Creating a hostile environment from the top down

With all the #MeToo stuff and the resulting changes that attempt to make things better in the workplace, my mom and I were recently discussing what the long-term solution is to women (or men) facing sexual harassment and a threatening environment at work.  Generally in the entertainment industry, there seems to be a slow solidifying of formerly blurry lines separating professional meetings from personal ones, and there's an increase in female "chaperones" for meetings between male execs and female employees.  It's great if that's decreasing harassment, but I think it's pretty depressing if we're saying that we think men need to be babysat in order not to harass someone -- and it's unnecessarily restricting for all the many situations that don't involve a predator or harasser.  Surely there's something else that can be done to actually change the long-term attitudes in the industry and increase respect between colleagues.  Having worked myself in at least one entertainment industry workplace with serious problems in this arena, my personal opinion is that there are two major areas that need to change before any workplace with sexual harassment can be fixed: For one, the top of the company can't be engaging in the problem, and secondly, the Human Resources department needs to actually be helpful and a viable outlet for recourse in the event of a problem.  When someone at the top sets a bad example for the rest of the workplace, and when Human Resources turns a blind eye or implies that if something happens it's the harassed employee's fault, the workplace culture will inevitably be unhealthy.

When I went to work in an internship in this unhealthy workplace, which we'll call the John Doe Show for the purposes of this blog post, I didn't know that "John Doe," the guy at the top of the totem pole, had a reputation for having relationships with staffers.  That's come out in the years since, but at the time, it was a fairly well-kept secret.  Sure, there were public displays of what frankly is totally creepy behavior towards women that would make anyone say, "ugh, gross" if viewed through an honest lens, but the public laughed off those displays as humorous personality quirks rather than taking them as signs of a man who used his celebrity and power to uncomfortably objectify women with no repercussions -- and no one who knew better said anything publicly.

During my time there, however, without benefit of anyone telling me anything explicit, I was able to put together the pieces of what I saw, what I was told, and the vibe I got, and I wasn't in the least bit shocked when John Doe's misdeeds eventually became very public knowledge.  Perhaps worse, the example he set created an atmosphere in the rest of the workplace that was uncomfortable and at times hostile.

I recently reread my journal from that time, which I was writing to turn in for internship credit in college and was therefore sanitized and cleansed of my actual opinion of some events.  I wrote my genuine thoughts in a giant spiral notebook that still sits in my parents' house, and which I remember hiding from other staffers at work as I was writing in it.  Reading my "official" journal, I was struck by the difference between what I wrote about Human Resources' talk to the interns our first day and what was actually said and meant -- and how unprofessional the work environment really was. 

What I wrote:  On the first day, Human Resources "had us watch a sexual harassment video and warned us about what not to do" and told us that "we represent John Doe and the show at all times."  

Translation:  She told us not to make eye contact with "John," not to talk to him, not to use his elevator, not to go in his wing of the office, to clear the hallway if we ever knew he was coming, and to make all efforts never to run into him. (She passed this off at the time as rules for a big celebrity.  Now I think it was ensuring he didn't start any more relationships with interns.  I had to deliver something to his dressing room every day and was told explicitly, "Get in and out of the dressing room when he's not there, and don't let him see you coming or going."  What wasn't said but implied was "or else."  What I'd like to ask now is "Why?  Is he so incapable of self control that if he so much as sees a young lady coming or going from his dressing room he'd harass her? Are you that scared of him saying or doing something that puts you in legal danger?  And if so, why is this accepted behavior?")  In regard to our bosses, she told us they would try to get us to go out drinking with them.  She said she officially was telling us not to do that because we'd see things we shouldn't see and probably be pressured to do things we shouldn't do, and then we'd be put in the position of saying no and having to go to work with them the next day and they'd be mad at us for saying no -- or we'd have to say yes since they're our bosses.  Either way, if we hung out with them when they pressured us to, she heavily implied the consequences were our own fault.  So we shouldn't do it.  But then she told us that it's part of the office culture there for the interns to go out with their bosses for drinks at least once a week, and it establishes good relationships that can lead to us getting more responsibility -- so it's a judgment call.

What that really means:  "I know stuff is going down that shouldn't, and I'm unofficially telling you, and I'm also telling you that it's your own fault if something happens and I'm just looking the other way and this is a lose-lose situation.  And I'm no use to you in creating a safe and professional work environment."

What that meant for me:  My bisexual female supervisor, who I was eventually told selected me from the pool of hired interns as her own because her impression of me from her interview with me was that I would be a "party girl," pressured me repeatedly to go out drinking after work.  I didn't.  She then gave me no responsibility throughout my internship, she gave me the cold shoulder once she figured out I wouldn't go out with her, and eventually she was fired for trying to make out with her next female intern at the bar she wanted me to go to.  But before she was fired, she was responsible for the fact that while my internship should have been spent on shoots and in production, I instead was assigned to do dry cleaning, buy the director's kid gifts, get a lipstick stain out of a jacket, make countless trips to McDonald's, and take inventory of a ten-foot-tall, over-cramped closet full of hundreds of tapes in boxes by emptying the entire closet out every week and counting and then putting them back rather than just making a system to keep track of what goes in and out.  At my exit interview, the same Human Resources woman who gave us the talk on our first day said my supervisor told her I was uninterested in production and so I didn't get the same production responsibilities of former interns in my position.  I was very interested in production.  I wasn't interested in drinking and partying and whatever else my boss wanted to do.  And at no point did I think going to Human Resources was a viable option.  She had made it clear -- party with your boss if you want responsibility, but don't if you want to avoid awkward situations.  The responsibility lay fully with the interns for our reaction to the situation, not with the staffers for not creating that situation in the first place.  That's the opposite of how it should be.  And until both those in leadership positions and Human Resources are on the side of right, no real and lasting change can truly take place.