I didn’t claim that it was? Really not sure why you’re arguing points that aren’t being made. I’m disputing the claim that the extremely harsh statement about company policy reflects the actual company policy by pointing out that in my experience (and apparently yours too) the actual company policy isn’t what they claim in HR-approved classes.
I disagree; corporate policy as implemented is the only valid reflection of corporate policy. If the stated policy is “any accusation results in immediate firing” but the way the company acts effectively has “actually, that only happens if we don’t care about you or want to get rid of you anyway” tacked on, then it’s absurd to treat the stated policy as being the policy they adhere to. Their actual policy is what they DO when a situation occurs.
Your position in this thread is (from your OP) that “there isn’t [a significant risk of a supervisor getting fired based on an accusation of sexual misconduct from one subordinate] and that it virtually never happens”. If corporate policy is to do just that, and the only exceptions are “long-time, respected manager[s] who’[re] friends with the higher ups”, then that argues against your position here.
If you want to revise the position in your OP to state that a “long-time, respected manager who’s friends with the higher ups” has no significant risk, then that’s something else.
Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s not. As you note, a “long-time, respected manager who’s friends with the higher ups” would be an exception. But there are many people who are not “long-time, respected manager who’s friends with the higher ups”, and in their case the HR handbook policy is likely to apply.
Addressed above. Again, they do it, just inconsistently. If we’re discussing some philosophical question of what their “actual policy” is, then you have room to make your point. But if the question is whether anyone in a company with that policy has a significant risk of unfounded accusations, then your point doesn’t hold.
The point is apt, though. On what criteria do we say that a particular allegation is “false”? Given that there is no physical evidence in most of these cases and they are uncorroborated he said/she said stories, how do we really know the truth?
It would be like trying to determine how many women in Salem in 1692 were falsely accused of being witches. Since a double digit number of them were convicted in the duly appointed court system, do we say that those accusations were true?
Rape and sexual harassment are different things. Rape is an extreme form of sexual assault. Sexual harassment may not involve sexual assault at all.
You aren’t going to jail for sexual harassment - not in the U.S. at least. It isn’t criminal to sexually harass someone.
You don’t report sexual harassment to the police - since it isn’t a crime. You report it to HR. Or, if you are smart, you have your attorney report it to HR. Or you go to the EEOC to report it (or you did back when I reported mine).
Employers, in the U.S. who fire you for sexual harassment are never going to risk a court case by telling anyone about it - you’ll get the same references everyone else does “worked date to date, title.” So if you get fired for sexual harassment, you can probably move to a different job as easily as anyone else can - unless its a small industry where gossip happens and your accuser is believed. The exception to this is public figures where the company may feel a statement needs to be made. But I doubt that is anyone on this board.
If you are sexually assaulting someone at work, then you are both sexually harassing them and sexually assaulting them and yeah, you might end up in jail since sexual assault is criminal - but you have a right to be tried in court and are unlikely to see court if there is no evidence. Several of the cases in the news of late have been sexual assault, not sexual harassment. They happened to have taken place in a work context.
On the other hand, if you are sexually harassed at work, you can end up with PSTD and mental health issues that last decades. You can end up changing careers to get away from your harasser. You can have your trust in authority eroded. I know because that was its effect on me (I went from tax accounting - which I loved - to IT - which paid well and worked as a career, but I sort of wish I’d been able to stick with tax, I was good at it. I’ve suffered PSTD and breakdowns on the job. I’m limited in what sort of jobs I can do, since I won’t work nights/evenings or weekends unless I have trust with the people who will be around.)
I think people are missing some things when analyzing this risk:
(1) Sexual harassment claims that reach the news are by definition against famous and, therefore, powerful men. They are much more likely to fend off a single accuser.
(2) The world has changed even from a few months ago. Sexual harassment was a lot more tolerated and the likelihood of a single accuser being believed is much higher.
(3) Even if the false accusations rate is only 2% that still will work out to thousands of cases a year.
