Women at Work - Why Things Aren’t Better, Yet

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

Many companies are still sorting out the right policies to put in place around sexual harassment. But even where good policies exist, we all need the skills and confidence to respond to and prevent inappropriate behavior at work. Guests: Marianne Cooper and Sarah Beaulieu. Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at Work. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Nicole Torres. I'm Amy Bernstein. And I'm Amy Gallo. Here are a few telling figures about the state of sexual harassment in corporate America. 35% of women report having experienced it. 38% say their company has updated or clarified its policies and procedures in the past year. Only 52% of women think reporting harassment would lead to a fair and effective investigation. This is all from the Women in the Workplace 2018 report. LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company publish it annually after surveying tens of thousands of employees in the U.S. and Canada. I sat down with one of the report's authors,

Marianne Cooper. She's a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Marianne, thanks so much for joining us. Of course, it's good to be here. So I wanted to ask you about this report and specifically about how you reacted to the finding that harassment is still quite prevalent. It's certainly depressing. Agreed. But it's not surprising. The sexual harassment, we've known for some time that prevalence is quite high, higher than most people would probably expect. And the women in the workplace reporters, 35% of women reporting experiencing it. But you can get much higher depending on the jobs that you're looking at, like women working in the restaurant industry or in low paid service work jobs tend to experience it at much higher rates. Right. As an observer of the past, you know, 18 months, I have to say I was somewhat hopeful that there would be some change based on Me Too. Did you expect to see a difference this year given what we've experienced in the past two years, 18 months?

Well, it depends which issue we're talking about. With the prevalence of sexual harassment, it takes a while for, I think, companies to get the right policies in place, get the right practices, enforce the policies that they do have, really kind of look into the belly of the beast, so to speak, decide whether or not they're going to address it and then address it. And all of that takes a lot of time. And so when you're looking at this from the perspective of social change, what we've had is a huge sort of revolutionary watershed kind of moment in which women and others are rising up and saying, we're just not going to take it anymore. The powers that be need to start to change things. But there's a lag between people speaking up and acting out and then companies adopting different ways of organizing things at work. heard your last answer there in that, are you hopeful that in three, five, 10 years, we will see the change based on what's happened with Me Too?

Honestly, I would like to be more hopeful than data for decades has shown me. So the issue is how seriously people are going to take it, and by which I mean leaders, and how seriously they are committed to changing things on the ground inside companies. What I've seen is it's almost sort of an interesting phenomenon in and of itself is that you can give people data about a social problem, and they will see the data, but they will not change the way that they're behaving. The lack of women at the top of companies or whatever else is a socially produced phenomenon. Sociologists and social psychologists and other scholars have documented many, many different explanations for why we see the patterns that we see. And then thinking about how to fix them. When you talk with companies or whatever, you can just look at their budget and tell where their priorities are. So you're

not going to fix systemic sexism and racism when you barely have a D&I team and you're not really providing support for that team. You're not going to fix this problem if you're not even tracking things like how many women and people of color are at different levels, how many women and people of color are getting promoted, what is our numbers on pay equity, things like that. So just like any other business objective that you have a plan, you have a strategy, you have key milestones and key indicators of success. That's the way we have to approach this. I don't see that happening. Right. We are in this conversation so far,

sort of going back and forth between women filling roles in leadership roles in organizations and the issue of sexual harassment. Just for our listeners, can you explain how those two things are connected and why we're talking about them together? Yeah. So sexual harassment is much more likely in environments dominated by men. And it's also more likely to occur when you have few women in leadership. So the idea is that if you have more women in leadership, what the data tends to find is you have lower rates of sexual harassment. And there's probably a few different reasons as to why that happens, but often it can be that women in organizations have more power. If you think about really hyper-masculine environments, I think Susan Fowler's account of Uber and what was

happening there on the ground is the exact kind of environment in which you have this sort of hyper-masculine, hyper-competitive, team members undermining each other, and you get problems like sexual harassment. So there's a lot of what we call these dynamics kind of co-occur is the technical term. So when you have more women at the top, it tends to create a whole different environment. Okay. Let's talk about what has changed in the past year. The numbers of corporations, organizations that have talked about their policies, revisited their policies, that has increased. Am I understanding that correctly? Well, we just started collecting this data,

so we don't have any longitudinal analysis yet. But it's kind of surprising. I mean, you'd ask about, have they clarified their policy and only 60% of employees are saying that their company has done that, which you would think in the wake of Me Too would be like 99% of employees, which again shows this real disconnect between what is sort of alive and well in our culture and in our society, and then what's happening on the ground inside organizations. This disconnect is sort of interesting and hard to explain, but companies usually have a sexual harassment policy. There's just kind of a gap between what the policy states and then what's happening on the ground. Kind of putting it into practice is apparently difficult.

