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Increased power and support for workers can result in increased accountability for sexual harassment

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference at New York’s Yankee Stadium, Monday, July 26, 2021.
(Richard Drew / Associated Press)

The investigation into allegations of sexual harassment against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo have led to his resignation and to reinforcing necessary conversations and understandings about workplace sexual harassment

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In remarks made by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, announcing his resignation after an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment, he insisted that he hadn’t intentionally harmed or mistreated women.

“In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn,” he said.

Since the increased visibility and momentum of the #MeToo movement, a social movement started in 2006 to support survivors of sexual violence, this has been a familiar refrain from individuals confronted about their harmful behaviors, saying they were unaware that their words and actions were unwelcome or inappropriate. That position is considered by some to be debatable, at best.

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“As the #MeToo movement took off, survivors came forward to share their experiences in numbers never seen before. The ensuing cultural conversations about sexual harassment, and sexual violence in general, helped to educate people about the lasting impact of sexual violence,” RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), said via email. The national anti-sexual violence organization supports victims, educates the public, works to improve public policy, and helps companies and organizations improve the ways in which they prevent and respond to sexual violence. “It’s RAINN’s hope that, as the public begins to understand the trauma resulting from sexual harassment, sexually violent behavior will no longer be tolerated anywhere.”

Christopher Uggen is a regents professor and Martindale chair in sociology and law at the University of Minnesota and has been researching sexual harassment for about 20 years. Sharyn Tejani is the director of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, part of the National Women’s Law Center, a women’s rights organization focused on gender justice. The legal defense fund connects individuals facing sex discrimination with legal assistance, potentially funding necessary legal assistance, and media and storytelling support. (Both the co-founder of the legal defense fund and the president of Time’s Up were mentioned in the New York attorney general’s report on the investigation, as having weighed in on the appropriateness of a letter Cuomo’s office was preparing that would undermine an accuser’s account of harassment, according to The Washington Post.) Uggen and Tejani took some time to discuss sexual harassment, whether the lines of propriety are being redrawn, and what’s necessary to shift the culture away from tolerating these behaviors. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. )

Q: When the governor mentioned not realizing that the lines around appropriate behavior had been redrawn, the allegations about the kinds of behaviors he’d engaged in included unwanted kissing, groping and other inappropriate touching, and remarks about women’s physical appearance and sex lives. Can you talk about how this idea that behaviors that may have been suffered in silence in the past is later seen as people redrawing lines around acceptable and appropriate behavior, and what that does to the ability to stop sexual harassment?

Tejani: The lines are not being redrawn, that is just untrue. If you look at the report, the things that it discusses — touching women, talking about sex, making workers put up with harassment because the alternative is that you will be a less-favored worker, creating an atmosphere where no one complained because they were afraid of retaliation (and then when someone did stand up, she was retaliated against) — all of that has always been on the wrong side of the line. I think that’s really highlighted in the report because the last 30 pages of the report talks about the legal standard, and why the report reached the conclusion that what the governor did violated that standard. It cites cases, from decades ago, that set the standard for what is sexual harassment. So, this idea that this is a new standard, or that somehow the lines have been redrawn, that is completely undercut by what is in the report.

Uggen: I can’t speak to Mr. Cuomo’s state of mind, but it’s true that societies are constantly redrawing the lines between deviant and acceptable behavior — whether the issue is marijuana use, racist speech or sexual harassment. Workplace sexual harassment is as old as the workplace, but it wasn’t publicly named and recognized as a social problem until the 1970s. That said, there have always been “lines” of acceptable and unacceptable workplace behaviors, and some of the allegations against Mr. Cuomo would also have been considered unacceptable in earlier periods, even if they might not have been classified as sexual harassment.

Q: In those same remarks, the governor seemed to list a number of other issues (from COVID-19 to gun violence) that he labeled as more important to focus on, saying that the controversy and litigation resulting from the sexual harassment investigation would be “wasting energy on distractions.” What does this framing, of sexual harassment as a less important issue, do to the ability to make progress in the ways that sexual harassment is addressed and rectified?

Tejani: I think it’s harmful to talk about it in that way because what you’re basically saying to workers is, if you care about whatever product you’re creating — whether it’s a new policy, website or pair of shoes — you should be so invested in that, that you’d be willing to put up with sexual harassment because the product is more important. No. Having a good workplace and a good product? Those things are not incompatible. Employers can, and have to, do both. The idea that workers have to be good soldiers and put up with it? No. That’s not what the law says and that’s never what was required, and you shouldn’t guilt your workers into being quiet.

Uggen: Such statements can be self-serving, of course, but they also reflect a real lack of sustained attention to sexual harassment. We can identify three big waves of attention to the issue: the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings of 1991; the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky story of 1998; and the #MeToo movement that peaked in 2018. In each case, the wave of public discussion quickly receded within a year or two. These ups and downs can be discouraging, but we should not lose sight of the fact that at least a small number of powerful people (and a larger number of less powerful people) are now being held to account for sexual harassment, even if other issues have taken center stage.

Q: Cuomo also said, referring to his three daughters, “I want them to know, from the bottom of my heart: I never did, and I never would, intentionally disrespect a woman or treat any woman differently than I would want them treated.” We often hear people mention their relational proximity to people in a marginalized group, in an effort to demonstrate their allyship with that group (i.e. “I can’t be racist because my husband is Black” or “I’m not sexist because I have a wife/daughter/sister/mother”). What do we misunderstand about our ability to be harmful to other groups of people, despite whatever personal relationships we may have with an individual from that group?

