Gretchen Carlson, Formerly of Fox News: How to Stop Sexual Harassment

Gretchen Carlson went public about the sexual harassment she endured from Roger Ailes as an employee of Fox News and got Roger Ailes fired. Carlson did not agree to stay silent when offered a settlement as part of a nondisclosure agreement, and she got fired. It took courage to go public, and, subsequently, many women have come forward to tell their previously undisclosed stories of sexual harassment. In her article in the New York Times, Carlson notes that, according to the National Women’s Law Center, “almost half of all women have been sexually harassed at work. And those are the ones who have been brave enough to reveal it.” In a previous article, I explain why sexual harassment is still so prevalent in the workplace. Carlson has committed herself to taking action to create workplaces free of sexual harassment for our daughters––places where offensive comments about women will not be dismissed as “locker room talk” and sexual assault will not be tolerated. She explains that while women need to feel able to come forward and say, “This is not OK,” creating harassment-free work environments will require more than women speaking up after the fact. She offers the following suggestions:

  • Companies should not be allowed to force newly hired employees to sign contracts that require secret arbitration of all discrimination disputes, including sexual harassment claims. Carlson explains that secrecy silences women and leaves harassers free from accountability. In addition, arbitration rarely favors the accuser and cannot be appealed. Carlson plans to testify before Congress to help fight forced arbitration, and we all need to weigh in with our representatives to support legislation to stop forced arbitration contracts.
  • We should reassess whether human resources (HR) departments are the right places for victims to lodge their complaints. As demonstrated by Carson’s case at Fox News, HR and corporate legal departments are often loyal to the company executives who hire them and see their job as protecting the company by covering up the misdeeds of executives to prevent lawsuits. In fact, when I was consulting to companies in the 1990s and early 2000s about how to set up policies and procedures that would create harassment-free environments for employees, a best practice was to have an outside ombudsman, often an employment law firm, on retainer to represent the interests of the employees. After this time, arbitration clauses were added to employment contracts and this route to safety for employees was closed off.
  • We should reassess sexual harassment training given by companies. I agree with Carlson that such training is often a corporate façade that creates the illusion of compliance with antiharassment laws. While Carlson suggests that harassment training should be assessed for effectiveness, I maintain that training without effective reporting procedures that bring perpetrators to justice can never be effective. In other words, don’t blame the training. Employees always know when “no tolerance” statements are insincere or not backed up by procedures with teeth to protect them.
  • We should be conscious and intentional about raising both boys and girls to show respect to each other at school and at home.
  • Men should hire more women into positions of power and stop enabling harassers. Carlson states that men and women need to work together: “This is not only a women’s issue. It’s a societal issue.”
Gretchen Carlson lost her job when she took on Roger Ailes. We all need to endorse her efforts to end sexual harassment and support her on her path to whatever is next in her career. Good luck, Gretchen, and thank you!   Image: “Black and White, City, Man, People”]]>

What Is Misogyny? A New Word with an Old Meaning

Image courtesy of pixabay.com.[/caption] I have been designing and facilitating women’s leadership-development programs for more than twenty-five years, and I always include a segment on misogyny.  I begin by asking for participants to raise their hands if they have heard the term misogyny before—usually no one has, until this year.  This fall, when I asked the question, almost every woman in the audience raised her hand and knew the definition:  having or showing a hatred or distrust of women.  The women in my most recent program were from the whole spectrum of political ideologies, but this year’s election campaign elevated both the term misogyny (which is not really a new word but had almost disappeared from use) and awareness of the behaviors associated with it to the level of national discourse.  Misogyny has always been with us, but we often didn’t see it, had become numb to it, or did not have a name for it.  This election campaign brought misogynistic attitudes and behaviors to the surface and out in the open. It’s also possible that some misogynistic behaviors are increasing because of the campaign rhetoric.  As an example, Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times reports that in September of this year, six women, each walking separately in midtown Manhattan in the early evening hours, were approached by young men who tried to light them on fire. Only females were targeted in these attacks.  Bellafante suggests that Donald Trump’s campaign inflicted damage on our culture by bringing to the surface male rage.  It has always been there, somewhat hidden, but may have been unleashed.  She reports that the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, discovered during the past four years a “dark world of woman hatred” in online forums that denigrate and condemn women as liars, cheaters, whores and social cancers” and advocate their imprisonment and collective rape.  Remember the phrases liar and lock her up during the campaign?  These phrases were not created by Donald Trump just for Hillary Clinton.  The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that for “the radical right in recent years, misogyny has become an increasingly common means of articulating broader discontent.” This is quite a serious matter.  Here are some other examples of misogyny in the United States today:

