SuperManager Podcast: Me Too and How it Affects You in the Workplace

Christine: You’re listening to SuperManager, the podcast for people who manage people and business with ideas, trends and expert interviews to help you be a SuperManager.

Sam: So I was watching one of the several news stories on television that you’ve been seeing lately about #MeToo and things that are happening in the workplace and Hollywood, and I was watching it with a friend of mine and he said, but that’s just Hollywood right, stuff like that doesn’t actually happen in work? Have you ever actually witnessed something like that? I mean, do you know anybody? And I had to kind of chuckle because I imagine a lot of people think that way. You know, if you’re unaware of what’s going on, you think, oh, that doesn’t really happen to different levels to different severities, absolutely it does. I had a job at an insurance company a long time ago. I was in my early twenties and I don’t want to confuse #MeToo and sexual harassment, with gender discrimination, but there was a lot of gender discrimination going on in this company. I mean, it’s just a whole mix of not being a very good place for, for a woman to work. But I made a good impression. I was doing a really good job and I remember the owner of the company calling me into his office and he said, Hey, I wanted to talk to you, I’ve heard a lot of really great things about you. And he stepped a little bit closer and he came over and he put his arm around my shoulder and was kind of giving me a one arm hug around my shoulder. And he said, from what I understand, you’re quite an intelligent, young lady and he’s kind of hugging me with this one hand. And without even thinking about it, I just very gently took his hand off of my shoulder and turned so that I was facing him. And I said, why thank you I am, but please don’t touch me like that. And he just said, oh, okay, apologies. And then we moved on from there. After that incident, he was nothing but respectful to me and it made a difference for me. Unfortunately not for any of the other women in the office. I later found out that there were some lawsuits going on, you know, long after I left the company. But in varying degrees, yes, it happens all the time, all over the place and some women are more sensitive to it than others. Some men have more self-realization than others. It’s just an interesting balance. And today we’re going to talk about #MeToo and how it affects you in the office. And I’ve got my, a group of super friends with me today. I’ve got,.

Vicky: Vicky Wors, Wors Consulting,.

Jerry: Jerry Richardson, I’m a labor and employment lawyer.

Sally: Sally Bowles, Prefix Technologies.

Mary: Mary Kutheis, business coach and confidante.

Rick: Rick Shore, Legal Shield, business solutions.

Sam: And I am Samantha Naes with CN Video, corporate video production.

Jerry: Sam, to your point, a recent Washington Post survey of working women, found 54% had been sexually harassed at some point in their careers. About 36% had experienced unwelcome sexual advances. EEOC will get 80,000 or 90,000 discrimination charges a year. And in a typical year, about seven to eight of those are sexual harassment charges.

Vicky: That sounds awfully low.

Sam: I was actually thinking the same thing. I think sometimes people are so used to it, it’s almost being underly sensitive to it. You just kind of brush it off and don’t give it any thought and are things not being reported or whatnot,

Sally: Or I think some women have to go either A, you put up with it or B, you just go find another job and get away from them and nothing’s ever really,.

Vicky: I wrecked my resume early on in my career cause I had to leave. I was a single, relatively attractive young woman and I was called a job hopper mainly because I had to leave because of the advances toward me.

Jerry: The EEOC has done an exhaustive sexual harassment study. What it basically concluded was that when sexually harassed women do not report, do not complain, fear, retaliation, and so they either leave as Vicky did or they stay and put up with it. One of the first sexual harassment cases that reached the United States Supreme Court Vinson against some bank down in Texas. But in any case, part of the factual allegations was that she had sexual relations with her manager 40 to 50 times in a bank vault. The degree to which people will put up with things, and the issue in that case became, you know, the employer kept saying, well, there must’ve been consent to have that many things and what to the supreme court said, well, the, the consent was just trying to keep her job. It was unwelcome and, and consent and that sense doesn’t mean it’s not unwelcome.

