Men at work wonder if they overstepped with women, too

Published 5:05 am Thursday, November 16, 2017

SAN FRANCISCO — It has been a confusing season for America’s working men, as the conversation around workplace harassment reveals it to be a nationwide epidemic — and many men wonder if they were involved or ignored the signs.

Consider Owen Cunningham, a director at San Francisco’s KBM-Hogue design firm. When he looks toward the annual corporate holiday party these days, he shudders.

“Cancel the holiday party,” said Cunningham, 37, adding that he means just until it has been figured out how men and women should interact. He said he considered himself progressive on gender issues but was thinking more about the behavior he had seen in the past: “What flirting is OK? Was I ever taking advantage of any meager power I had? You start to wonder.”

Across white-collar workplaces, rank-and-file men are awakening to the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault after high-profile cases including those of Harvey Weinstein, Mark Halperin and Louis C.K. Those cases helped inspire the #MeToo campaign, in which thousands of women have posted about their own harassment experiences on social media. Now many men who like to think they treat women as equals in the workplace are starting to look back at their own behavior and are wondering if they, too, have overstepped at work — in overt or subtle ways that would get them included in a #MeToo post.

“I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong,” said Nick Matthews, 42, who works at PwC, formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers, and lives in San Francisco. “But has anything I’ve done been interpreted another way?”

In response, some men are forming all-male text groups at companies or in their industries to brainstorm on harassment issues.

Some said they planned to be a lot more careful in interacting with women because they felt that the line between friendliness and sexual harassment was too easy to cross. Others are struggling to reconcile how these behaviors could happen even among men who believe in equal rights.

Joel Milton, 30, an entrepreneur in Denver with Baker Technologies, a platform for cannabis dispensaries, said he had recently decided to be more careful about corporate offsites after seeing the swell of #MeToo claims.

“When I hear someone on my team is having a pool party, now I’ll say, ‘Hey, maybe no managers should be there,’” Milton said, relaying the type of information likely to be covered in many companies’ employment manuals.

He added that harassment was not something he had thought much about before but that he was considering his own behavior more. “Like, did I ever do anything?” he said.

Many companies have long mandated anti-harassment training to educate men and women about the issue. But in a report last year, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that much of that training was ineffective and that workplace harassment was widely underreported.

Jonathan Segal, a lawyer who was on the commission’s harassment task force, said he was now fielding odd questions from men about how to behave at work. At a fundraiser last month in Palm Beach, Florida, some men asked him if it was permissible to hug a woman and where the boundaries should be drawn.

Segal said he had explained to the men that the context mattered and that pretending there was a gray zone between collegial friendliness and sexual assault was absurd. For instance, he told them, hugging an old friend is very different from going up behind a co-worker while she was at a desk typing.

“If someone can’t understand that, then maybe they just shouldn’t be hugging,” he said.

Segal, who runs anti-harassment training, is now expanding part of the program called Safe Mentoring, which teaches men how to mentor younger women without harassing them. At a recent session, a male supervisor talked about having an extra ticket to a sporting event and feeling he could invite only a male colleague; Segal went over how to invite a female colleague without sexually harassing her.

Al Harris, who has been running workplace equality programs and writing on the topic from Chicago with his partner, Andie Kramer, for many years, said “What we’re seeing now is men are backing away from the role that we try to encourage them to play, which is actively mentoring and sponsoring women in the workplace.”

“The answer to harassment cannot be avoiding women,” Segal said.