  • One in five women and one in seventy-one men in the United States have been raped.
  • Every day in the United States, more than three women are murdered by husbands or boyfriends.
  • Many universities in the United States are under pressure for sheltering athletes and coaches accused of rape and of disbelieving their accusers. For example, in the Stanford rape case involving swimmer Brock Turner, the university sheltered him, and his father defended him by explaining that he should not be punished because he was “only having a little fun” when he sexually assaulted an unconscious woman on campus. Turner was eventually convicted after a large public outcry forced his arrest.
  • A survey last year of twenty-seven college campuses by the Association of American Universities found that 23 percent of women responding reported experiencing sexual assault since enrolling in their university. Harvard found sexual assault to be widespread on campus with 31 percent of the class of 2015 reporting some form of it.
  • Because of misogyny, it is difficult for women to be elected to high offices, such as president of the United States or secretary general of the United Nations. There has never been a woman in either role.  After seven strong and qualified women were recently rejected as the next leader of the United Nations in favor of one more man, one female diplomat explained, “Misogyny is baked into this system.”
Let’s be clear.  It is not only men who can enact misogynistic attitudes and behaviors.  Women often internalize misogyny and hold other women to harsher standards, undermine the success of other women, and generally withhold their support of women leaders. What’s to be done?  I think the women of the 2012 Harvard soccer team who were the focus of a “scouting report” by the 2012 men’s soccer team that exhibited misogynistic practices of objectifying the women said it best in their Harvard Crimson article:
‘Locker room talk’ is not an excuse because this is not limited to athletic teams. The whole world is a locker room.  The actions and the words of the 2012 men’s soccer team have deeply hurt us.  They were careless, disgusting, and appalling.  As women of Harvard Soccer and of the world, we want to take this experience as an opportunity to encourage our fellow women to band together in combatting this [misogynistic] type of behavior because we are a team and we are stronger when we are united.  To the men of Harvard soccer and to the men of the world, we invite you to join us, because ultimately we are all members of the same team.  We are human beings and we should be treated with dignity.  We want your help in combatting this.  We need your help in preventing this.”
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Why Women’s Voices Are Needed in Public Affairs but Are Missing

Does watching Mika Brzezinski get constantly interrupted by Joe Scarborough every morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe make you as angry as it makes me? And, yes, I do know that Scarborough interrupts all of his guests, but Brzezinski is his coanchor and often the only woman at the political round-table discussions hosted by the show. I often find watching how she is interrupted, talked over, and disregarded so upsetting that I have to turn the show off. She is smart and has a lot to say, but she is continually not allowed to make her points. Unfortunately, as I wrote in a previous article about research on women getting interrupted in business settings, this happens everywhere. Now new research, described by Marie Tessier of the New York Times, addresses the consequences of women’s voices being underrepresented in public affairs due to more frequent negative interruptions in meetings and harsh feedback online. When women don’t feel that their opinions are valued, they become less willing to share them. Tessier notes that researchers report that women’s voices are underrepresented in many public affairs settings like school board meetings, town meetings, rural community meetings, and online news sites. The researchers found that “women take up just a quarter to a third of discussion time where policy is discussed and decisions made, except when they are in the majority.” This includes online discussions of public affairs where “women’s voices are outnumbered three to one in news comments, according to data from the University of Sydney and Stanford University.” What are the possible consequences of women’s voices being underrepresented in public affairs? Tessier suggests these outcomes:

  • Democratic institutions may not accurately reflect the will of the people.
  • Issues of particular concern to women, such as care for children, older people, and people with disabilities, may not become funding priorities.
  • In Congress, the police, or the military, where women are underrepresented, there is a greater danger of policy decisions being skewed against survivors of sexual assault, against prosecution of sexual assault offenders, or against gender pay equity.
Strategies to increase the representation of women’s voices include the following:
  • Increase the number of women on school boards and in meetings. Women are interrupted and disregarded less often when they are in the majority.
  • Increase the number of women in leadership. Women speak more when a woman is leading.
  • Build networks, teams, and alliances to get ideas heard.
  • Institute a “no interruption” rule in meetings and rules to ensure equal floor time for women.
I have written more about ways to help women get their voices heard. What has worked for you?   Image: “Men and Women at a Town Hall Meeting” By: CDC/Dawn Arlotta  ]]>

Five Things Leaders Can Do to Help Women Get Their Voices Heard

I recently facilitated a leadership development workshop with a mixed-gender, mixed-race group and noticed a familiar pattern—the men, regardless of race, took up much more airtime than the women, and the women, especially the women of color, hardly said anything at all. I felt a familiar sense of annoyance rise up in me as one man after another seemed to go on and on whenever he had the floor, and I had to call on individual women and draw them out to get their voices and ideas into the room. Yes, I know that not all men have the “on and on” disease, and that some women speak a lot in groups, but this difference in gendered communication patterns has been well documented in social science research. Julia Baird recently wrote about this dynamic, which she calls “manologues,” in the New York Times and put words to my experience in the following statement: “Men take, and are allocated, more time to talk in almost every professional setting. Women self-censor, edit (and) apologize for speaking. Men expound.” In her article, Baird summarized the findings from a number of studies that support her statements as follows:

  • A study from Harvard found that the larger the group, the more likely men are to speak.
  • A Brigham Young and Princeton University study found that when women are outnumbered, they speak for between a quarter and a third less time than men.
  • Men talk more directly; women hedge and turn statements into questions.
  • Women are interrupted more by both men and women.
  • The more powerful men become, the more they speak; the same is not true for women. For good reason, women worry about a backlash that can occur when women speak more. A study from Yale found that both male and female listeners were quick to think that women who speak more are talking too much or too aggressively. Men are rewarded for speaking more, and women are punished.
  • A New Zealand study found that in formal contexts, men talk more often and for longer than women. Women use words to explore; men, to explain.
  • A Harvard study found that female students speak more when a female instructor is in the classroom.
Baird concludes that “including women is not the same as hearing women.”  

What Leaders Can Do to Ensure That Women Are Heard

Leaders can take concrete steps to ensure that women’s voices are heard in professional and workplace settings:
  1. Form gender-balanced panels in professional conference settings and encourage moderators to equalize the airtime allotted to women and men.
  2. Institute “no interruptions” rules in meetings.
  3. Ensure equal participation in meetings. Keep track of who is and is not speaking and call on people who are speaking less.
  4. Increase the number of women in leadership and on teams.
  5. Be an ally—draw attention to women’s contributions, and make space for them.
What has worked for you?   The image in this post is in the public domain, courtesy of Hans.  ]]>