Sexual harassment in the American workplace remains an ongoing and expensive problem for companies of all types and sizes, more than 25 years after Anita Hill’s testimony to Congress made it a topic of national conversation. In recent years, the conversation has focused on the rampant epidemic of sexual harassment in the technology industry, but addressing harassment must be a priority for all employers. In June 2016, the EEOC reported that roughly one-third of the “90,000 charges received by EEOC in fiscal year 2015 included an allegation of workplace harassment,” that three-quarters of those who had experienced workplace harassment did not report it within the workplace, and that harassment was a major cause of employee turnover, workplace strife, and lost productivity.
As the recent Uber allegations demonstrate, this problem is particularly acute in Silicon Valley. On Feb. 19, former Uber site reliability engineer Susan Fowler shook the tech industry with a frank blog post discussing her experiences with sexual harassment during her time at Uber, and the ways in which Uber’s human resources department failed to respond appropriately to her reports of harassment. A few days later, a former Uber employee using the pseudonym Amy Vertino posted about her similar experiences at the company. On Feb. 27, Uber’s senior vice president of engineering, Amit Singhal, resigned amid reports that he had previously left Google while under investigation for allegations of sexual harassment. Tesla and other major tech companies are also in the cross hairs.