IMHO, if corporate manager drone #4298 is accused by corporate drone #33164 of sexual misconduct they are in serious Jeopardy. It’s a lot less risky for the company to just fire the guy. They avoid a lot of legal and public relations liability. It’s only high demand employees that are worth that risk.
Continuing my post because I accidentally submitted the previous.
Personally, I don’t ascribe a huge amount of risk to being falsely accused. However, I see that the results of one would range from bad to devestating. It legitimately could cost my career and effectively ruin my life.
It hasn’t had a huge impact on how I act, but I definitely am conscious of the risk. Doing things like never meeting alone with a woman is ridiculous. But I’m often in situations where I’m having drinks and dinner with coworkers. I don’t think I would risk doing that alone with a young female subordinate.
You are correct. And when a wrongfully terminated employee sues and shows that the company applies their policy unevenly there’s a good chance a settlement of some kind will be reached. Even in right to work states a company generally needs to make their policies available to their employees and apply them consistently.
Let’s say it works out to 2000 as you said ‘thousands’
As this is similar to rates in other crimes so why is this a special case?
And while it would be nice to have no false accusations result in negitively impact; why are those 2000 men more important than the 98,000 women who were attacked?
It turns out you had a bad connection. You got some medieval prankster. The real Emmett Till would point out that *the interplay of race and sexual relations is real and complex and you cannot consider one without the other. This also extends to other oissues. Did you know that the era I lived in the maximum number of executions for rape were of black men for raping white women. Ok maybe one or two were guilty, but seriously, use your noggin and consider everything dispassionately and don’t rely on conjctures and surmises. *
That was an FBI study which he relied on a sudy which found that an average of 8% of rape allegations were unfounded. This is often bandied out sans context, but it was using FBI’s standard defination of unfounded, which means made knowingly it was untrue. Whats often left out is that rape had by far the highest rate of deliberatley false allegations, everything else was less than 1%. The actual rate of cases which were dismissed is highter, about 40%.
(Bolding mine)
Thats correct. Again, like the above, presented sans context. First, a signifacnt proportion of rape exonerations are of the “rape and murder” variety. Where chances of a purposely false allegation are well nil. (Typically in those kind of miscarriage case, police railroad the first viable susphttps://www.innocenceproject.org/indiana-man-exonerated-after-serving-more-than-25-years-for-a-rape-dna-testing-proves-he-didnt-commit/ect they have, often the husband). Another large proportion of exonerated rapes are either black men accused of raping white women* and or stranger rape where conviction was based solely or mostly on indentifcation. Both of those kind of cases are known to have high probabilities of miscarriage of justice**.
TL: DR, while purposely false allegations are a concern, the biggest cause of miscarriages of justice in rape cases tend to be police misconduct.
Also Innocence Project (and other studies where convicted rapists have been exlcuded by DNA evidence) will concentrate on cases where there already is some major questions as to the safety of the convictions. They don’t go around randomly checking dudes convicted of rape/sexual assualt.
Also, since rape convictions typically result in some serious jail time means that a lot more resources are devoted to examining these cases. No one at the Innocence Project or elsewhere is going to spend much time chrecking the safety of a convcition for handling stolen goods where the accused got a 6 month suspended sentence and community service.
*In the US, but it holds elsewhere, just substitite “black” with “relevant disadvantaged minority group” and “white” with “relevant majority group”.
Missed Edit: I do expect a rash of exonerations for rape and sexual assualt convictions as more and more doubt has been placed on the reliability of forensic methods, inlcuding DNA, which have been used since the 1990’s and since the last 25 years have seen extedsive use in sex crime cases (bite marks and hair samples), I am looking at you). But again, in those cases it is not a purposely lying woman who doomed the poor bugger, but errors made by the police + investigators. And note, they did try and corroborate the allegations, as in the linked case above. Corroberation should not be seen as a paneca.
You are missing something here. Firing a guy when a woman accuses him of sexual harassment empowers the woman. If she has that sort of power, she can cause a lot of trouble for the company. Don’t like someone - accuse them of sexual harassment and they are gone. If companies functioned like that, women could overset the power base - even just by knocking out other drones.
