Caucasian mid-adult man sexually harassing woman sitting at computer and looking at viewer.
Ever wonder what you would or should do if you experience sexually harassment on the job? I think most women have given this more than a passing thought.
Thanks to law professors Joanna Grossman at Southern Methodist University and Deborah Rhode at Stanford University, we now have a primer on the subject. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Grossman and Rhode basically advise women to do what former FBI director James Comey did: Keep a record of the offenses and tell trusted friends and family. At the same time, though, they sound some cautionary notes: Employment discrimination cases, they write, have the lowest win rate for plaintiffs of any civil cause of action. Plus, the employee can expect some nasty retaliation (50 to 60 percent report retribution).
Every working woman should file that information away (the authors say that they focus on women, because they make up 90 percent of harassment targets), but here's what intrigued me: Are blatant forms of sexism still a problem in places like Big Law? I posed that question and others to Grossman.
Here's what she says:
Corporations and law firms require sexual harassment training and preach gender equality all the time. And most lawyers I know are conservative, cover-your-ass types. So is sexual harassment still a problem in law firms?
Every data point suggests that it is. Every study we looked at, including those about the legal profession, say that 40 percent of women will or have experience harassment. If you look at studies of law firms, two-thirds say they've seen it or experienced it.
Really? But lawyers must be much more subtle about it. I can't imagine male partners, even the most powerful ones, at big firms acting the way Roger Ailes or Bill O'Reilly allegedly did toward women.
We all tend to think that they're no longer literally banging on the hotel room door, but you still see those cases. We've aggregated information from a lot of different sources, and what we see is that things have not changed that much. Bar association studies show many instances of bad harassment conduct. I don't see any reason for optimism. I've worked on this for over 20 years, and I've never seen it under control.
If sexual harassment is so prevalent in law firms, why don't we hear more about it?
It's been quiet, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. Until sexual harassment allegations at Fox [News] and Uber became news, this has not been a big topic. Arbitration has also made the problem go underground. We don't hear about these cases, which means there could be worse cases out there.