Yeah. So how do you explain the difference between what's happening outside organizations and society and what's happening inside corporations in particular? Well, I think employees do the work they're expected to do. And I think they do the work that they get rewarded for. And I think what this shows is that managers in particular, it is not a part of their performance objectives to ensure safe cultures, to make sure their teams are diverse, and to foster a sort of diverse and inclusive climate inside a company. And if that is not on your list of performance objectives, you're going to focus on whatever is in your objectives. And so there's just a misalignment there. One of the interesting findings was that there was a

discrepancy between how men and women perceived what their organizations were doing, how they were putting policies in place. How do you make sense of that disparity? Well, we've seen it in many different ways over many different questions in the report. There's kind of a his and her story on what's happening on the ground inside companies. And so as an example, we had a question, you know, if you reported sexual harassment, it would be, and we gave people a variety of options to choose from, but 50% of women thought it would be effective, but 70% of men thought it would be effective. We have another question about, you know, disrespectful behavior towards women is quickly addressed. And only 30% of women say

that's true versus about 50% of men. So we have these really large gender gaps, which points to just different experiences on the ground and perhaps a lack of understanding about all the different sort of things that can create what we might call microaggressions or disrespectful behavior. Certain kinds of behavior are just not seen in the same way by some men and by some women. Based on these findings, what would you like our listeners, especially our listeners who are leaders, what do you want them to take away? Well, I think they need to approach this problem like they're approaching every other business objective. And it matters from a bottom line perspective in the sense that diversity, when you have a diverse team or diverse organization, if you leverage that diversity, those teams and those organizations tend to perform better. It's also fundamentally a matter of fairness and equity. Now, women have been outpacing men in higher education since the early 1980s. They're now earning 57% of bachelor's degrees. This is not, it's not a supply problem. The problem is not just going to take care of itself. It really requires active intervention. And one thing I will

say is what we have noticed is that the biggest gender gap in promotion is at that first step up from entry level to manager. I think often what we do is try to solve the problem not at its origin. So while we do need to focus on women in leadership and high potential women, what we really need to focus on is that first step up and making sure that all throughout your pipeline and your organization, you don't have really large disparities. Keep track of that data, monitor it, try to figure out what's happening so that you can solve the problem and really actually create change that's going to last long term in your organization. Right. only 50% of women think reporting would be effective. Because we did a show in an earlier season of this podcast about Me Too, in which Joan Williams said for the first time ever,

she really is encouraging people to report. And I'm curious, based on what you're seeing in this study, whether that feels true to you? And I guess what advice do you give to women who are thinking about reporting? Sure. I think Joan is right that when you look at sort of the arc of history on this issue, this is a much better time than we've ever had. I think more women are speaking up, more women are being believed, more organizations are realizing that they've got a serious problem and need to address it. So all of those are very important and favorable when it comes to speaking up. The sad truth, though, is that women who report are often retaliated against.

And so the best thing to do if a woman is experiencing sexual harassment is get as much information as possible so that you can make the most informed decision that you can. So that's talking to a lawyer, figuring out what your company's policy is, figuring out how to report. Usually a company has outlined somewhere or somebody knows how the steps involved in reporting. Document everything. That is the main advice that people will give you so that you have a record of what happened, who was there, did someone else observe it, the dates, and making sure you keep that documentation not at work but at home so that if you're suddenly retaliated against, you still have access to that. Things like keep a copy of your personnel file because often what happens when a woman comes forward is that she, her character, is really, they go after her, try to discredit her, try to say she's a low performer. So you kind of want to have your ducks all in a row. And again, legal advice is always important. But I think the main thing to think about too is, you know, if no one speaks up,

then we can't move forward. And when someone speaks up, really support them and create a fair process for something to be, you know, thoroughly investigated. Because if a woman speaks up and her company shuts her down, or her company makes her sign some kind of, you know, non-disclosure agreement, it's going to silence other women. And I think what women and other people are saying right now is we don't want to be silenced. We're going to keep speaking up, but we have to be in solidarity with one another to keep that going. My biggest worry is that this huge watershed moment won't get us as far as it possibly could unless we stick together. Because really, the only counterweight to this is women and other allies sticking together. So 18 months ago, I was watching what was happening with Harvey Weinstein and then Me Too.