Corporate America is not interested in giving female (or male) corporate drones veto power over employment decisions. They aren’t interested in the churn, gossip, turnover and lost productivity of such an environment. Nor do they want the counter suit sexual harassment claims - when he declares that she came onto him, and rejected, went to HR with the harassment claim.
My experience - and I’ve been involved in this topic for 30 years - including spending time counseling women going through this - is unless you have witnesses, other victims, or evidence, corporate HR will “investigate” by taking to both parties, and any witnesses identified, but will not generally interview people unless they believe they can provide evidence since they don’t want gossip to get out of hand, give the guy some sexual harassment training (regardless of the outcome of the investigation) and very likely put the whole department through it, and lay the accuser (and possibly the accused) off in the next RIF. But they’ll wait for a RIF to do it.
If the company is big enough, they’ll do the sexual harassment training, and reassign one person to a different department. That’s how I got into IT from Accounting.
This is complicated now by a lot of people not actually being employees of the company. With contract staff, vendors providing services, people interviewing for gigs (as actresses do), it becomes very difficult for two organizations to coordinate a response - and one organization usually has the power. When I was in a tight spot at my last client (not sexual harassment, but they were likely committing fraud and breaking federal regulations which put public safety at risk - and expecting me to participate), my company couldn’t do anything to protect me - I either quit that client, and stopped getting paid until the firm could find me another client, or sucked it up.
Oh, my experience on sexual harassment claims with evidence.
He will be fired.
You will end your career with that company. You won’t get fired. You will be branded a troublemaker, given assignments designed to drive you out, and never get any raise that is above standard. The company may try to drive you out.
If you sue, you will see very little money - most of the cash will end up in the hands of your attorney. You will be lucky to see enough to cover your lost work hours.
My advice is if you are being sexually harassed, assemble as much evidence as possible - and look for another job. This one is over regardless of what the outcome of any investigation is.
Depends on the evidence. My sister’s harasser was stupid enough to leave text messages. Her boss told her not to come for three days and fired his ass. Has not hurt her career one bit as far as I can tell. So she actually got a nice break out of it (seriously, she went with friends to a mountain resort).
Glad she got off easy, she can laugh about it now. Does not always happen.
If it doesn’t hurt her career, she works for a good company. Many corporations will label an accuser a troublemaker - even when there is evidence. A woman harassed who complains - if she gets harassed again, she has a good hostile environment claim. “Look, these idiots keep hiring harassers” - even when the firm is ethical and trying to do the right thing, some guys (as recent media coverage lets us know) are scumbags, and sometimes a hiring manager doesn’t do a good job for screening out a scumbag (it can be really hard to tell, after all “Bill Cosby, scumbag” is not something many people anticipated). And therefore, the companies often look for an opportunity to get rid of the victims rather than risk a scumbag slipping through, targeting someone they know will stand up for herself, and ending up with another, this time bigger because its a pattern, problem.
From a companies point of view, their goal is to keep risk low, and they’ll make the decisions that have the lowest risk while maintaining the corporate ethical culture (which may or may not be actually ethical). But they’ll add in variables that you might not think of - and HR and Legal will add different variables.
(From a mental health perspective, if a woman has been traumatized by her harassment, its often a good idea to find a different job - on her own, not getting pushed out - anyway. Locations, people, sounds - they can all be triggery. Not all women, but for many, getting out is a good plan. Not all women are traumatized, some just get angry, or amused - but some women do get traumatized. And what I’ve discovered is that some women are traumatized over what to me are relatively minor things - a culture of off color jokes - and other women brush off things that would send me to the rubber room spa for a weekend - unsolicited pictures of your coworkers dicks)
I know what I wrote in the OP and don’t wish to revise it. I was discussing particular piece of information and whether it was something that should be taken at face value, and pointed out the reason for it. You’re trying to say that I have to incorporate that particular conversation into my OP for some reason, and that’s just not the case. If you don’t get this, I don’t think we can productively discuss the topic.