Rick: Don’t you think, and you guys can help me with this, don’t you think that the #MeToo movement, if you will, is based upon allowing women or encouraging women to come forward. Because what you’re saying I think is so true that things can happen in the workplace and we either overlook it or we pull away from it or we leave our employer or we just kind of put up with it. Isn’t that really supposed to help women realize that they’re not alone?

Sam: If you really stop and think about it, you hear people say the words, well, I didn’t want to say anything because I was afraid of retaliation. I was afraid of losing my job. But it’s not as straightforward as that. It’s not like in my example before I would’ve pulled that person’s hand off of me and said, don’t touch me like that again. He wouldn’t have said, okay, you’re fired. But how likely is it that you confront somebody and tell them that they’re doing wrong and they’re in charge, they’re your boss. What’s the likelihood that they’re going to say, oh, excuse me, you’re absolutely right and I’m wrong. Typically, people don’t like to believe that they’ve done something wrong and it turns into a defensive, but you and I didn’t, and nobody else minds. And it can create a bad work environment, so I think a lot of people just feel like, if I’m quiet about this, if I put up with it, if I try to avoid or if I tried, you know, maybe I can somehow fix the situation by changing my actions. But then once somebody steps up and says this happens and they see the support that everyone else gives and says, wait a minute, that’s not right. You know, you’re getting support. It’s not a bad thing. This person’s not going to be able to make my life miserable. And it kind of enables you to feel a little bit more comfortable, like you’re not going to be ostracized or,

Vicky: Well, I know we’re speaking mainly because of women having been a human resources consultant manager, I’ve investigated every flavor of harassment. You can come up with, you know, male on female, female on male, male on male, female on female. The issue is that it’s unwelcome and there are items that are being put that, you know, you either do this or you don’t have a job or you won’t have a promotion.

Sam: You don’t want to be perceived as too touchy,

Vicky: Or too touchy and God bless their souls, men that are being harassed at work by women. Okay. And they don’t come forward because quota, you know, men don’t report. Right. Okay.

Sam: I’ve witnessed that before,

Vicky: And they are happily married. They don’t want to have a problem that this may come get out to their spouse or if they’re going with someone. So this #MeToo isn’t just a female issue.

Sally: Right.

Vicky: You know, I actually wrote a book about this. It was my history.

Rick: What’s the name of the book?

Vicky: I can’t believe that was me. Dot, dot, dot. Oh yes it is and it still is, by Lauren Taylor. The book is about my early history and it’s no different for women today.

Sam: I think the stories from back then are much worse and much more obvious than the stories of the current,

Vicky: I didn’t have a college course said Back Seat 101. I mean, you know,

Sally: I feel like we have moved forward. I don’t think we’ve moved forward enough and I hope changes are yet to come. But, um, I know from the time I graduated college to now, I feel like there have been some changes, positive changes.

Vicky: It’s still going on. It’s called the male female dynamic in the workforce and let’s face it, most people meet their future spouse in the workforce.

Sally: That’s true.

Mary: I met my future spouse in the same workplace where I experienced my first sexual harassment. It was in the late eighties that I started there, but in the early nineties it was kind of an old boy network with the group that I worked with. And one of the things that happened was when many of us would answer our phones not knowing where the incoming call was coming from because at the time we didn’t have what we called spy phones. You would just answer the phone. I would say business, this is Mary. And they would say, are you naked? And yeah, it was wildly inappropriate. It was ridiculous, high school boy behavior and all that kind of thing, however, one of the things is that I was also oftentimes alone with those same men who did that and never once did any of them cross a line, they treated me with the utmost respect when we were in person. They were very kind and very respectful. So yeah, it was stupid behavior and it certainly shouldn’t be tolerated then or today. But that was a different time. Now, some maybe year later when I was actually harassed by a client that we were on a business trip and his overtures got more and more aggressive to the point where the final night of the trip I locked myself in my room and I wouldn’t come out because it was so horrific. And when I talked to the sales person who was involved in that and who would have direct contact with that person, he said, please don’t say anything. We really need this account. So I didn’t, I kept it very quiet.

