With Harvey Weinstein’s court case hitting recent headlines again and Megan Kelly’s tweets about her response to the blockbuster movie Bombshell, loosely based upon her and her colleagues sexual harassment complaints against FOX - women across all sectors of the workplace are talking again. But long before Megan and #MeToo, women in the Forest Service have been fighting for justice in the workplace for more than five decades. Since the 1970’s they’ve been adamantly speaking out and the forest service has been attempting to respond. For some of those who have spoken up, they paid a heavy price - lost careers, homes, families. Others have decided to make a career out of helping the next in line continue the fight. But for all their efforts they say little has changed. And that the system is now even working against women who say they’d prefer not to speak out. So how does this happen. They claim it’s due to the larger reason most women avoid the issue altogether. It’s called retaliation.
In fact on average EEOC studies show that, the vast majority of individuals experiencing Harrassment do not file formal complaints at anywhere between 87-94% despite close to that same number reporting that they have experienced it. They also estimate that 75 percent of all workplace harassment incidents go unreported and 75% who did report faced some form of retaliation.
The fear of retaliation is clearly systemic but what happens when it becomes sewn in to the system designed to stop it. Innocent victims can get caught in the crosshairs and today you’ll hear from an Albuquerque woman with one such story. who now finds herself on the other side of silence born from the fact that under new so-called reform policies she wasn’t allowed it in the first place.
While many sexual harassment cases are settled out of court with gag orders, we often don’t hear the final numbers on what all this costs but in 1994 the Merit Systems Protection Board, a federal agency that oversee the abuses targeting federal employees, estimates that it cost the government a total of $327.1 million in job turnover, sick leave and decreased individual and workgroup productivity.
Since 2010, employers have paid out close to 700 million to employees alleging harassment through the EEOC's administrative enforcement prelitigation process alone.
Within the current atmosphere conditions become more extreme on both sides of the issue, and reforms can backfire putting victims in even more harm and causing not only a freezing effect on speaking out but an environment where harassment can become rape, and offenses become offenders while on the other side the innocent can also be made guilty, and victims vilified.
With the prices paid out by guilty organizations along with the personal costs to fight these battles- better prevention seems an inevitable smart investment for all and joining us to talk About what that could look like and why and how the current solutions may be causing more harm than good.
Listen below:
Part One:
Part Two:
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