Men to benefit from gender neutral policies

The industry is also inching towards recognising the agony of men charged with false allegations and bringing in a ‘gender neutrality’ policy. IT companies in Silicon City have now started working towards safety of every employee, including men, in the organisation from sexual harassment. Today, a lot of companies are ensuring a gender neutral policies, since many false cases have been registered against men and they have also been sexually harassed. Almost all the big IT companies have a gender neutral policy today, including Wipro, and IBM.

Sidharth Ved, who works in a reputed IT company, agrees that companies are no longer giving women employees an upper hand in sexual harassment cases. Even in training session, the examples of a woman harassing a male employee is given to show the change in the mindset. He says that recently a manager was accused of sexual harassment after he put a woman employee on a performance test. Angered by this, she lodged a false complaint which was detected by the committee.

“While sexual harassment can happen to men or women, women are targeted more due to several socialised messages like ‘Boys will be boys’, ‘you can’t do anything’, ‘don’t get into trouble’, ‘pretend you did not see/hear anything’ etc. As a result, many hesitate to report. For men, too, reporting is not easy. Given the macho image that men are expected to project, not being able to handle the attention of a woman makes you less of a man. And of course, as we can imagine the LGBT+ community is particularly vulnerable,” elaborates Nirmala Menon, CEO of Interweave firm.

Often, when awareness sessions are conducted, IT professionals say that they tend to focus on women. This, they say, lead to several male employees also seeking a similar policy for them.

“Why do you think men are not sexually harassed? We are also sexually harassed but we seldom complain,” says a trainer for IT companies. All companies are now realising that everyone, irrespective of gender, should feel safe in a company which will help them become more productive.

A gender neutral sexual harassment policy could include harassment by one man against another man, and not just a woman employee harassing her male counterpart. It also covers sexual harassment by a woman employee against another woman.

“We are very passionate about creating a safe working environment. Today, we go beyond certain things in the law. The law has prescribed basic minimum needs to be set up. There are many companies whom we give what is required. Interestingly, there are a lot of companies now seeking if we could do something more,” explains Jayaprada S.N., co-founder of Metis.

That’s how gender neutral places are becoming a norm now. Almost every other workplace we are working with, want to make it gender neutral. We want to make workspaces secured for women but we want to extend it for men too. A lot of companies have been requesting us to do so, she

adds.