And I have to say, I thought in a year, things are going to be so different. Can you help me just personally, like, how should I make sense of why things aren't different? You know, it's a frustrating feeling. And I'm curious, as someone who's steeped in this, how you deal with that frustration yourself. So sexism, misogyny, racism is deeply embedded into our culture. It's sort of baked into processes. And so people speaking up doesn't automatically undo that. I mean, there are systems of, you know, not like cultural beliefs about women making these things up, even though only if we're just talking about sexual assault, for example, there's been studies about false accusations, and there's just as many false

accusations of sexual assault as other kinds of things. But there are these larger beliefs that somehow people are making it up, that they're not telling the truth, that they're out for their own social gain. It's really hard to dispel all of that. It's really hard to come to terms with how devalued our society is, the devalued view of women that our society holds. It's really hard to come to terms with the fact that a lot of people don't think that some of these things are that big a deal when really they are. So we're in a cultural moment of change in which new norms have to be established and enforced. And it's really hard to do that. Whose voices are believed? Who gets to speak their truth? All of those things are deeply tied to sexism, racism, classism, and all of that. I think at the core, this is a fundamental revolutionary moment in who gets to speak and who gets to be heard. And that doesn't get resolved in 18 months because we're asking a lot of people in power to just share.

And historically, that doesn't happen that easily. And usually asking nicely doesn't lead to much change. And so it's sort of women and other people holding the powers that be, putting their feet to the fire and kind of saying, it's great that you're signed on to whatever pledge or whatever else you're doing. So let's see what's happening on the ground. I mean, literally almost every organization and institution in our country would have to change for us to see real reductions in prevalence. All our universities. Right.

And that's a lot. That's a lot. But I think it's, we're in a better place than we've ever been. And I think once you really believe that it's happening and understand the size of it, it gets people to act. So hopefully we're at that sort of point, a tipping point, if you will, on this issue. But I don't think it's going to be significantly better in 18 months, but maybe in, you know, my children's lifetime. Let's keep working. Yep.

All right. Thanks so much. Thank you. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities.

Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Hey, listeners, if you want to hear from more leaders to help you answer questions like, should I talk about my anxiety at work? Or how do I claim my leadership power? Then you should listen to TED Business, hosted by Columbia Business School professor Madhupe Akinnola. Thank you. to TED Business wherever you get your podcasts. As Marianne said, companies are still sorting out the right policies to put in place and how to enforce them effectively. But no matter what companies do, employees, both men and women, need the skills and confidence to respond to sexual harassment. Sarah Beaulieu trains leaders and employees to respond to and prevent inappropriate behavior in their companies.

She's also working on a book that goes into depth on how to handle specific scenarios we might all face at work. And she's here to talk us through what to say in various difficult situations. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Sarah, you heard my conversation with Marian Cooper, and I'm curious what stood out to you about those findings. Are you seeing the same thing they are in terms of not much progress over the past year? I see the same thing in terms of progress being slow. And I think one of the challenges is that when you're looking, as you talked about, is looking at these issues from a cultural or systemic perspective or even an organizational perspective is that they're slow moving. But I think what I see is that culture is conversation and that when you engage in conversation with people and teach

people how to have conversations, that there is a huge willingness to learn how to do things differently. It just takes a while. When you say the conversation, what do you mean? I mean the conversations about the culture that permits sexual harassment to take place. So I think sometimes we're really focused on incidents of sexual harassment, which then lead us to conversations about the rules, about what happened, about what could have happened, about how it was handled. And those are really important conversations and disruptive conversations that are creating some of the changes that need to happen in our society. But the conversations

that we can have as human beings with each other are going to be the conversations that will create a culture that will be more safe and inclusive for everyone. Right. So what skills would you say are needed to be better at identifying when something bad is happening? Empathy. Seeing the world through somebody else's eyes. That was something that came out that there's huge differences in the ways that people experience the same situation or same conversation. And so somebody might feel like, gosh, well, that's just a hug. Like, who cares? Like, what's the big deal? And somebody else is it's the 17th hug, unwanted hug that they've been given by somebody bigger than them that day. Two is there is this expectation. I think people think that you should speak up when you know

