After Weinstein et al, is office romance still allowed?

Sexual-harassment scandals don’t tell us much about how people should interact at work. Is it time to rethink the rules?

‘Even workplace relationship stories with happy endings can look like they were one wrong turn away from sexual-harassment horror tales’.

It has been nearly two months since the first allegations surfaced of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sordid history of sexual harassment and pay-offs to accusers. Since then, the accusations levelled at Weinstein and other powerful men have snowballed, prompted in part by aggressive journalistic investigations and by the #MeToo Twitter hashtag, which has encouraged disclosures of sexual misconduct.

The “Weinstein effect” has swept through the entertainment and media industries, leaving wrecked careers in its wake: actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Louis CK, political journalist Mark Halperin, veteran television talk-show host Charlie Rose and now Today show co-host Matt Lauer, author and radio personality Garrison Keillor and famed conductor James Levine.

What these high-profile cases mean for the rest of us is hard to say. Celebrity scandals involving gross abuse don’t offer obvious guidance for how ordinary men and women should interact at work. Will the disgrace of these prominent men translate into tougher policies or changed attitudes in offices? Will it advance gender equity and mutual respect — or promote polarisation and paranoia?

One thing can be said with certainty: any notion of simply banishing romantic or sexual inter­actions at work will fail. Too many of us find lovers, partners and spouses in the setting where we spend most of our waking hours. To move forward from this moment, we must acknowledge not just the awful impact of sexual harassment on women but the reality that the modern workplace is, among other things, a place where romantic overtures are not always unwelcome.

The Weinstein story, and those that followed, struck a chord not just for the sheer scope of the allegations. It was unsettling and infuriating to learn that so many sexual predators apparently had enjoyed impunity because of their status and power and that so many victims apparently had kept silent.

Even commentators who previously have criticised how some institutions handle charges of sexual abuse have welcomed today’s cultural reckoning. Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, whose book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus was published earlier this year, says, “What’s shocking about a lot of these revelations is the extent to which men in power have felt they have free access to the bodies of women who work for them, or aspire to. Did they think they were feudal lords and these women were their vassals?” She nonetheless sounds a note of caution: “We need to be careful about a rush to judgment and conflating different kinds of accusations.”

In some recent cases, however, we have seen just that. Though many of the men brought down by the scandals have been accused of egregious sexual impositions, from indecent exposure to rape, others have been implicated in less flagrant misconduct.

Leon Wieseltier, who served as literary editor at The New Republic for many years, reportedly engaged in what one former colleague, writing in The Atlantic, called “low-level lechery” towards women at the magazine — from sexual innuendo and compliments to hugs and kisses, mostly on the cheek but occasionally on the lips.

Michael Oreskes, National Public Radio’s senior vice-president for news, resigned after two women accused him of one-time unwelcome advances two decades ago when he worked at The New York Times — in addition to two recent complaints about taking work-related conversations with female NPR staff in an uncomfortably personal direction.

Keillor says his only offence was to place his hand on a female co-worker’s bare back while comforting her, not realising that her shirt was open (though other details may yet emerge).

These and other cases raise many thorny questions. Should vastly different degrees of misconduct be punishable in the same way — by disgrace and career death? Should interaction between colleagues in social settings outside the office be subject to the same norms of propriety as workplace behaviour? When, if ever, is sexualised or romantic interaction appropriate at work?

Even in this age of online dating, there is ample evidence that many people continue to find love (or sex) at work. In a survey of 500 single, divorced and widowed adults released last February by data company ReportLinker, 27 per cent mentioned work as a way to meet partners, while only 20 per cent said they used a dating app or website. Millennials were likelier than older singles (33 per cent) to view the workplace as a dating pool. In another informal survey of 2373 Americans aged 18 to 34, conducted by online magazine Mic in 2015, nearly one in five said they had met their spouse or partner through work.

Such on-the-job romances have become riskier, however, in our age of heightened sensitivity to harassment and discrimination. A recent tweet by singer-songwriter Marian Call telling men “how happy women would be if strangers & co-workers never ‘flirted’ with us again” went viral, with thousands of retweets and “likes” (though it also sparked some heated debate). Even workplace relationship stories with happy endings can look like they were one wrong turn away from sexual harassment horror tales.

Four years ago, when The New York Times published a profile of Chirlane McCray, wife of New York City mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, some were scandalised by the account of how the couple met in 1991 while working at city hall. McCray, who had long identified as a lesbian, “had zero interest in dating a man” — but de Blasio was undaunted and “flirted with her mercilessly … calling nonstop and trying to steal an unwelcome kiss”.

In a follow-up piece published in Slate to address concerns that the story of the de Blasio-McCray courtship sounded too much like sexual harassment, McCray was quoted as saying that he was “sweetly persistent, but … always respectful”. Yet such judgments can be very much in the eye of the beholder.

Kipnis stresses the distinction between enjoyable flirting and humiliating or oblivious behaviour: “Flirtation is mutual, innuendo is one-way.” But while that distinction is often obvious, the lines can be blurred. Seeming mutuality can be the result of a less powerful person “playing along” to placate an abuser.

