Workplace sexual harassment: Are real changes taking place?

Posted in Sexual Harassment,Sexual Harassment at Work on July 21, 2016

Some people who are duly concerned about equity and fair play at the workplace might laud a recent Fortune article focusing upon on-the-job sexual harassment against female employees.

That media piece is essentially a bright-light offering for the optimism it exudes positing that women are becoming progressively empowered when they challenge high-level male employees who engage in harassing behaviors.

In fact, one commentator refers to “a seismic shift” that is underway regarding that empowerment.

Any right-minded person who cheers a collective national workplace devoid of toxic sex-related behavior will logically be buoyed by any such assessment, while at the same time perhaps questioning its validity.

After all, there is far more than mere anecdotal evidence suggesting that workplace sexual harassment targeting female workers is a seemingly intractable and endemic reality.

In fact, reams of empirical data and flat-out uncontested claims of victims from California to Maine underscore the widespread and pernicious evil of sexual harassment that plagues American offices, stores, factories, schools and other work venues nationwide.

The Fortune article spotlights the recent high-profile case involving the alleged sexually harassing conduct of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes aimed at multiple female employees over a number of years. The story’s main slant is that there might now be an erosion in the manner that many women claiming sexual harassment in the past have suffered from material backlash following allegations of male misconduct.

“I was flooded with support from women and from men,” states one ex-Fox employee who has stepped forward to support the claims of other women at that company who say Ailes crossed a legal line in his behavior toward them.

That is good to hear, of course, and it would be a propitious thing indeed if workplace sexual harassment was truly abating at the workplace.

It’s certainly appropriate to withhold judgment, though, and pay due adherence to the legions of complaints that regularly emerge from women employees across the country who unquestionably continue to suffer from the degrading, humiliating, threatening and illegal conduct that marks sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment is an ongoing scourge. Any employee in California or elsewhere who is being victimized by it might reasonably want to contact a proven victims’ rights attorney without delay to fight back proactively and with strong resolve.