I have some experience with this, if indirectly. I’m a 60 year old man with a long successful career at the same company, and I wasn’t sexually harassed per se, but another senior male employee who barely knew me sent me an email full of outrageous sexual jokes about women. I forwarded it to our internal authorities and soon he was gone. The internal authorities told me nobody could retaliate.
But…
A manager above me, who helps set my salary, set up a meeting with me specifically about this. He said doing things like reporting this is not valuable. No, it is doing my primary duties that is valuable.
Is this retribution? Is this being branded a troublemaker? It is certainly a strong message. Losing my job at 60 would be pretty awful.
The “particular piece of information” was something that had a bearing on your claim in your OP. Your argument that it didn’t have to be taken at face value was based on your claim that it wouldn’t be applied in one specific circumstance. That means it would be applied outside of that specific circumstance. Therefore it has a bearing on your OP to the extent that you don’t narrow your claim to that specific circumstance.
If you don’t get this, then we probably can’t productively discuss the topic, but bottom line remains that your attempt to parry that point fails in the context of your OP.
This looks like the first qualifying example anyone has provided. But it also sounds like such an awful agreement to enter into that I’m surprised you signed up for it; you’ve basically got a clause that says ‘if someone makes an accusation of harassment against you, the business blows up’ seems like a really, really bad idea to me. A ‘2 on 1 policy’ and video cameras doesn’t really seem like enough of a defense if any accusation of harassment would bankrupt you, since someone could say that your 2 on 1 was in on it, or that you said something to them that’s not caught by a video camera.
And the staffing difficulties this creates seem absolutely horrendous, you have to always have at least five staff actively working to keep up the 2 on 1 thing. (You have you, plus 2 other staff so you’re never one on one with them, plus one more so that someone can go to the bathroom alone without leaving a 1 on 1 situation, and another because you violate the 2 on 1 rule if anyone calls in sick or gets injured and has to leave). I can see how a major corporation could do a 2 on 1 rule, but I really don’t see how a dojo small enough that it would be bankrupted if the owner has to sit out for a few weeks would be able to keep the amount of staff needed for that policy, especially since you tend to have a lot of staff with unreliable schedules.
It sounds to me like this policy doesn’t just give you a risk of losing your job if there’s an accusation, it sounds like it forces the business to an unrealistically, unprofitable level of staffing.
She, lets face it was lucky. Her boss, though an asshole in many ways, was completely clear that such behaviour could not and would not be tolerated. She also had a support group of family and friends. Moreover, she was and is a hard-working, bright, personable individual that everyone in her office liked.
A woman who has a less supportive boss and family and who is otherwise bitchy and annoying might not get a similar good outcome, no matter how deserving and merited her case might be.
And you have all the markings of someone protected - you are male, you are old enough with a long enough tenure to be in a protected class.
Imagine how easy it is to get rid of the cute 23 year old woman recent college grad that was hired less than a year ago who has been having a hard time getting taken seriously because she’s female and good looking and people get distracted by her hair and breasts. Before harassment she was fighting an up hill battle for respect, then a guy gets fired for coming on to her when she said stop, and HR and her manager just looks at her and sees a neon sign that says “trouble.”
I don’t doubt that your experience has been true for 30 years. I’m not so sure it’s true today.
In your 30 years of dealing with this how many false accusations have you dealt with?
And how much easier would it have been for Uber to fire the guy harassing Susan Fowler instead of becoming the poster child for the sexual harassment problems in Silicon Valley? The world has changed and is continuing to change. Your hypothetical cute 23 year old woman has a non-zero chance of going viral and for her company to become the focus of the national debate about sexual harassment. The calculus for companies has changed and the easiest thing to do is just fire the guy being accused.
I find one thing deeply confusing - it seems that some people who claim that “every victim should be taken seriously, even if he/she is the only accuser” are also simultaneously saying that “a man has nothing to fear if only one accuser comes forth against him.”
“Should” and “Does” are different words with different meanings. The first one is saying what they think SHOULD happen, and the second one is saying what they think DOES happen. It’s like saying “Dude should never have been elected” but also admitting “Dude did get elected;” there’s no contradiction.
