When men avoid female coworkers, it’s time for a visit to human resources
If you are being held back by your gender, you have a good case, Howard Levitt says.
“Now, more than a year into the #MeToo movement,” a Bloomberg story says, “with its devastating revelations of harassment and abuse in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and beyond, Wall Street risks becoming more of a boys’ club rather than less of one.” A Mercer study, “When Women Thrive”, found that in finance, while 67 per cent of support staff are women, women make up just 15 per cent of executives, 26 per cent of senior managers and 37 per cent of managers.
The numbers are not dramatically different in other areas of the private sector, outside of professions where there still are disproportionately fewer senior, highly paid, partners.
So what is the prospect of those numbers substantially changing? The reality is that, for women to get ahead in corporations, they require mentorship — and the vast majority of potential mentors are male. Mentorship does not only provide women the training and the opportunity to demonstrate their skills, it’s also necessary to get the active support and endorsement of corporate leadership to receive promotional opportunities. Has #MeToo facilitated mentorship? Or has it presented women’s progress with a substantial setback?
The statistics are out and they are not propitious.
Bloomberg called it the Pence Effect, noting U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence’s refusal to dine with a woman without the presence of his wife. But to advance in many companies, you have to be taken on business trips, inherently requiring hotel stays and dinners out. According to a 2018 survey conducted by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, males are five times more likely to hesitate to go on a business trip with a junior female colleague than a male one and 3.5 times more likely to hesitate even going to a work dinner with a female co-worker. Thirty per cent of male managers are now uncomfortable working alone with a woman, more than twice as many as before, and 50 per cent are uncomfortable sharing a common work activity with a woman, such as mentoring or even socializing.
What is behind it? Are males distrusting themselves, fearful of false allegations or afraid of rumours and inaccurate perceptions?
Sandberg ’s solution is more mentorship, but, almost by definition, true mentorship cannot be forced.
If a company is mentoring its junior male employees but not its junior women, it might avoid a sexual harassment complaint but run inexorably into a sex discrimination one.
Too little consideration has been given to this risk. From women’s’ perspective, it is simply not enough to assert #MeToo. That only places them further behind. What is necessary, to rectify the imbalance in the workplace, is for women who are being marginalized relative to equal or less capable men, to take that matter to Human Resources and ultimately rely upon legal remedies. Few employers want to be seen as denying opportunities to qualified women.
If you are being held back in the workplace by your gender, you have a good case.
With all the focus on sexual harassment, we often forget the tried-and-true. Good old-fashioned human rights remedies are readily available and increasingly seldom used.
Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, employment and labour lawyers. He practises employment law in eight provinces. The most recent of his six books is War Stories from the Workplace: Columns by Howard Levitt. Twitter.com/HowardLevittLaw