exactly the right thing to say and that it'll feel great when you do it. You'll feel like a superhero for intervening. And I think we send this myth and message out to people. And the truth is, is that it's going to feel horribly uncomfortable and that your heart is going to pound and you're going to question whether you're saying the right thing. You're going to have all of those things going through your head. And so it doesn't matter what gender you are, that when you are speaking up, the process of speaking up is incredibly uncomfortable. So if you are expecting it to be something else, then you're not doing it. So I think it's getting people comfortable with that. And then it is absolutely, I think,

giving people a chance to practice. And so a lot of the compliance training that happens is the compliance training is designed to show you what harassment is or isn't, not to really unpack the conversations that have allowed it to take place. And so you need people to practice those kinds of conversations ahead of time so that you're going to have people that will give each other a little bit of a break. And then the last thing is I just I want people's questions and to create an environment where people aren't getting shamed for saying, well, like, is it OK to give somebody a compliment? I hear that. I hear the complaints about that question a lot. And it's like, well, what do you mean by a compliment? It's like, great. Like if you've got a question, like, let's unpack your question, because a lot of times what it's getting at is some kind of misunderstanding about intention versus impact or holding two things to be true at the same time. The questions, a lot of the questions about reporting and understanding why it's so hard to report. But at the same time, if you don't report, organizations can't take action against harassment.

Those are uncomfortable things to hold. So when you find yourself dealing with, you know, clueless or possibly even criminal men, how do you get to the point where you can actually say something? How do you do that? How do you make that leap? I think it's a lot of practice. And an intervention conversation in which you are the victim of harassment is that's also to me just an unrealistic expectation that we're setting for people. around here who could intervene on their behavior or who care or or you start to think about I'm not the only person who's being impacted by the situation are there other people that I can bring in off the sidelines can you tell us a story of a time you've done that brought in other people

who have been nearby sure so I was traveling for a speaking engagement and I was very tired I had had a long day so I decided to go have a drink at a bar and have dinner and wanted to just enjoy the view and a man started speaking to me and I was I was trying to you know at first I did the no no thank you like how's your dinner great it's great like go back to my writing and and he persisted and and eventually asked me I turned to him I said look like I'm just trying to enjoy my dinner alone. And he said, oh, I'm not trying to bother you. You look like an actress.

Now he starts commenting on my appearance. You look like an actress. What do you do for work? So I told him that I train workplaces on sexual harassment. It still did not deter him. And at this point, I noticed that there were two other gentlemen sitting to my right who were noticing the interaction. And so at some point, they smirked a little bit. And so I knew I wasn't alone in that situation. And so ultimately, what I ended up doing is I

turned to these two men and I asked, I was like, so what keynote are you going to tomorrow at your conference that I didn't know that they were going to a conference? I just made it up. And they started engaging in a conversation with me. And what that did is it paused. So it stopped the harassment from continuing. It allowed me to have a little bit of breathing room. It distracted them. And then it turned out at this particular bar, the bartending staff had been trained. And so this guy tried to buy me a drink and they didn't let him. And so when I asked for my check, they just gave me my check and I paid. And then I complained to the manager. So after that whole scenario kind of ended, did you talk to the two guys you mentioned? I did. On my way out, I stopped and just said, hey, thank you. What you did was perfect because you gave me a, you stopped him from doing what he was doing. I could tell you didn't want that to happen.

I was like A plus for bystander intervention. And then when I got back to my room that night, I was still very just activated and energized about the whole thing. And so they had been wearing these polo shirts with logos on them. So I looked up their company, some Canadian company, and emailed the CEO of their company. And I said, look, I just want to thank you because you had two lovely employees who were out representing your company well. Could you please also send along my thanks to their high school teachers, their parents, anybody that they worked for, any company that they've worked for before you, because they did a good job representing. It strikes me that one of the things you said, it's an unrealistic expectation for someone who is the subject of the harassment to intervene. And yet, I do feel like

in those moments when it's happened to me, I feel completely frozen and I feel completely alone. Right. So I think that that story really, in some ways, it's about looking to make eye contact with other people. Right. Just to sort of at least help you, you know, knowing you're going to need help, looking for the helpers in the room. Absolutely. And you are not alone. And I was debriefing the conversation with another male colleague the next day who was also in town for the same conference. And what he said is he's seen that situation play out many times and often doesn't know what to say and isn't sure how to say it and doesn't want to seem like he's trying to now make a pass at somebody. And so there's just that awkwardness that goes around. But I think that if we have more proactive conversations ahead of time, where it's like,

