As the wave of #MeToo stories have come to light over the past year, it’s become painfully clear that whatever organizations are doing to try to prevent sexual harassment isn’t working.
Ninety-eight percent of companies say they have sexual harassment policies. Many provide anti-sexual harassment training. Some perpetrators have been fired or fallen from grace. And yet more than four decades after the term “sexual harassment” was first coined, it remains a persistent and pervasive problem in virtually every sector and in every industry of the economy, our new Better Life Lab report finds. It wreaks financial, physical, and psychological damage, keeping women and other targets out of power or out of professions entirely. It also costs billions in lost productivity, wasted talent, public penalties, private settlements, and insurance costs.
So what does work? Or might?
Sadly, there’s very little evidence-based research on strategies to prevent or address sexual harassment. The best related research examines sexual assault on college campuses and in the military. That research shows that training bystanders how to recognize, intervene, and show empathy to targets of assault not only increases awareness and improves attitudes, but also encourages bystanders to disrupt assaults before they happen, and help survivors report and seek support after the fact.
Researchers and workplace experts are now exploring how to prevent sexual harassment in companies by translating that approach. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its 2016 task force report encouraged employers to offer bystander training, for one. And New York City passed a law in May requiring all companies with more than 15 employees to begin providing bystander training by April 2019. It could prove a promising, long-term solution.
But culture change is hard — it can take anywhere from months to several years, experts say. It’s much easier to go for the annual, canned webinar training on sexual harassment that checks the legal-liability box. Yet culture change is exactly why bystander interventions could be powerful: the strategy recognizes that, when it comes to workplace culture, everyone is responsible for creating it, every day, in every interaction.
Jane Stapleton, co-director of the Prevention Innovations Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and an expert in bystander interventions, told me about an all-too-familiar scenario: Say there’s a lecherous guy in the office — someone who makes off-color jokes, watches porn at his cubicle, or hits on younger workers. Everyone knows who he is. But no one says anything. Co-workers may laugh uncomfortably at his jokes, or ignore them. Maybe they’ll warn a new employee to stay away from him. Maybe not. “Everybody’s watching, and nobody’s doing anything about it. So the message the perpetrator gets is, ‘My behavior is normal and natural,’” Stapleton said. “No one’s telling him, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ Instead, they’re telling the new intern, ‘Don’t go into the copy room with him.’ It’s all about risk aversion — which we know through decades of research on rape prevention, does not stop perpetrators from perpetrating.”
When bystanders remain silent, and targets are the ones expected to shoulder responsibility for avoiding, fending off, or shrugging off offensive behavior, it normalizes sexual harassment and toxic or hostile work environments. So bystander intervention, which Stapleton and others are beginning to develop for workplaces, is designed to help everyone find their voice and give them tools to speak up.
It’s all about building a sense of community. “Bystander intervention is not about approaching women as victims or potential victims, or men as perpetrators, or potential perpetrators” she said. “Rather, it’s leveraging the people in the environment to set the tone for what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable behavior.”
Read more of my piece in Harvard Business Review here