Vicky: Been there.

Mary: Yeah. And, and so it was, it was horrifying. And I found out years later that this guy only got fired when he did the same thing to his boss’s wife. So that’s what got him out of the company.

Rick: Let me ask this, so people say you should report it. You know, we’re encouraging people to report these kinds of things. And I’m sure you didn’t report.

Mary: No, no, no, no, no. That was common knowledge. It was common knowledge and it was just, it was just silly and goofy.

Sam: They were just air quote, joking right.

Mary: And it and it wasn’t even, yeah.

Rick: Who do you report it to?

Sally: Well hopefully your company has policies and procedures and,.

Vicky: Human Resources typically.

Rick: Yeah.

Jerry: Why don’t we look at the historical perspective. This is part of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. That’s enacted in 1964. The original proposal was only to prohibit racial discrimination and Adam Smith, a Democrat from Virginia decided that he could defeat that legislation if he got sex as an amendment to that legislation because the northern liberals would not support that. Well, we know that didn’t work out as he thought.

Vicky: Backfired.

Jerry: So there is, there is a prohibition since 64 against sex discrimination. Nothing that has defined sexual harassment. Sexual harassment develops through case law initially in the late seventies. In 1980 the EEOC issues regulations that to this day are in effect and really define what sexual harassment is. And there were,

Vicky: Almost thirty years ago.

Jerry: Some charges that started, but it’s really not until 1992 and Clarence Thomas’s hearings as a prospective supreme court justice when Anita Hill testified that really an awareness of sexual harassment as a serious issue the workplace hit the next thing that happens is the supreme court developed in affirmative defense. And it basically said if the employer takes preventive actions such as policies that prohibits sexual harassment, such as complaints, procedures, and then if they actually investigate the complaints and if the complaints come up with a violation of the policy than they implement effective corrective action, then an employer has a defense and the employer doesn’t have any liability if the employee hasn’t used those measures. So that that’s a watershed moment because employers all start implementing these policies and then they start doing training before that, not so much the next watershed moments, 2017 in the #MeToo movement. And when you start seeing the headlines. Yeah, Roger Ailes. What… Fox, one settlement was $40 million. Just one of them and there were a number of them and there were six settlements for one of their on-air personalities,

Everyone: Bill O’Reilly.

Jerry: Yeah, 6 settlements for him. The total like $45 million and you got the publicity about Bill Cosby, 50 women alleging that, so those are another watershed moment.

Vicky: The issue again, is it male, female or is it power that they can get by with this, they can do what they want cause let’s face it, rape, isn’t a sexual act rape is a power.

Jerry: Well sexual harassment, I don’t think there’s any dispute that it’s all about power.

Vicky: It’s all about power.

Jerry: It’s people who abuse the power they have. The EEOC, in that study I mentioned in 2016, came up with risk factors, there’s about 11 of them. And they all are addressing ways that power either gets so diffused in an organization that the policies of the organization don’t get carried out or somewhat related. If you have a compensation system that’s based on say tips or commissions where it’s responsive to purchases being made. Those are situations that don’t necessarily cause sexual harassment but they can certainly be associated with it and so employers need to be aware that those are risk factors.

Sam: I think also you talked about policies and procedures and rules being put into place, but it’s been my experience that it’s less about the policies and the procedures than it is about the actual feelings and the mentality of leadership itself. You can have policies in place to say you’re not allowed to do this or you should do this or you shouldn’t do that, but everybody kind of knows the culture of the company based on leadership and if you’ve got a sign hanging up on the wall that says you’re not allowed to do this, but you’ve got a leader who still jokes around about it and doesn’t get it, then that becomes the culture of the company and that ultimately rules.

Vicky: It really does. CEO or whoever’s the head of the organization, their particular philosophy of life or how they treat something does permeate throughout an organization. You can see what’s going on in the US right now. Things permeate and people think it’s okay just cause so-and-so does it, I can do it. So the idea is, is that within an organization it’s up to the executives, those that are setting the tone and the philosophy of the organization to set the right tone and if they need assistance then they call Jerry.