look, like if you're at the, if you're at a bar and you see somebody who's being harassed, you can buy the guy a drink and send it to the other end of the bar. There's, you can, you can make up a conversation and say, you know, are you okay? Do you need any help? You can alert the bartender. There's lots of things that people can do. And that's just I mean, that's a bar example. But I think there's plenty of workplace examples that are are similar. intervention would be harder because, you know, maybe the people around they also know the like offending party, and they might not want to, like, come up with the worst interpretation of what's happening and step in because they don't want to isolate one person, you know, so I feel like it would be different than at a bar where you see some stranger, you know, acting weird, you want to step in, in the workplace when you know everyone involved, isn't that to step in. In the workplace, when you know everyone involved, isn't that, is that harder? Do you, should you act differently? Do you have advice for that type of situation? I think it does make it hard. It absolutely makes it harder. And that's why I think

that doing practice conversations ahead of time so that people can understand what page you're on and be on the same page about those dynamics. So one thing that I'll hear a lot about is younger sales representatives who are out at a dinner with an important client and there's just some kind of inappropriate interaction or just very close talking or putting your hand on somebody's back or shoulder. And so things that maybe this person has it under control. And so sometimes there's an assumption that this maybe this person has it under control. And so sometimes there's an assumption that this young woman might have it under control, but there's six other colleagues there. So there's certainly the conversation that can happen, an intervention

that could take place at that dinner table. But most of the intervention actually happens in conversations that take place before you got there. So understanding, so if you're a salesperson, understanding that your manager has your back. Has your manager told you that you don't have to accept inappropriate behavior and that they always want to know about it? What do your sales incentives look like? Do you know if the CEO has your back and would make a call to the client CEO and tell them that they've got a representative who has a problem?

So when you think about all of the conversations and even just running through some of those scenarios ahead of time helps people feel more empowered in that moment because they know, as you were saying before, is that there are helpers who are there. But the time that you want to be knowing if somebody is a helper is not when an incident is happening. It's before that incident takes place. Right. But in the moment, I've heard a lot of men say, I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Right. It wasn't clear if she wanted help, if she was receptive to the attention.

And I, you know, I wasn't sure that if I stepped in, I would be, you know, like making her feel weak. I hear that. I hear that. I hear that a lot. What I try to reflect back when I hear that is that the intervention is on the culture and it's not on the person. And so what I don't want is I don't want to be working in an environment where this kind of behavior goes unchecked. And if somebody knows, again, it goes back to if I know ahead of time

that, hey, like I'm one of your colleagues. And like if I see something that that what makes it what kinds of things make you feel uncomfortable? Because if I know that you're a handshake person and somebody is coming in to hug you, then it is on me to say now, like, she doesn't want to hug. Don't hug her. Right. That just sounds so hard to say to say well i actually put in the position of you know a friend who comes in for a hug and i don't want it and i've now we've turned it into a joke you know hands off yes yeah right because i got really tired of it i well, I have called out men who, and in a humorous way of like, oh, no hug for the guy. It's just to make people aware. It's like aware of what they do. Do you know this person wants a hug? Right. So say you report something. What should you, you report to

HR, right? What should you expect? What happens? So there's reporting something that happened to you, but there's also, let's say you walk by a manager's office late at night and you see them leaning over very close in an awkward way with a more junior employee and you decide you want to do the right thing and maybe you don't have the skill of intervening in the most so you have a choice right you have a choice about intervening in the moment or not intervening in the moment or saying something after the fact or not saying something after the fact but let's say in this case you decide to go to to hr and you report it most often what will happen is human resources will have a conversation and you may

not you don't know what you saw you did the the right thing in my, from my perspective by reporting, but maybe they're engaged in a consensual affair. Maybe, maybe they told the same story about what happened. Maybe they told different stories. Maybe this person is a little bit of a close toucher, but the junior person doesn't want to report it or, or confirm that that was in fact what happened um but again is when when you were doing that so i think there's there is this discomfort that comes along with like you may not see the outcome of that and sometimes it's really frustrating especially if you don't know that that's how these kinds of reports typically go down is that you're not always going to get reported back to you and then you have to go to work with all these people so

then then you're seeing the manager and they're kind of looking at you while you're getting coffee and you're wondering whether they know that it was you that said something. And so there is a series of discomfort. get in your car, go home, and then hope that the person who is in the office, if something was happening, is going to be able to have the power to report. So again, I think there are a number of choices that you can have. And talking to the person that you saw in the office is also one of them and perhaps a good first conversation to figure out what it is that you saw. But the reporting is challenging. I heard a story recently about an organization where several people went to HR to complain about a particular man and his behavior. And then, you know, HR and management said, we did an investigation. Our investigation is over and the man was still there.

