We are still not doing enough about sexual harassment at work

Since then, women’s workplace rights have advanced in convulsions, each new revolution a challenge to the idea that everything was resolved at the last one. “Is office harassment really a thing of the past?” asked the Guardian in 2012, in the wake of Jimmy Savile revelations, confronting a widespread assumption. MeToo produced a similar shock to sensibilities but since then, the media has focused on the backlash, and problems faced by young men as women become more politicised and achieve more at work. But are we due another reckoning?

That was the argument made last week – at least when it comes to the bar. A widespread investigation led by Harriet Harman revealed “systematic sexual harassment and bullying” towards junior barristers, often from a “cohort of untouchables” among their seniors. About 44% of those surveyed said they had experienced or observed this behaviour.

The individual cases – taken from more than 170 submissions – are shocking. One woman was asked by a senior colleague if she liked “sadomasochistic sexual acts”. She said: “He got my mobile number and messaged me, asking me to go out with him.” Another claimed a male barrister had offered to pay for her training course if she slept with him, only to grow hostile when she refused. “Often the same senior members of the profession who are happy to sexually exploit junior members will later complain that those junior members ‘slept their way to the top’,” she said.

The idea that the staid legal profession is rife with sexual discrimination may surprise some.But junior clerks were groped by silks and pupil barristers told by clerks that they needed to sleep with them to get work. “It should be made clear that it is serious misconduct to trawl for sex on LinkedIn,” Harman felt moved to warn the profession.

MeToo drew attention to the casting couch sleaze of Hollywood. The New York Times reported that around 200 powerful men lost their jobs after MeToo. A report by the CIPD, which sets HR standards, finds the movement made workers more confident over speaking up about sexual bullying. So is harassment still endemic at work?

This is hard to answer because so little data has been gathered – a telling fact. In many countries, including Britain, this kind of comprehensive reporting is only just beginning. In a 2018 Women and Equalities Committee report, the authors wrote that the government has “left it to others to collect data”, and there was “no way of knowing whether the incidence of sexual harassment is increasing or decreasing”. A study this year by the London School of Economics stated that “no central, reliable measures of sexual harassment existed before 2017-18”. Add to this that higher levels of such reports might indicate one of two things: that more people feel able to come forward with their complaints, or that harassment has worsened. Long-term trends – and past initiatives – are hard to assess.

What we can deduce, however, is that some workplaces will resist change. There is clear evidence that things are worse for women in male-dominated jobs such as at the bar, where nearly 80% of KCs, the peak of the profession, are male.

Lady Harman’s findings echo wider studies. Research from Sweden, for example, shows female engineers (35%) and college professors (28%) reported more harassment, as, to a lesser extent, did men in female-dominated workplaces such as nursing (17%) and social work (14%).

A focus on getting more women into higher status jobs and an influx of young women into previously male professions are likely to erode this problem. More men in female-coded jobs may help too.

But other triggers for sexual harassment may be getting worse over time. The TUC has found that the rise of casual work has made people less able to take action against a colleague or employer for fear of repercussions. That might explain the fact that about 69% of women in manufacturing and 67% of women in hospitality and leisure, where the gig economy has become fundamental, have reported sexual harassment. Women on zero hours contracts were 75% more likely to have been victims than women on other contracts.

According to the CIPD, it is the public sector – not the private – in which workers feel least supported in preventing sexual harassment. Several academic studies have found that women in supervisory roles, rather than employees, are more likely to experience sexual harassment by managers, possibly because their status constitutes a threat. Harman’s report provides strong evidence that the problem lies within steep power hierarchies – where one individual has inordinate control over a junior’s career.

Changing big structures will be tricky, or at least slow. Employers are left tinkering round the edges. Harman’s solutions are familiar: a better and more independent complaints scheme (which has failed to change a troubling culture in Westminster), anti-sexual harassment training (these training programmes rarely work and can backfire), and banning relationships between barristers and junior staff. But it’s a start.

More official data would help: government conducted one big survey in 2020 and should make this a regular effort. Meanwhile, people at the top of certain industries and professions – those with few women in senior roles, low job security, steep hierarchies – would do well to take a hard look at their workplaces: a harassment scandal is unlikely to be far away.

Photograph by Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images