Jerry: If you’ve got a policy in a three ring binder for available on an intranet, and that’s all you have, you’ve got nothing.

Sam: Right.

Jerry: And in order for a policy to mean anything, you have to have effective training by that. Every new hire has to be trained. Someone gets promoted to a supervisory provision, there has to be training for that person. Then annual training, you do need the buy in from the top down and without that kind of training, and that’s necessary, I would say it’s not sufficient to have an effective policy. Once you get complaints, you have to do investigations that aren’t kangaroo courts.

Sam: I had an office that it was a, let’s just say it was a bad office environment and I ended up leaving the company and before leaving it actually did go to human resources. Human Resources got involved, someone from human resources came down to our office to talk to everyone about sensitivity and sexual harassment and treatment of others and didn’t help a thing because the leadership was the problem and leadership didn’t feel that they were the audience for this, that it was the employees that were supposed to be the audience for this. I ended up leaving the company and they called me to do an exit interview and one of the questions they asked was, do you feel like reaching out to human resources would have helped? When I said no, and they said, why not? And I said, because I did reach out to human resources and they didn’t solve my problem. And she paused, she paused and she lowered her tone of voice just a little bit and she said, listen, I know what’s going on in your office, but you have to understand your boss is my boss.

Sally: Oh, I think that gets repeated over and,

Vicky: Over and over and human resources is one of the first place you cut when you reduce head count. And the unfortunate thing is, is that they are trained to keep their jobs too and it has been somewhat of a problem that they perpetuate the status quo.

Sam: I feel like human resources is more there to protect management than they are to protect the employees and their job.

Jerry: You can generalize only so far.

Sam: Well true.

Jerry: That is true in some organizations, not as much in others. My best example came from a consent decree, but there were sometimes an ombudsman has been established and that’s an independent party. Not part of human resources. Their complaints are brought to the ombudsman, and then the ombudsman then has the power to investigate and then to tell management, here’s what you need to do. Now management is then faced with, you know, if I insensitive, I can say, well we’re not going to do that, but if management doesn’t do it and if there’s a lawsuit, that evidence is horrendous. If you’ve been told you have a problem and haven’t fixed it, you’re gonna lose the lawsuit.

Rick: And that’s back to my question. Who do you go to?

Sam: Yeah, it’s hard.

Rick: I’m not going to go to HR because they’re, they play golf with the owner of the company, they’re buddies with the owner of the company. They’re not going to help me. I need a third party.

Jerry: You do, the EEOC.

Rick: Yeah, that I can talk to, to say what can I… What are my rights?

Vicky: I would prefer to not go to the EEOC, that gets to be real,

Jerry: But that’s what the choice, what it is, what the choice is. And that’s how you sell to management that they need to have an effective complaints procedure.

Sam: It has to be a culture change. And I think it’s about just understanding. I think a lot of people don’t mean to sexually harass. I think that it just doesn’t occur to them how uncomfortable they’re making somebody else or the fact that the other person may not really like them. They’re just afraid to show dislike for what’s going on. And it’s just getting a culture of people understanding.

Jerry: Okay, well wait a minute, because there’s a quid pro quo, which is sexual harassment, where you basically are making an unwelcome sexual demand in your conditioning, some aspect of the other person’s employment, continued employment from them,

Sam: Well, that’s obviously, yeah, that’s obviously intentional.

Jerry: Then you have hostile environment and hostile environment, I dare to say that most people, if they’re telling risque stories or if they’re making comments about people’s bodies, they’re brushing up against, they know what they’re doing, they know what they’re doing. If they can get away with it, they continue.

Vicky: Some of its the shock factor. People like to see the shotgun. I imagine whoever called you and said, asked if your naked, they wish they could, they wish they could’ve been a fly on the wall to say, well, what was her face?