And so I'm curious, when you talk about the expectations when you report, there was a lot of negative feeling around what did they do? This guy's still here after all these reports. What should those people have expected from their HR? It's always hard to say after the fact what somebody else should have done. So I'm very careful not to armchair quarterback somebody else's decisions. However, I think it's what I would be curious about is I would be curious what was reported and documented. I would also be curious about whether there was some accountability that was not visible.

So its termination is very visible. A warning is not visible. But the challenge with that is that there's three people who went and this person now has a warning that says if anything else is reported, you're out. But nobody wants to report because now there's this whole whisper network around this person of like, well, we've reported it and now human resources didn't do anything. Nothing happened. So what's the point of reporting? And that doesn't just impact that situation, it impacts other situations. And so the trust between human resources and employees is a real challenge that, again, avoiding the conversation about the

trust issues is not going to make it better. And so you might as well just put it out in the open where it's like, look, it's kind of a black hole when it goes in. And for a number of different reasons and oftentimes out of legal protection for the company, but that there's much more that we can do as individual employees, as managers, as team leaders to help create accountability around behavior and relationships in our own teams. Would you advise in that situation to go to, if you were, you know, one of those women who had reported and then saw that nothing had changed or happened, would you advise going to your manager or HR and just asking for more information?

Absolutely. If that was something that you wanted is if you wanted more information and wanted to have a better understanding of what was happening, you could ask for more information. You might not get it. And that would feel frustrating. You can ask why they wouldn't give you the information. You could ask, if I see something in the future, would you want to know about it or not? I mean, I would be thinking, I would think about, you know, I would think about what I could be documenting as well. And I think it's just also recognize that in that situation, if I was somebody who had reported that, that it's okay that you would walk away from that situation feeling like you didn't trust human resources or trust your company. Yeah. Given the statistic from the research we discussed earlier that so few women believe these issues are going to be addressed appropriately, how, as like a single HR manager, do you encourage confidence in people who you do want to come report to you if something happens. That's a tough one. I mean, trust is about time and consistency. And so I think it's having

reasonable expectations about it. And also, again, going back to what can you be transparent about and the degree to which you can be transparent about it on a consistent basis. Yeah. Well, and it occurs to me as an HR manager, it just might be a topic of conversation you want to be engaging in regularly so people know it's something you care about. That's a great one. One of the examples I gave, if there are five HR managers at your company picnic and one of them's wearing a t-shirt from the last rape crisis center gala and three of them are wearing sports t-shirts. Like which one are you going to report to or feel the most comfortable reporting to? Right. So that's another manager one which either HR or manager is just supporting survivors of sexual abuse and assault. When you think about the numbers that

will come into your workplace already having experienced some kind of sexual abuse or assault, not in your workplace and not sexual harassment in your, that's such an easy win in terms of just aligning yourself with like, this is not a place where we want people to be suffering in this way. And so that's, that's a, that's again, just a really easy one that you can do. Yeah. ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. You mentioned the Whisper Network, and I'm sort of wondering what your thoughts are when you yourself are kind of drawn into it. You hear something about, you know, a guy in the office.

What's the right thing to do? Do you pass along the whisper? What do you do? it's a disclosure conversation so that I would approach that differently. But if it's, I heard about that person over there doing, doing something, I, I tend to not pass that information along. I, I might pass it along to that guy's friend or depending if I, if I knew the person,

but I also tend to be somebody who has less hesitation about speaking up because of what my background and experience is and so and i recognize that that's a privilege for me to feel that way and so but it's but i do think about where's listen you know you're i know you're friends with this person but they they have a reputation here for being somebody that women don't want to work with. And if you care about them, then you might want to talk to them about it. Right. So you go to that friend and you say that, you know, I've heard these rumors about your friend. How does that guy then go talk to the person who's supposedly the harasser? What does he say? There's no one thing that you can say, and it probably will go badly.

