.

“So the men learn it’s OK and the women learn ... that it’s part of the culture and climate,” Fitzgerald said. “It explains that whole thing of: Does this company take this seriously? Obviously, culture is something that starts at the very, very top.”