How corporate illusions facilitate sexual harassment
Most of us enter the workforce with an expectation, if not a presumption, that we will be able to rely on the integrity of our colleagues and employers to ensure we are treated fairly and with due respect.
We expect such integrity particularly of senior colleagues who have an essential role to play in nurturing the careers of younger members of staff.
When a highly placed senior colleague persistently abuses that position by making what are clearly inappropriate — that is, undesired and unreciprocated — sexual advances (not to be confused with misplaced affection) to junior members of staff, these latter face a very difficult moral dilemma.
On the one hand, they may suffer in passive silence; on the other, they may make a formal complaint to their employer which, more often than not, will win them enmity in the workplace and end up as an expensive court case which there is no guarantee of winning. Sexual harassment often takes place behind closed doors without a third party present, and it can be very difficult to prove.
Ideally, these complaints should be dealt with adequately in the workplace. However, there are grounds to suggest that employers will sometimes side with the senior colleague undoubtedly because he is too useful to the management to lose. In one recent case, for example, an internal investigator stated that a complainant gave “an exaggerated misinterpretation of a fairly innocuous greeting” when she objected to a senior colleague who entered her office and said, “you look gorgeous” before proceeding to “grab hold of her, hold her against him and then kiss her lingeringly on the side of her face”.
In light of such assessments, it is not surprising that the highly placed harasser will continue to walk the same corridors, occupy the same work space and attend the same meetings as the junior complainant.
This partiality is compounded by the fact that an employee in an inferior position, who plays a lesser role in the corporate identity, will be treated less well and, in some cases, face suspension and/or a disciplinary hearing for a similar or lesser allegation.
This corporate partiality explains perhaps why, at one recent Equality Tribunal hearing, the senior counsel acting for the employer, in order to defend the validity of the internal investigation, referred not to the employer but to the alleged harasser (a high-ranking member of staff) as “my client”.
Perhaps surprisingly, it can be female colleagues who are the least supportive of a complainant. Even if they, too, would denounce sexual harassment in general terms or may even have been subject to it themselves, they may still view the complainant as ‘rocking the boat’ and betraying the establishment.
In my own experience, it is in fact the male colleagues who tend to be most outraged that someone in authority should have abused their position in such a way.
Whether or not a case against a sexual harasser is won, the complainant should take comfort in speaking out against such an abuse of position in the workplace: it is one way of shattering another glass partition, the one that separates truth from pristine corporate illusion.
And men should take comfort from knowing that the other glass partition, the one that makes them wary of women lest they misinterpret innocent behaviour as sexual harassment, is an unnecessary construct: the majority of women colleagues know that the majority of men do respect them and we are, in fact, grateful to them for both observing the proper benchmark for correct professional behaviour and for sharing our dismay at the abusive practices of a predatory minority.
Dr Sarah Alyn Stacey
French Department
Trinity College
Dublin 2
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