Mary: And, and maybe maybe they just, they just thought it was hilarious. And however, I will say that when the Anita Hill thing happened, everything changed. Yeah. All of that changed. And in fact, there was even,

Vicky: But we still got Clarence Thomas.

Mary: There was even a paragraph where they had to clean up their language because there was far too much of the F-bomb being dropped all the time and it was like, that can’t happen anymore. And I think that might even have been a tougher change for many of them.

Rick: This awareness, this public awareness I think is becoming a good thing but also limiting because men today, and I know it’s not just male female, but men today are trained to be more cautious about their interactions with women. They don’t want to have lunch alone with a woman. They didn’t want to meet alone. You know, in a private environment.

Vicky: Actually it is true, that’s not something that’s too farfetched. They’re, they’re cautious in a one-on-one interaction.

Rick: Right.

Sam: Which can cause a whole different set of problems,

Rick: Sure, then you don’t have that comradery and that ability to interact appropriately in a business setting because you’re cautious about, gee, am I going to say the wrong thing? I mean, does it now make men more resistant to hiring women? I mean, could it get to that point right now?

Vicky: I think in some cases it does. Having been a human resources person at a corporation, I’ve been told quietly before, when a woman brought an allegation, get rid of her.

Jerry: Certainly that can happen. But look, if you’re in a tight labor market and you’re talking to them about hiring and you need people who are qualified, are you going to cut out basically in this day and age, half of the candidates?

Sam: But it is, I can see where that is a real problem though. You’re saying the tight labor market, so that means, okay, women shouldn’t worry about not being hired because of the discomfort of the whole #MeToo thing, because there’s a desperate need for employees. But what if there wasn’t?

Jerry: No, but what I’m talking about is from the employers perspective, you have to be out there hiring and trying to get the best people available. And the distribution of those people is across genders. And I dare to say it’s probably fairly equally distributed. So realistically, can you afford to cut out half of the candidates?

Rick: We’re not disagreeing with you Jerry,

Vicky: Yeah, we got,

Sam: Yeah.

Vicky: You’ve got male dominated occupations, female dominated occupations. Right now it’s the occupations that are male dominated that are most in, in that technical, along those lines, and you can’t really afford Jerry, to be limiting your selection just because… Take silicon valley for instance, it’s mainly male and they’re having to try to do something.

Jerry: Much of that, but much of that is self-selection. Go to my field. When I entered law school, if there were a third women in my class, that was a lot, but that was progress I entered in 1976 so before that there had been much fewer. Now it’s more than half, generally.

Sally: Yeah.

Jerry: People aren’t going to pay for professional schools if there aren’t opportunities out there for them. Okay, and I’ve been in law firms where they’re hiring and they don’t want to narrow their choices. We’re going to hire a dumber guy because,

Sally: I agree, I agree.

Sam: They’re still, it still is a factor though. I agree with what Rick said. I think it still could be a factor. If I’m an employer and I have to choose between two equal candidates and in somewhere, in my mind I’m thinking, well, but I’ve got to be more cautious around this person, they might accuse me of sexual harassment. I just might decide on the other one.

Jerry: The harassers don’t think they’re harassers.

Vicky: No, they don’t.

Jerry: They don’t.

Sam: But you just said that it was intentional.

Jerry: No, I said the behavior, they know what their actions are when they are doing them, but if they generally stand outside people who behave in racist ways, they never think of themselves as racist either. I mean, I’ve been doing this for 40 years. I’ve worked with a lot of people. They do not and so everyone has a self image that they’re this good person.

Sam: Right.

Vicky: Sally, in your IT, have you seen because it’s mainly male dominated, or do you see that,

Sally: I think it’s changing. I think it’s changing. I also think that I, across the board, fields are changing.

Sam: It’s interesting what you said. It brought something to mind when you said IT is more male dominated. I actually worked at a company where IT was not male dominated. I was in the IT department and it was 80% women and I was like, wow, 80% women. That’s great. And I’d said something to my supervisor about it. I said, wow, in it we’ve got 80% women in this department. And he said, yeah, we’re on a budget. Yeah.