It has changed so much that Susan Fowler quit and Uber was sexually harassing on an institutional scale with many women complaining about it - and it wasn’t until she did go public - after she left - that Uber did anything about it. If its changed significantly, its only been in the past four months. I, personally, hope its changing. But it was supposed to change with Anita Hill. It was supposed to change with Mitsubishi. It was supposed to change with the Tailhook scandal, or Bob Packwood - so I’m not holding my breath that this most recent spate of incidents is going to completely solve our problems. I think it will make it better - but it won’t fix it.
As for me, I deal with women, outside of the corporate structure, who have made claims and require support. So I don’t tend to see false accusations. I have seen a few cases where internally I say “really? You filed a sexual harassment claim because one of your coworkers made a comment - not to you - about fat people?” But they end up talking to the people I work with because they have been traumatized - even if I think that perhaps they are snowflakes. But that is really rare - two or three times in thirty years - and its been older women who have been worn down over time by pervasive sexism who finally break over some stupid comment.
What happened to better a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer? It seems you’re reversing the principle, better a hundred innocent men suffer than one guilty man go free.
Its also bigger than that. Every women getting taken seriously does not mean every woman is automatically believed and the guy she accuses is walked to the door by security with his stuff in a box half an hour after she leaves HR. It means every woman’s claim is investigated. Every man accused is talked to and given training on why the reported behavior isn’t appropriate - even if they say “you might not have done this, but since the claim was made, here watch this 60 minute video.” Every claim is put into the accused personnel record so that if there is a pattern of accusations, action can be taken. Mangers are told what is going on, and are told to watch interactions between the individuals in question. It means that if Bob and Jessica are sitting next to each other, maybe its time to move Jessica’s desk over to the other end of the office, so she doesn’t notice him masturbating to porn on his phone - since no one else has actually caught him doing it - because you shouldn’t fire Bob for an accusation of masturbating to porn on his phone at his desk without any other evidence or witnesses (its probably blocked from your work PC, but you can still use your phone) - but that doesn’t mean you need to have Jessica continue to sit next to him.
I can well imagine how hard it is for people early in their career, people who are likely targets, people for whom proving themselves is going just fine but still mostly in the future.
I can imagine how much harder still it is for people who have some marks against them - and I mean marks like being a member of a minority group that is discriminated against, or like having made a perfectly valid harassment claim previously, or like having turned down somebody twice their age hitting on them. These marks are absolutely irrelevant here, and are not in the slightest a negative reflection on the person. But I know these would be improper reasons making it more difficult to complain.
Having had this experience, I think that making valid complaints and getting them acted upon is, itself, something preferentially available to those of us who inherited a bunch of unearned privilege. Which is why it is extremely important that we act when we find ourselves in a position to. There is absolutely no excuse not to.
IIRC nobody ever said he raped anyone. The woman said he made advances to her, but later recanted. I think the worst he could be plausibly accused of doing is whistle at her, and even that is disputed.
I have a hard time that there were no witnesses or collaborators when, even according to the accused, this was a long-running sexual relationship. Although details are scarce, there doesn’t seem to be any dispute that sex happened, and presumably lots of other people (restaurant staff and the like) witnessed interactions between them. So I don’t think it qualifies just on basic grounds, if nothing else the fact that the accused admitted to having sex with the accuser means there is not just a single accuser.
More to the general point, it’s certainly not a case that could have been solved by only holding closed-door meetings with a witness present, unless the guy planned to have someone from work accompany them to the bedroom on dates. Having sexual relationships with subordinates is an EXTREMLY different risk category than having closed-door meetings with subordinates about work matters.
He wasn’t her supervisor and he wasn’t fired or disciplined at work, so again it doesn’t meet the basic standards set in the OP. This really doesn’t have anything at all to do with any kind of sexual harassment in the workplace- I would certainly agree that getting drunk and banging a 17-year-old (especially against her will) is not a good career choice, but it’s miles away from holding closed-door meetings with subordinates.
The idea that managers working in an office should fear unsubstantiated accusations that arise from an unwitnessed meeting because someone lost their job over a long-running affair with a co-worker and someone else killed themselves because their cover-up of the drunken rape of a 17-year-old started to fall apart doesn’t make any sense to me.