It is true as well, however, that a fully consensual dynamic can later be reinterpreted as abusive for a variety of reasons, from a soured romance to work troubles, to a change in perspective because of “#MeToo”-style consciousness-raising. Since the 1980s federal courts have ruled that a woman who willingly participates in and even initiates raunchy behaviour at work can still successfully sue for sexual harassment over similar conduct if she did not welcome it in those specific instances.

The US’s previous “national teach-in” on sexual harassment took place after the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, where his former employee Anita Hill accused him of several ins­tances of misconduct. (Thomas denied the allegations.) The new sensitivity to these issues had salutary results, including the resignation in 1997 of senator Bob Packwood, after reports that he had made unwanted advances to 19 former staff members and lobbyists. He initially denied the charges but stepped down after the exposure of his personal diaries, which corroborated some of the incidents.

Yet the 90s also brought much-publicised stories of over-reaction to mostly innocuous behaviour: a creative writing instructor fined and suspended for using sexual metaphors in class; a county official fired for emailing a female employee a mildly ribald piece of internet humour, even though she had given her OK to receiving it; an insurance company manager demoted and transferred for sending sexually humorous greeting cards to a female office administrator, even though the cards had been mutually exchanged. Such episodes fostered the perception that the new rules on harassment had become a double standard favouring women, and they helped to create a backlash against efforts to combat the problem.

At the end of the decade, the scandals stemming from president Bill Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky changed the cultural tide. Some commentators, such as The Atlantic ’s Caitlin Flanagan, have blamed the feminists who backed Clinton for stalling the momentum of the fight against harassment — but it is also true that by then much of the public was ready for a rebellion against “sexual correctness”.

The revelations that have em­erged in the past two months are a potent reminder that workplace sexual harassment remains a real problem, and not just in the precincts of media and entertainment. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of 900 American adults conducted in October, 48 per cent of employed women said they had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. Nearly 79 per cent of women, and 63 per cent of men, disagreed with the idea that harassment reports were overblown.

A more nuanced picture emerges from polls that distinguish among kinds of offences. A US Merit Systems Protection Board survey last year of more than 42,000 federal employees suggests that more extreme violations are fairly rare. Although 18 per cent of women and 6 per cent of men said they had been sexually harassed in the previous year, only 1 per cent — for both sexes — reported being pressured for sexual favours, with a similar figure for reports of sexual assault. The rest of the reported behaviour consisted of unwelcome jokes or comments, suggestive looks or gestures and “invasions of personal space”. These numbers showed a sharp decline, however, from a similar survey of federal workers in 1994, when 44 per cent of women and 19 per cent of men reported some form of unwanted sexual attention in the previous year.

The lesser forms of misconduct recorded by these surveys are not necessarily harmless. It is hard to know how many represent cases in which behaviour was so offensive or persistent that it rose to toxic levels. That possibility is magnified when someone in a position of power is being inappropriate with a subordinate.

In a recent discussion at King’s College London, feminist scholar Martha Nussbaum offered a partial defence of Wieseltier, saying she had always perceived his conduct at The New Republic as “ridiculously theatrical (and) a little gross, but not threatening or malign”. Yet, even as Nussbaum expressed regret over his potentially permanent exile from the magazine world, she acknowledged that her experience “may well be different from that of vulnerable employees”, for whom the same behaviour might have created a “hostile work environment”.

That high-level abuses of power can now be easily exposed is an unquestioned gain for equality in the workplace. But whether the #MeToo moment will have a positive impact on the advancement of women, and the quality of everyone’s work life, depends on what we do with it.

Liana Kerzner, a Canadian TV host, writer and producer, has seen her share of workplace sexism, but she has mixed feelings about the present climate. “The huge uproar over every new headline is having negative effects on some survivors of abuse,” she tells me. “Some feel (that) treating groping as equivalent to more serious, Weinstein-level assaults trivialises violent attacks.” Kerzner says “we need to be able to use judgment and separate men who are just awkward from men who use their power to intimidate”.

There is a real need for cultural change and for conversations on sexual respect, Kerzner says, but “making workplaces too uptight will backfire”. As she sees it, “When hours are long and there’s a lot of stress, the humour can get ‘inappropriate’, but it’s just a coping mechanism. If you can’t joke around at work, your workplace doesn’t have the trust necessary for people to give the company their best.”

Instead of formal rules, Kerzner argues, it is much more important to have strong workplace communication and responsive management, so that employees bothered by a co-worker’s behaviour can complain without fearing retaliation or over-reaction. For their part, managers should try to notice and defuse tensions before someone complains.

Unfortunately, today’s workplace policies often encourage a rigid and punitive approach in such cases. If an employee complains to a supervisor of sexually inappropriate behaviour, the supervisor usually cannot simply talk to the offender but has to take the matter to human resources — and the offender cannot try to resolve the issue by apologising. Often, they are forbidden to have any contact with the complainant.

These protocols can exacerbate problems stemming from low-level misconduct or workplace romances gone awry — and we can do better. Relaxing such rules would make room for managers to deal with such issues in a more flexible, humane way. At the very least, it should be possible to give the parties to such disputes a chance to talk to each other.

The answer, in the end, is to ensure dignity and respect in the workplace for women and men, whether accusers or accused.

Finding the right balance may not be easy, but it is the only way forward if we are to accept the human — and sometimes sexual or romantic — reality of our working lives.

The Wall Street Journal

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine and an opinion columnist for Newsday.