Top Highlights

• Today some 40% of women (and 16% of men) say they’ve been sexually harassed at work—a number that, remarkably, has not changed since the 1980s.
• But given how widespread grievance procedures and forbidden-behavior training have become, why are the numbers still so high?
• By 1997, 75% of American companies had developed mandatory training programs for all employees to explain what behaviors the law forbids and how to file a complaint, and 95% had put grievance procedures in place for reporting harassment and requesting hearings.
• Neither the training programs that most companies put all workers through nor the grievance procedures that they have implemented are helping to solve the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. In fact, both tend to increase worker disaffection and turnover.
• Typically it’s mandatory, which sends the message that men have to be forced to pay attention to the issue. And it focuses on forbidden behaviors, the nitty-gritty, which signals that men don’t know where the line is. The message is that men need fixing.

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