#MeToo called for an overhaul. Are workplaces really changing?
Women have spoken. Men have fallen. Corporations are nervous. But are American workplaces making real progress in curbing sexual harassment?
Five months after allegations against Harvey Weinstein led to the mass baring of past secrets, the focus is turning to the future. Government is stepping up efforts: In Washington, the House of Representatives is preparing to train every worker, down to the most junior intern, and state legislators across the country are proposing ambitious new laws. Corporate boards and investors from Wall Street to Silicon Valley are going on the offensive, probing for problems to avoid being surprised. Entrepreneurs are developing apps and programs to help victims discover if their harassers have targeted others. Women in entertainment, advertising and other industries are demanding fundamental shifts, including more females in leadership roles.
The #MeToo moment has shifted social attitudes, inspired widespread calls for change and resulted in unprecedented accountability. But the revelations about the pervasiveness of harassment — and of the legal and institutional failures to address it — illuminate how tough it will be to extinguish.
“We can’t fire our way out of this problem,” said Paula Brantner, who runs sexual harassment workshops for nonprofits and businesses, pointing out that removing individual offenders is not enough.
Harassment has flourished in part because structures intended to address it are broken: weak laws that fail to protect women, corporate policies that are narrowly drawn and secret settlements that silence women about abuses. “The reality is, the problem is systemic, and we have to address it at a systemic level,” said Rory Gerberg, also a consultant whose clients include technology companies.
Even as dramatic headlines have captured attention, many women say they’ve seen zero change in their own workplaces. At a Mexican restaurant in Lake Elsinore, Calif., a server named Nikkie Parra fumed through a recent shift as one customer recalled the time he asked her to wrestle his penis, another compared a fold in a bar rag to a vagina and her boss sang, “Nikkie Nikkie Nikkie, can’t you see, sometimes those hips just hypnotize me.”
She gathered the courage to ask co-workers to join her in a lawsuit. When the boss caught wind of her plans, she was fired. “It felt like hopelessness,” she said later. “It felt like this is not going to change. Especially with what’s going on in the media and all the celebrities, and this still happens.”
Women with wider influence share those anxieties. When Tina Tchen, a lawyer and former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, left the White House, she thought she would quietly restart her legal career focusing on workplace issues. Now she is helping to guide the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, an initiative that sprang up virtually overnight, spearheaded by women in entertainment, and that faces a critical question: whether the more than $20 million donated so far can fund both immediate legal help for low-income workers like Parra and a longer-term strategy of filing potential landmark cases.
Tchen has also been working with organizations that have faced harassment allegations: the Service Employees International Union, which was particularly embarrassed given its mission of protecting workers; and Pixar Animation, where John Lasseter, perhaps the most revered animator since Walt Disney, recently took a leave of absence.
Across industries, Tchen says she sees plenty of resolve for fighting harassment, but a lack of proven mechanisms. “The tool kit is a little bit bare,” she said, explaining that there is no consensus on how to report a repeat offender who goes from job to job, or address more minor infractions with measures short of suspension or firing.
But among some major corporations, a fear-driven shift has begun: Harassment is now considered not just a legal liability, but also a serious reputational and business risk. Executives and boards are beginning to look at harassment “the same way you think about other risks to your organization” like security or hacking, said Kaye Foster-Cheek, former head of human resources for Johnson & Johnson and a member of three boards.
“For the first time I’m seeing a discussion about, ‘Even if this behavior doesn’t rise to the level of legal sexual harassment, we won’t tolerate it,’ ” said Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president of the Society for Human Resource Management.