I’VE BEEN INUNDATED BY WOMEN’S STORIES

SAYS KATE MALTBY

When you’re involved in a high-profile claim of sexual harassment, as I was last year against former deputy PM Damian Green, something odd begins to happen. Women begin to get in touch from all over the country with their own experiences. Strangers send emails; lifelong family friends use impromptu visits to confide long-unshared traumas. You become a repository for other women’s stories.

Men also experience sexual harassment and it is my view that, in politics particularly, the prevalence of male-male sexual harassment is one of the last aspects of the “Pestminster” scandal yet to break.

But it is primarily women who have come to me for help over the past year. So I am not at all surprised by the findings that one in three women has been harassed at work in the last year.

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that most of the women who write to me aren’t aware of the legal protections their workplace should offer against harassment – and, just as often, the employer doesn’t seem to be either.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about the evidence required to uphold a claim of harassment in the workplace: you don’t have to reach the criminal standard of proof – beyond reasonable doubt – to discipline a colleague.

But the biggest problem is still with employers who talk a good talk – and then look the other way when their highestperforming employee pesters young women. (And if any promising women take the first jobs they can elsewhere, is it really worth it to keep a highperforming pest?)

I’ve always admired Theresa May’s commitment to women in politics – but when I and others accused her closest ally of impropriety, she fought to save him.

The test of an employer is how they respond when the boss’s best mate is the problem, not whether Jon from Corporate PR has tweeted the #Metoo hashtag.