Poll in a moment. The results will be private for reasons left as an exercise for the student.
I have worked at the company for 35 years. It is a small business, so everyone knows what is going on company wide. We have had one case os sexual harassment in that amount of time. It was very obvious and serious. The perpetrator was gone in two days.
Yes and no. We do home health care, and so sexual harassment is a really complicated issue. Is the old guy with advanced Alzheimer’s whose wife just died sexually harassing a nurse when he makes comments about how pretty she is and can she get him Viagra? Everyone has their own interpretation and their own comfort level and their own way of handling these sorts of situations, and our boss is okay with that. If we ever feel unsafe or unwilling to return to a patient for any reason, we just call our supervisor and tell her we’re giving up that patient. Another nurse will be sent out to see if they are a better fit with that patient.
So yes, it’s handled well in terms of no one needing to be exposed to it past their level of tolerance…but due to the nature of the work, another person will be sent into the same situation. It’s pretty difficult for our firm to drop a patient entirely due to patient abandonment issues, although it does occasionally happen if we run out of nurses willing to see a patient with a reputation.
Never had a case against another employee that I know of.
It’s hard to say, since I haven’t seen a case of it. But the college has a strong policy and I would think they take any allegations seriously.
I’ve been fortunate and never had a case in my vicinity. Racial harassment? Yes, and he was gone PDQ.
I’m male. I’m the boss. I currently have an entirely female staff. No matter how you look at it, I’m fucked.
How so?
I was kidding. It has never been a problem, but if it were it would likely be me on the receiving end.
My workplace is now home.
Previous workplaces - the first one did - they weren’t great at it to start, but they got better over time. They understood the difference between “workplace banter acceptable to both parties” and “sexual harrasment.”
The second - not an ethical company. It never came up, was never part of training, we never had an ‘if this happens talk to’ contact. And from what I saw of other misdeeds, if it had happened it would have been completely and totally a matter of who was involved.
We had a guy here who made inappropriate comments to just about every woman. We all knew he was to be avoided; I don’t know of anyone who formally complained. One day there was an article in the paper about him because he had broken into an ex-girlfriend’s house and was found there getting friendly with some of her stuff. At work, he was moved to a different building, but retains the same job and crosses paths with us on a regular basis. And yeah, he’s skeevy as ever.
Another man, who is much more of a big shot, also broke into an ex-girlfriend’s house and was arrested. I don’t know that he suffered any work-related discipline.
One of my husband’s employees (we work for the same company) was harassing another of his employees. My husband passed the problem to HR, and I waited with interest to see what would happen, but before any outcome, the harasser got a new job (with a company that we work very closely with and we will very likely continue to cross paths with him in the future).
There are just some people here that will be inappropriate given the chance, we all know who they are and try not to give them any opportunities.
Last week, a doctor told me he was planning to go home and relax, as he made a jerking-off gesture. I just acted as though I hadn’t seen it and mentally added him to the list. Little stuff like that happens all the time, but it’s not worth making a fuss about.
You know, as fewer and fewer places tolerate this sort of thing, a sort of Darwinian shuffle is going to concentrate the true incorrigibles into smaller and smaller places, as they get bumped from place to place until they find the spot where they won’t get fired, and sit there.
My two partners and I (the entire business) encourage sexual harassment.
Each of our sexual habits, preferences, appetites are questioned and ridiculed on a daily basis.
It’s a system that appears to work for us but very doubtful as a policy should we expand the business.
I have to assume my company takes it seriously because all us management types just had to complete a sexual harassment policies training course. However, at the store level that I am at, the staff is 95% female, we rarely have more than 5 employees at a time and they rarely work in groups of more than 2 at a time, so staff interaction is pretty limited. Most of the time it is just me and my boss, day after day…
Dude might tie flies for relaxation and you were the one who misunderstood the gesture. Or not.
Yes and no. I know of couple of people who have lost their jobs for sexual harassment when the laws were just coming into force, but they must have been pretty bad for that to happen. Another guy was caught giving promotions and bonuses to one of his employees in return for sex and he was just transferred to another job. I’m not sure that what the man or the woman in that case were doing can be called ‘sexually harassment’ but all the rest of us were certainly victims.
In my previous job, an older guy thought it was “funny” to come up behind woman and grab them in a big bear hug. The first time he did it to me, I slammed him into the wall.
Both of us complained to management, and they had a seminar on sexual harassment, with the bottom line that any inappropriate remarks would be cause for dismissal, and any inappropriate touching would lead to immediate dismissal.
In my new job, it hasn’t happened yet.
This, but replace “college” with “hospital.” I picked “female but don’t know.”
Part of the issue is that there are patients in addition to coworkers. I do know of colleagues in another office who refuse to be alone in an exam room with a couple of their male patients, as those guys get overly “friendly” (suggestive) and are always trying to touch their hands/arms/wherever they can reach. Nothing overtly abusive or aggressive, but enough to make them feel icked out. I don’t know if they have told their supervisor or what, or if (as noted above) these particular patients had strokes/neurological problems that make them prone to inappropriate behavior, etc.
I picked “female, but don’t know.” My boss is female, so it’s not a problem for me. She did tell an 18 year old male co-worker about a recent session of drunken backseat acrobatics with her husband, and he ran out of the office beet-red, and telling me, “You need to go listen to her, I can’t!” But he was grinning from ear-to-ear and giggling. He wasn’t uncomfortable around her later.
It has been a problem at many jobs in the past. In the past 20 years, at 3 different jobs, I have had extremely inappropriate things said to me by four members of management.
I voted for “I’m female, and management treats it as is proper.” It’s still a little complicated, which I think reflects that the fact that it’s a complicated issue in general.
I work at a large college, so you know, it’s higher education so the tone is generally out there that the institution takes issues of sexual harassment seriously, even with an understanding that due to our environment, and the fact that we’re talking about students, and potential media issues, the threshold is probably even tighter than in other environments. Issues about faculty/staff - students taken extremely seriously.
It’s maybe a little different with situations among employees. Things are still very kosher in that no one is being denied a promotion because they won’t have sex with their supervisor, no one’s ass is being grabbed. Situational sexual harassment is more slippery, those cases where there are more subjective factors, the whole “I didn’t feel comfortable” thing. Our size makes this challenging, too – I believe in general, managers are committed to responding to these kinds of incidents, but when you have so many individual managers, their responses are going to be somewhat different.
At my company, my department is all male (in software engineering, not that uncommon), and occasionally the guys will complain about their wives at lunch - sometimes more than is normal but I figure we all need to blow off steam at some point.
Never actually dealt with harassment, but I’m a dude, so I’m less of a target anyway.