Hey, I've noticed you're kind of touchy feely with your colleagues. Have you thought about that just in the context of all these me too conversations that we're having using a training? This is why I think it is good to do training. And the person might get mad at you. And so, you know, again, it's like the person might get mad at you, but that you're giving them feedback on their behavior that is important and critical feedback. So I don't think a lot of people feel confident enough yet to do that. And so I think just going back to the slowness of change to happen, oftentimes I think the same thing will happen. Well, what could they possibly say? But again, if we can't even imagine ourselves having these kinds of conversations, we can't imagine the world to

change. So we're going to practice them. We're going to mess them up a few times. And, and I, I mean, I've had that situation where I've given feedback to somebody where I said, like, you know, I'm was just, I'm concerned about you. I care about you that I, I just, I'm wondering about this interaction that you're having. And the person did, the thing did, like the conversation did blow up. And what I try to tell myself in those moments is that the landmine was already there. I didn't want it to go off in my face, but it did. And so, but it's those tensions that are existing and the behavior that's happening is that those are things, I didn't create those and I didn't create them by speaking up about them. They were already there and I made

sure that it didn't blow up on somebody who was more vulnerable than me. Yeah. And you don't want the crime to be that you didn't at least try to prevent the trouble and help someone. Right. Yeah. I do want to talk about retaliation, however, because I do think there's a lot of what you're saying is about needing the courage to speak up, taking risks and doing so. And I think what we've seen is that often, especially for women who've raised these topics, there has been retaliation from managers, sometimes from HR. And I'm curious, how do you deal with that? And how do you know if that's going to happen to you before you make the assessment of whether to speak up? So if we are expecting the people with the least amount of power to be the ones who speak up, then of course there's going to be retaliation. And so part of it is just creating power in numbers. But I think the retaliation is real. And so, I mean, the thing that I do and that I'm very clear about is that if you choose not to report,

that is a valid choice and a choice that absolutely makes sense given everything that we know about, not just the formal retaliation, but social retaliation or just if you are somebody who may be experienced sexual abuse or a sexual assault and are emotionally re-triggered by an unsafe work environment, that you do what you have to do to take care of yourself and whatever choice you make is right. meantime, let's try to empower some more people who can start to speak up and intervene on the culture so that we don't have to continue to face incidents like this, which is then reporting them causes retaliation. So my focus tends to always just to be to go back to the prevention. Right. So if you are a leader in an organization that's very interested in making progress in this issue, having these proactive discussions, but you bring it up and you just get blank stares or you get, you know, let's focus on something else. You know, you just keep getting pushback. How can you make progress despite that hesitancy from people around you? Well, it won't be one conversation.

So recognizing that it's a series of conversations and a series of ways of bringing people along. So I tend to think about most sexual harassment training as an internal communication strategy. So if you put yourself in charge of your sexual harassment prevention and response internal communication strategy, then I would be thinking about my peers, be thinking about helping them understand the risks to productivity, that if our organization doesn't have psychological safety, we're not going to be productive.

We've got some financial and legal risks that are associated with this topic that we should really understand. We have serious reputational risks. At any point, somebody could pick up the phone and complain about the organization in a very public way. And that would be much more expensive than investing in a little more training on this topic. I think there are tons of ways that if you are overseeing a team and you have a budget to be thinking about, you don't need to wait for human resources to come to you with online compliance training that's mandatory for everybody. You can just start doing some of your own work on this. And the more work that you do, and a lot of it's around conflict and feedback and bystander

intervention, is that there's a bunch of just really easy, quick wins. And it's less about finding the perfect one. And it's more about just creating a series of conversations to allow the conversation to continue and to practice some of these scenarios and to talk through the different issues around both prevention and response at a team level. You don't have to wait for your CEO to get on board or for human resources to roll out some company-wide training

to to make a difference on this we we published an article from Kathleen Reardon that had a spectrum of sexual misconduct and I felt like that was like you could just even print out that article and have a conversation with two or three other people like where do you think these things fall what would we do what does our organization I, I can see the sort of simple conversation starters, but you at the same time want to make a big impact. So I appreciate you saying, you know, sort of start small. Start small. And have realistic expectations. Share something on LinkedIn. I mean, the number of people, I do surveys going into