Tejani: You’re absolutely right, this is something we hear over and over again. What really is the point of harassment is power and misuse of power. Harassers routinely abuse people over whom they have power, rather than someone in their personal life or someone they see as powerful. We see this all the time in the people who come forward to us. It’s not usually somebody like the governor, whose power is very clear, but it’s the power in the workplace. It’s the supervisors who can decide what shifts you get, or the customer who decides what your tip is, and those people have power and they can use it to harass, even if they wouldn’t do that to someone in their personal life.

Uggen: Such statements place the accused into closer proximity to the victims or targets of their behavior, in this case younger women, perhaps as a means to say, “I get it” or “I’m not as terrible as I might appear.” But they generally ring hollow to those victims or targets, who have every right to expect decent treatment regardless of their status as daughter or wife. It is also common for people accused of serious harm to cite the other good things they do and their responsible performance in work or family roles. Some sociologists call this “the metaphor of the ledger,” and a means of neutralizing or rationalizing one’s behavior.

Q: With the momentum created by the #MeToo movement, in addition to the workshops, seminars and trainings about workplace sexual harassment, do you find it surprising that these examples of harassment against women persist?

Tejani: I don’t find it surprising because the #MeToo movement started (gaining global traction) three to four years ago, so it’s understandable that things haven’t gotten better all at once. I will say that an investigation like this one, I can’t imagine this kind of thing happening prior to all of the work that has been done in the last four years. I think that part of the problem is the kinds of trainings that we’re seeing. It’s once a year, on video, while you’re doing something else. Then, as highlighted in the report, sometimes people say they’ve done the training, but they actually haven’t done the training. When you think about how an employer would actually teach an employee something that was important to the employee, like something that had to do with their actual job, an employer would never do it by showing a video once a year. An employer would have someone sit with you and train you, and then have you ask questions and come back and see if you actually learned the material, test you on it. That’s how you train people, and that’s not the kind of training that people are doing. The few examples where you actually see a reduction in workplace sexual harassment are when workers are involved in the process. They’re involved in diagnosing the problem, they’re involved in coming up with the training, they’re involved in thinking about what the discipline is going to be because harassment is really about power. So, you have to change the power dynamic in order to get an actual change. I think the other thing that employers have to deal with is the absolutely legitimate fear of retaliation. It’s not enough to just train about anti-harassment, you have to train about how you can’t retaliate against people when they report it.

Uggen: No. It’s unrealistic to expect a workshop or training session to undo a lifetime of gender socialization and systemic workplace inequalities. There is even some evidence that such trainings can backfire, encouraging pushback or resistance to change. I do see positive change on two fronts, though. First, consciousness of sexual harassment and its harms is on the rise, though I’d caution that this might mean more complaints in coming years, as people who were once silent begin to come forward. Second, more prominent people are being held to account and are facing serious consequences. Although the certainty of punishment remains extremely low today, harassers can no longer count on complete impunity. From a criminological perspective, such accountability can help to deter others.

Q: From your experience and work in your field, what seems to be at the root of sexual harassment?

Tejani: You can see this in the report, that people were afraid to come forward and complain because they felt that they were going to be retaliated against. In fact, that was true. If they complained about the governor, they were afraid of losing their jobs, rightfully. It’s about power, it’s about how people use their power, and how we can change that power balance to make it so that workers have a better chance.

Uggen: Most experts would say “power,” and it’s true that sexual harassment is bound up with workplace power relations. That said, it’s not always a simple case of a powerful male boss harassing a less-powerful female worker. In fact, we find that female supervisors may face more harassment than other women, in part because male coworkers and clients use harassment to undermine their power and authority.

Q: Can you describe the kind of culture that seems to continue and encourage this kind of behavior? And what kinds of shifts in culture need to take place to reverse this behavior and its harm?

Tejani: Sexual harassment happens in all kinds of workplaces, and the report talks about how there was this report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a few years ago that identified certain traits of workplaces that can lend themselves to having more sexual harassment. One of the things that they say in this EEOC report is this will happen where there are very highly valued employees. This is a good example of what happened with the governor, where you have somebody who’s incredibly powerful, who no one wants to cross because that person is very important. That’s one of the ways that you see a situation where sexual harassment can likely flourish because no one’s going to cross this person. We also see this in the people who come forward in workplaces that are heavily male. In those workplaces, sexual harassment is used to keep women out of the workplace, and it’s especially damaging because traditionally male jobs pay more than traditionally female jobs. So, the few women who make it into the (traditionally male) job can actually earn a lot more money. Sex harassment is used to keep women out of those jobs, to keep those jobs mostly male, and to keep women away from those jobs where they could actually earn more. Other places where we see this harassment are in places where there are large power imbalances, where people can really be the person to decide if you’re going to get a shift. If you’re not going to get a shift, you’re not going to make your money, so you’re going to please that person. It’s the same thing if you work in a customer-facing job. If the customer isn’t happy with you, you won’t get a tip; so that customer has such financial control, they have the power to sexually harass.

It has a lot to do with changing how power works by working with your employees to figure out what the problems are in the workplace; helping to have the employees work on the training and figuring out what the discipline should be; making sure that workers aren’t relying on tips, so that they get an actual minimum wage and they don’t have to do exactly what the customer wants, like smiling or removing their mask because the customer is demanding it. It’s changing how power works in the workplace, to give more of the power to workers so they can actually stand up for their rights without fearing what’s going to happen next.

Uggen: For meaningful permanent change to occur, we all must recognize the costs of harassment and implement the wholesale changes needed to prevent and control it. Hiring and promoting women has proven successful in many organizations. Bystander intervention programs also show promising results in some settings, when workers are given effective tools to disrupt problem behavior. There is no short-term panacea, however, and the fact that Mr. Cuomo personally championed such anti-harassment efforts should temper our expectations.

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