In December 2017, women’s professional group TEMPO Milwaukee sent out a survey asking its members about their experiences with sexual harassment in the workplace. Of the roughly 100 who responded, 68% said they had faced harassment at some point in their careers. These results, released in early January, followed a year of reckoning on sexual harassment and assault.
Since The New York Times’ exposé of Harvey Weinstein, the public has watched in triumph and horror as one powerful man after another is brought to account. #MeToo gave a name to a movement, and the Time’s Up campaign promised a shift from acknowledgement to action. The Milwaukee survey, TEMPO president and CEO Jennifer Dirks explains, aimed to give a “local voice” to what had suddenly, finally, become a national conversation. “It should send a message to the Milwaukee community that this isn’t just a Hollywood issue,” Dirks says. “We have to realize that this has been going on for years and has been pushed under the rug.”
TEMPO members are Milwaukee-area businesswomen in high-level leadership positions. But Dirks points out that no community is immune to sexual harassment. It is endemic across industries and tied to deeper inequities that have enabled perpetrators and silenced victims. Now, longtime advocates are hoping the spotlight will help spur lasting change.
Breaking the Silence
Workplace sexual harassment generally refers to persistent, unwelcome comments or conduct that creates a hostile work environment or causes negative employment outcomes. As a form of sex discrimination, it violates federal law—as well as the Wisconsin Fair Employment Act. Still, pursuing legal action can be a harrowing, uphill battle. Plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases often must relive painful experiences and steel themselves against the age-old “she wanted it” defense.
“They’re very difficult cases to prove, unfortunately, because you can imagine the sort of defenses that are trotted out. ‘It’s not unwelcome,’ ‘She did something similar,’ ‘She sent me lascivious texts,’ that kind of thing,” says Colin Good, an attorney with Wisconsin law firm Hawks Quindel. He notes that many victims also face a “time pressure element” for reporting due to Wisconsin’s 300-day statute of limitations for discrimination complaints.
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In a culture that’s often more concerned with preserving men’s reputations than women’s rights, many are reluctant to enter the legal fray. “Victims are left paralyzed with decisions on what to do, so they will choose not to do anything because they fear their names are going to be dragged through the mud,” Good says. “It’s crushing, and it needs to stop.” Dirks says it’s still common for women, particularly those in entry level positions, to feel “powerless” or fear a backlash if they speak up. “There’s been a nervousness, a lack of confidence to report,” she says. “And when women do report, nothing has been done about it.”
To bolster claims, Good advises keeping contemporaneous notes of interactions and sending your human resources department complaints in writing and blind copying an outside email so there’s a record of the exchange. While proving these cases is a challenge, he hopes the recent high-profile disclosures will ease the burden on less privileged women who face harassment every day. “Hopefully, with the current social climate, women’s voices are being believed with a greater frequency,” Good says. “That has a long way to go, but it’s a good start.”
Education and Training
As the terrible scope of the problem comes to light, many employers are rethinking their approach to sexual harassment training. Advocates say effective training can reinforce no-tolerance policies and resolve confusion about when conduct crosses a line. Unfortunately, there’s little evidence that training is effective. “I remember when I was in the corporate world, my sexual harassment training was day one, sitting behind a computer and watching a video from the 1970s that was very antiquated. It was kind of laughable, looking back,” Dirks says. “I was asked a couple of questions and that was the extent of it.”
In 1998, two U.S. Supreme Court cases established that companies could avoid liability in sexual harassment cases if they could show that their employees had been trained on their anti-harassment policy. “Because of that legal-compliance motivation, training often has a legal-compliance framework,” says Shannon Rawski, an assistant professor at UW-Oshkosh who has researched employee responses to sexual harassment training. Within that framework, training is often bogged down by rigid definitions and scenarios that don’t reflect real work environments.
Traditional training focuses on victims and harassers, implicitly characterizing employees as one or the other. Rawski says this can cause a sense of “identity threat,” where trainees feel they are being forced into an undesirable role. “They develop backlash attitudes against the training itself,” Rawski says. “They’ll deem the training session as illegitimate, as something that doesn’t need to be listened to.”
Employees who experienced a sense of threat during training are more likely to avoid the colleagues they think are likely to become victims, Rawski’s research suggests. This finding has worrisome implications. “If you stereotype women as potential victims, you can see how that might lead to socially ostracizing women in the workplace,” Rawski says.