organizations, the number of people who said they've never shared anything on the topic of sexual harassment or violence on social media, just share an article on LinkedIn. Let's lower expectations. Baby steps. Baby steps. So Sarah, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. I have a lot of thoughts. I know. Nicole, what are some of the thoughts flying through your head? I think one thing, I really like this point about why, how to kind of prepare yourself to intervene in certain situations. You have to realize that like these, it's not going to be comfortable. Like you're not going to say something, walk away feeling great. You know, you're going to have to prepare for this feeling terrible, uncomfortable, uncertain. And I was thinking about one of the reasons why I think a lot of people do not speak up or are afraid to speak up is that they're not sure what's going on.

I'm still wondering, what do you do in that situation? How do you kind of alleviate the concerns about whether you're seeing something or when you're not sure about what you're seeing i have a couple of thoughts um one of them is if you're not sure don't come in hot you know don't come in with hey leave her alone right maybe it's hey uh mary um great to see i want to talk to you about that meeting today yeah Just see what happens there. That's good advice. Yeah. what's the right thing to do? And my sense from what Sarah was saying is sometimes you just do something and it may not be the right thing and you may look back on it five years later

and go, wow, I would have handled that differently or the conversation may blow up. But I think the problem is the decision becomes paralyzing. It's making me think of a situation at a offsite for a previous company that I worked for where there was, you know, lots of alcohol involved. It was a big party. And I remember seeing these two people intensely involved in this conversation. And the man, it was a man and a woman, and the man kept touching

the woman. And it was one of those situations where you're like, I think she wants to be in that conversation, but he's someone who has authority over her. Does she not? And then there was sort of like a lot of whispering going on around it. And none of us ever did anything, you know, as far as I know, nothing ever came of it. But it did. Looking back on it, why didn't I just go over and say, hey, do you guys want to dance? Right? Like, why? Why didn't I just intervene just in case something was going on? It's a hard thing to do. It's really hard. Yeah.

It's really hard. I mean, you don't want to, you know, if the two people in the office whom Sarah mentioned wanted to be in that situation, the last thing you want to do is say, hey, I saw you guys leaning over the desk together right on the other hand you know maybe the thing to do in that situation is to say to whoever you're closer to um you know the door was open right when you guys were in there right i don't know i don't have there are no easy answers to this but i think your point about not coming hot like are you okay what was going on right like not presuming you know but

just asking questions or even saying hey the door was open and just leaving it giving the person the opportunity to clarify or to ask for help or to say oh gosh that's embarrassing but yeah i wanted to be in there. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that worries me in the, and we've talked about this before, is in the dynamics here, is I think that sometimes people feel like they need to be 100% sure of what they saw, that something happened before they say something. And I think that just reinforces the silence of victims or even the silence of bystanders is that this is messy. It's not going to be 100 percent clear or crystal clear what's happened or who perpetrated or who's the victim. And we still need to talk about it. Totally. And in fact, if you're the less powerful person in this scenario, you may not even realize something is going on. Right. I mean, if you've ever been in this situation, what can happen is you're just like you're you're incredulous you cannot you're asking yourself wait a minute what's going on what just happened i must have misunderstood that

or or did what i think happened just happen right yeah i remember right after me too one of our colleagues asked me you know have is this is this personal for you have you ever had an experience and I was like no and then I like then listed five things that had happened I was like oh right I just hadn't thought about them that way right the boss who asked me out the I mean I had a client when I was a consultant who I loved he was of all the people I interacted with he was funny he was he was just I always loved being in meetings with him and there was you know a time he showed me a really inappropriate image on his computer and I just thought I remember just thinking just pretend this didn't happen so then you can still have fun with him and I was like what you know what and it

it's and it we continue to have a good relationship He's a great guy. It was much easier for foot in their mouth and said a really weird thing. And, like, it's awkward and uncomfortable, but we're going to ignore it to save face for everyone. Like, taken to an extreme, that could be really, really dangerous, really bad. But I think that happens on a smaller scale a lot of the time. Yeah. And I think what we've learned from the research we've published from the past two years is that those offenses,

unfortunately, do add up and they create an environment that allows more serious offenses. And that's the part that worries me about my own behavior of dismissing these actions in the past. That's our show. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Amy Gallo. own behavior of dismissing these actions in the past. Erica Truxler makes our discussion guides, and J.M. Olajars is our copy editor.