Vicky: So you can pay less, there’s the other factor.

Sam: He outright told me that, he outright told me that.

Jerry: Cheaper and better.

Sam: He wasn’t joking. That was a, that was a an honest answer. We’re on a budget and we get lower pay.

Mary: Yeah. And I can tell you the guy that harassed me all those years ago, I’m quite certain he thought he was entitled to that, that that was part of the deal. And when it didn’t work out, he tried to get me fired. He was the client. It didn’t work, but he didn’t see that as doing something bad. He thought it was part of the deal that he gets for being the powerful client.

Vicky: Well, actually to that point, my late husband was the one I married. In fact, it was some sad… Anyway, related to me that early on in his career, and you know, he’s a bit older than I, it was not unusual in St Louis that the, you know, heads of major corporations, they had their social life and then they had their business wife and it was,

Rick: I don’t think that’s limited to St. Louis.

Sam: We didn’t invent that.

Vicky: It was a perk at the executive levels.

Sam: So what do we do? It’s kind of a difficult solution. How do you make everyone comfortable?

Mary: Well, one of the things that’s interesting is that when you’re looking at leadership, 90% of the difference between average leaders and superior leaders is their level of emotional intelligence. So it’s not only it’s understanding oneself, it’s understanding how you interact with other people. There’s a lot of facets to emotional intelligence, but leaders need to be emotionally intelligent. And when they, there’s a test to measure it. And when there were clearer understandings about what behaviors are right and wrong,

Rick: Really starts at the top.

Mary: Yeah.

Jerry: Well, the EOC, again in this study done in 2016 it couldn’t say, Hey, this is the law and it’s is required. But what it recommended was one, civility training in the workplace and part of the reasoning being that if employees treat each other with dignity and respect, well it has this positive effect on limiting Sexual harassment.

Vicky: It also reduces turnover.

Jerry: Can certainly and,

Vicky: It’s good for the business.

Sam: Well it’s good for both sides because when you learn to treat people with dignity and respect and not only are other people not being sexually harassed but you know how to behave, I think a part of the problem is just not knowing what is the correct behavior in the office.

Jerry: It’s called bystander training, under Title IX, which is an education that has become fairly standard and you train people in the environment to raise issues with people who can make changes in the organization either through complaints or to management effectively or to intervene in a situation when they see that something like harassment is occurring.

Rick: So there’s training that EEOC recommends. What about the owners? Is there some documentation that they should be going through this training?

Jerry: Well from the,

Rick: Or do they just pour it down to everybody else, you guys need to pay attention to this while I go do my own thing.

Jerry: From the perspective of the EEOC, it’s organizational training. From top to bottom. All right. But training’s only as good as people knowing what they’re doing that are doing the training and the willingness of the people who are undergoing the training to accept the training.

Vicky: I will tell you, I have trained a number of groups and it’s real interesting how the executive level is too busy to attend to attend. Sure. Absolutely.

Sam: On that note,

Jerry: I have joked that when I conduct middle school for sharks, I usually don’t see minnows leaving…

Rick: That makes no sense to me.

Sam: Let the record show we’re all looking very confused.

Jerry: Where all the sharks are, the people that are out there. Usually a lot of the training that I do is one on one training with people who as part of resolving the sexual harassment complaint, it’s, you know, here’s what you did wrong, here’s what you need to avoid. Okay, so they’re sharks or I’m sending them the minnow school. You will swim out of here and you will sin no more, and I know about that.

Sam: That was a great spirited conversation, and I would like to encourage our listeners to check out the LinkedIn, group, SuperManager for Linkedin and SuperManager on Facebook, those groups, and post your experiences, what you thought about this podcast, your comments, your personal experiences, and your thoughts as well.

Christine: Thanks for listening to SuperManager by CN Video Production. Visit our website at cn-video.com for additional episodes and lots of SuperManager resources or give us a call at 314 VIDEO ME.