As an alternative, some experts have suggested reframing the training to focus on a different role: the bystander. Bystander training, Rawski says, can include all the same information, but from the perspective of a third party who intervenes on behalf of a colleague. “Employees are going to be much more willing to identify with a positive role in that situation,” she says.
The Wisconsin legislature has been working to update its own sexual harassment policies in recent months, and on Tuesday, Jan. 16, the Assembly unanimously approved a resolution making sexual harassment training mandatory for representatives. In Milwaukee, Alderman Tony Zielinski recently introduced a resolution to tell the director of the Department of Employee Relations to create a policy for training city employees on sexual harassment.
“It’s important for Milwaukee to be aggressive in combating this problem in our community,” Zielinski says, adding that coverage of local policy changes and Hollywood downfalls make it easier for people to speak out. “That’s one benefit,” he says. “The second benefit is, if you’re a would-be sexual harasser, you may think twice about trying to engage in this type of activity because you know that society is clamping down.”
Income Inequality
Sexual harassment infects all professions, including (as the past year has shown) the upper echelons of celebrity. But in low-wage, female-dominated job sectors, it is epidemic. Women in low-paying jobs are more vulnerable to mistreatment and face more obstacles to justice than their higher-paid counterparts.
Data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has shown that retail, accommodation and food service jobs are the most common sources of harassment complaints, and studies of specific industries like hospitality have shown alarming rates of abuse. “Gender-based violence is an income inequality issue,” says Chicago-based attorney Sheerine Alemzadeh. “That’s how you have to think about it when you address the problem on a systemic level.”
A 2017 EEOC study found that 75% of women who reported harassment faced retaliation after coming forward. “If you’re living hand-to-mouth and don’t have any savings, losing your job or getting punished financially for making this report is something you simply can’t afford to do,” says Alemzadeh. “It creates a really strong culture of silence in the most-affected communities.”
Low-wage employees often work irregular hours without benefits, paid sick time or medical leave, and many rely on their employer’s discretion for basic accommodations. This type of power dynamic can make it harder to oppose mistreatment. And certain lines of work create additional risks. Restaurant servers, for example, may have to tolerate customers’ bad behavior because they depend on tips to make a living wage. According to The Restaurant Opportunities Center, 90% of female restaurant workers have dealt with harassment at work.
Women make up two-thirds of the low-wage labor force in the U.S. Alemzadeh says that support for harassment victims in this demographic often begins close to home by organizing inside the industries that are most impacted. “I think change is going to need to come from the grassroots,” she says. “It’s going to come from leaders inside those communities making a decision to invest in this issue.”
Alemzadeh is a co-founder and co-director of Healing to Action, an initiative supporting worker-led efforts against gender-based violence. Since forming in 2016, Healing to Action has offered education and leadership development across industries and partnered with organizations in the labor movement to improve their responses to the issue. Among other projects, Healing to Action has participated in Hands Off Pants On, a Chicago-based campaign to protect hospitality workers, the One Fair Wage campaign and the passage of the Illinois Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.
From Anger to Action
The national organization 9to5 has supported and advocated for survivors of sexual harassment for years as part of their mission to promote women’s rights and equality in the workplace. Astar Herndon, director of 9to5’s Wisconsin chapter, says the organization looks at the #MeToo movement comprehensively—particularly as it affects the women in low-income sectors who often face the most severe violations.
“What’s going to create an environment for those women to be able to step forward is comprehensive policy and increased worker protections,” says Herndon. “Not just sexual harassment protections, but economic protections as well. Strengthening equal pay provisions, having paid leave and paid sick time.” Herndon says these protections would help level the playing field and in turn give women “a more powerful voice in the workplace.”
Despite the connection between economic instability and sexual harassment, Herndon says the Wisconsin legislature has continued to threaten and undermine policies that support workers—like the Wisconsin Family Medical Leave Act and living wage provisions. “We have all this momentum and energy about what women workers need, but then simultaneously repeals of bills that actually help women workers,” she says.
In the age of “hashtag activism,” popular movements often struggle to advance past the collective anger phase. Herndon says nonprofit organizations have a responsibility to “take this anger and inform our community about next steps.” At the same time, there’s a need for businesses to protect their workers—for the state to support them in doing so—and for individuals to become more civically engaged by using their voices and votes to hold elected leaders accountable and advocate for policies that prevent harassment by bringing more equity into the workplace.
“We can’t be frozen in fear, shock or anger. We have to take that and move it into action,” Herndon says. “There is going to be a real reckoning, I hope, soon, where workers, people, women realize and use their power in a collective way.”
