Vanessa Fuhrmans* says the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in the workplace is inextricably linked to the persistence of gender inequality.
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The #MeToo movement has thrown a glaring spotlight on the gender gap in the workplace.
For the past year, a collective reckoning about the sexual pressure many women encounter on the job has taken place.
What has been less apparent, though, is how harassment and the gender gap are inextricably linked.
In fact, harassment can be a direct side effect of a workplace that slights women on everything from pay to promotions, especially when the perception is that men run the show and women can’t speak up.
Putting more women into executive ranks where they can have a greater collective voice goes hand-in-hand with making workplaces feel safer and more inclusive, says Kat Cole, COO and President of North America for Focus Brands.
“You can’t separate them,” she says.
“When women see other women in a position of leadership, it reframes what they think is possible to them.”
The fourth annual Women in the Workplace survey from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Co. offers a comprehensive look at both the prevalence of harassment and the persistence of workplace inequality.
More than a third of women surveyed say they have been harassed at some point in their careers, and in male-dominated jobs those numbers are even higher.
“This is about power,” says Rachel Thomas, President of LeanIn.Org.
“And there is still a dramatic power imbalance in the workplace.”
While women and men enter the workforce in roughly equal numbers, women fall behind in promotions from the very first step onto the management ladder, the survey shows.
By the senior-manager level, men outnumber women two to one, and in the C-suite, just 22 per cent are women.
Even in industries where women significantly outnumber men, such as health care and retail, men still prevail at the top.
Tackling difficult subjects
As large as the share of women reporting harassment is, the McKinsey and LeanIn report’s authors caution that the numbers don’t fully capture the experience of workers more vulnerable to certain types of misbehaviour, such as those in service jobs, because most survey participants were white-collar employees.
Still, there are signs #MeToo is having an effect.
Some employers say a big part of the solution lies in encouraging frank conversations and examining warning signs before bigger problems emerge.
“Every company has a policy around harassment,” says Beth Steinberg, Chief People Officer of Zenefits.
“If that were sufficient, then Harvey Weinstein wouldn’t have happened.”
Zenefits periodically conducts an anonymous but detailed employee survey that lets the company discern if certain groups feel less supported than others, or other signs of discontent.
Though the survey hasn’t specifically asked about harassment, the relative lack of women on tech teams surfaced as an issue in a few comments in last year’s initial survey.
One thing managers spotted and changed was that there wasn’t always a woman on the job-interview team.
That could both discourage female applicants and contribute to biased hiring decisions, Ms Steinberg says.
The company has also held a series of employee roundtables to discuss hot-button issues including harassment and to role-play various scenarios, such as hearing a co-worker make a disparaging remark about a woman.
To help get the conversation going, Ms Steinberg told the group how, early in her career at another company, one of the most senior men cornered her in the copy room and groped her breast.
Though she told her then-boss, they concluded the man held so much power that she would be better off not pressing the matter.
“I think back on it and still feel humiliated,” she says.
“We need to make sure employees know they have a voice.”
In some workplaces, such sessions have turned into forums where men and women talk through anxieties about interacting in a post-#MeToo world.
“Some of the renegotiation of social boundaries is messy, and we have to be OK with this,” says Jennifer Allyn, diversity-strategy leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
At one of Allyn’s discussions, a male partner asked whether he should begin taking a female client he frequently invites out to dinner to lunch instead to avoid any appearance of impropriety.
The group arrived at a consensus: let the client decide.
The takeaway was, “Don’t immediately go to, ‘Let’s not have dinner,’” Ms Allyn says.
Another frequent question: whether hugging a colleague is still all right.
“The more space we make to talk about it — the unintended consequences, the backlash — the less fraught it has to feel,” Ms Allyn says.
Yet the Lean In and McKinsey numbers suggest that there is more work to do.
Only a quarter of women say incidents of harassment are rapidly addressed by their employers, compared with almost 40 per cent of men.
And nearly a third of women harbour doubts that reporting harassment to their employers would be helpful, or worry they would be penalised for speaking up — twice the share of men.
The disconnect between men and women extends to how they see efforts to even the gender playing field more broadly.
While nearly 60 per cent of men say gender diversity is a high priority at their workplace, only 44 per cent of women do.
Men are also more likely to worry the diversity focus will make their workplaces less of a meritocracy.
In fact, one in seven say they worry that being a man will make it harder for them to advance.
* Vanessa Fuhrmans is The Wall Street Journal’s Deputy Bureau Chief for Management. Journal reporters Chip Cutter and Lauren Weber contributed to this article.
This article first appeared at www.wsj.com.
