Workplace Skeeziness
Rising Professionals and Sexual Harassment
I’ll start with a story an early careerist told me.
Her first day on the internship, Samantha (let’s call her) finds herself in the elevator with an older gentleman, Zack (also not his real name). They have a few floors to go, so she shakes off the nervousness of the coming interview with a bit of chipper back-and-forth. Turns out Zack is the general manager at the firm where Samantha’s interviewing. A good connection, she thinks. The door dings, it’s her floor, and she’s off to the interview, with hardly another thought for Zack.
It’s relatively tempting to suggest to younger colleagues that skeeziness is just the way the world is—so, you know, just hang tough. But such bystander resignation is a kind of complicity.
Until he shows up again, after she lands the position. “Hey Samantha,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for years, and I don’t remember interns’ names. But I remember yours.” The whole thing seems weird, but she has plenty to do in her first big person’s job. She tries to put the best spin on Zack’s behavior, because she needs this work.
But geez, Zack shows up a lot, sometimes even standing over her shoulder as she works. Her coworkers tell her: “He’s never been one to come in like this.” Samantha talks about it with her friends after work. But nobody says anything to Zack.
Then one night, at a company-wide blues fest, things get worse. As a low-income, young-adult, brand-new professional, Samantha is here for the fest. Free food. Free drinks. Stories to tell, jokes to share, connections to make, networks to fill in.
But again, she can’t get away from Zack. He keeps sidling up, asking questions, staring. “What kind of drink do you like?” he asks at one point. Keeping things low-key, she says she enjoys the occasional whiskey. Zack disappears for awhile and then shows up with a bottle, inviting her to a back room, offering her a drink. He’s still staring, awaiting reciprocity. She takes the smallest sip in the history of sips and gets out of the room as fast as she can.
“Hey Samantha,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for years, and I don’t remember interns’ names. But I remember yours.”
On the last day of the internship, Zack asks Samantha to lunch. She tells him she’s dating someone else. He pushes her to go anyway. He’s going to get drunk in his office, he says, if she doesn’t go out with him.
A coworker shows up and intervenes, “Zack, you need to leave her alone.”
Later, in conversation, that same coworker asked Samantha why she hadn’t complained about Zack’s behavior. Samantha told me she asked herself the same question.
Answer? She didn’t know who to report the general manager to. Answer? She didn’t want to be a complainer. Answer? She needed letters of recommendation and a positive supervisor evaluation. So, her response to sexual harassment was little more than communication paralysis.
I think it’s safe to say that if there’s a mode switch that would make this situation better, it’s not from Samantha. In fact, I think I put my initial question wrong: it’s not “What mode needs to switch?” so much as “Whose mode needs to switch?”
I found the beginnings of an answer in conversation for this Substack with my colleague Dr. Jennifer VanAntwerp, a scholar on workplace harassment. Perhaps my favorite thing about her work for the co-authored book Sex, Gender, and Engineering is that she doesn’t hold back from asking herself unpleasant questions. She noted in a public presentation about the book that engineering has historically been a male-dominated field, so it’s been relatively tempting for her to suggest to younger colleagues that skeeziness is just the way the world is—so, you know, just hang tough. But such bystander resignation is a kind of complicity, VanAntwerp notes. Maybe the best path towards eliminating sexual harassment at work is to teach bystanders the role they can play in stories of abuse, discrimination, and harassment.
The question is not “What mode needs to switch?” so much as “Whose mode needs to switch?”
When I went back to my previous interviewees, they had stories, too. Nothing melodramatic—but quietly difficult nonetheless. Another woman professional—let’s call her Robin—noted about seemingly well-intentioned comments at work:
I think they really thought were going to be compliments, but I just ended up being disappointed that my WORK wasn't seen…. In a meeting with a distributor after a long presentation, the first comment a guy makes is that it's nice that our company finally hired someone attractive. Meant to be flattering or whatever, but I worked really hard on the presentation. Ya know?
Here’s what a rising professional I’ll call Suzie had to say:
I had one role when I worked in the nonprofit sector where this happened more frequently than I had ever experienced before…. Looking back, what is interesting in this is that the people who should have been embarrassed weren't…. I certainly was. Going to my boss to mention it was a bit mortifying, because sometimes it was an accumulation of "little" things and sometimes it was a little more overt. It makes you question whether or not you can tolerate doing the work that you're hired to do.
My own takeaway from these stories is how easy it is to overlook the bystander. The coworker, the manager, the executive director—whoever it is, they can and should make the mode-switch.
In Samantha’s story, the bystander made things worse by asking the victim why she hadn’t said something sooner. In Suzie’s story, by contrast, the bystander made things better: “I was fortunate to have a male supervisor…who was great at listening and stepping in to prevent further incidents.” Robin put it more bluntly: “I have not found a good way to advocate for myself, but damn is it important for men in positions of power to advocate for safe workplaces for women.”
I expected that most of my respondents would have stories of male aggression against females. But one of my interviewees talked about how she herself was accused of sexual impropriety after she assured a coworker, “No one’s going to bust your balls over this”—a phrase she took to be innocent, but which (along with other hostile actions from her coworker) eventually compelled her to leave.
It's not surprising, I guess, that there’s more than one way to harass and discriminate in the workplace. But there are ways to change workplace culture for the better, and one good place to start is to become the best kind of bystander.