Sexual Harassment and the Office

My first serious encounter with the issue of sexual harassment was last year when a senior manager in my office obliquely told me that one of the other senior managers (of masculine gender) makes inappropriate comments to men in the office. I said, if any of them complains, I will take action. Else I don’t want to intervene. About six months later, someone did come and complain about the guy making it difficult to work due to the nature of jokes and suggestions made by him. I, with a male director of the company, interviewed everybody but nobody would say anything specific. Finally I called in the accused and interrogated him. The guy was so blasé and overconfident that he said he was doing it for team building. That his invitations to single men in the office to join him for weekend holidays and evening at bars were in jest. A while more of quizzing and he himself told me, that a few days before the complaint, after I left for a meeting with a colleague of his, he had made offensive remarks on the nature of the meeting. My team had actually put up with his rubbish until he dragged my name into his mucky world. I was, to say the least, touched by the team.
While I only warned the guy that day, he left within a month by himself.
As a freelance consultant, I have had clients hit on me. I just dropped the clients. Money was never terribly important to me. If I had continued meeting them and the level of hitting on me had increased, would I have then made a fuss? I have no way of knowing because I stopped meeting them alone, practically immediately. If I had had a boss do it, I think I would have done just the same. But the question I am not sure, is would I have wanted retribution? But what I can stand witness to, is that it is possible to work in this world with men, whose sole purpose is not trying to find ways to sleep with every woman they come across.

 
While agree all this is far milder than what is happening at Tehelka, it got me thinking about the role of a senior person in a company and also my own other experiences in this area.

 
I think I can understand what Shoma Chaudhary did, even though she is now vilified. This post is actually in support of her. While a company office bearers have a responsibility to take care of every person in the organization, the primary responsibility of an office bearer is the company itself. I doubt that she did what she did to cover up for him as much as to ensure that the magazine is not harmed. I doubt she shut the girl up or told her it’s okay. It is possible that the girl was overwhelmed and after the “apology letter” seemed pacified. I doubt, if she had completely rejected it, anyone would have thought the issue resolved.

 
On most such cases where there is a he-said-she-said angle, it is difficult to decipher, and your first instinct is the easiest way to get on with work. Is that insensitive? Yes maybe. But if you think back to what our parents did when we were young, it was just the same. How often did they carry out a careful adjudication on every fight we siblings had? Is it the right thing to do in a corporate environment? Possibly not, But do we have very many other options that will not destroy a small company? Definitely not.

 
The few things she could have taken were
a) Not make his furlough sound like a resolution but make it the step to make the environment tension free for a full investigation.
b) Declare the steps being taken for the full investigation

 
Not having done that, harmed her and the organization. If she did think the apology letter had been accepted, she should make the facts public to save her name here.

 
I in no way am supporting Tejpal here. He is obviously a part of the male population that has no compunction in mistreating women and barely thinking about it again. He is clearly someone who got away with it for years. In a principled world, no one male or female would have worked with someone like that. But this is still a world of Kennedys, Clintons, Tejpals and Phaneesh Murthys. They all have their supporters, who justify their acts. Shoma Chaudhary has not. She has only tried to minimize the damage to the organization.

 
Let’s be clear on a few things here.
a) It was not as if no action had been taken for days on end. From the time of the incident to the public knowing, barely 10 days had passed. And some steps had clearly been taken in the interim. It is unreasonable to expect a resolution for a few months.
b) Being a feminist does not imply supporting a woman at all times. It is okay to take time to figure things out and then decide where the truth lies. Taking the time is not equivalent to nothing being done.
c) Terming it “untoward incident” is not minimizing the incident. Euphemisms are replacements not denigrations. It is an acknowledgement that what happened was not normal or positive. I doubt if I would have written the letter to all in the company saying – He has been accused of sexual molestation and rape.

 
Why has the incident reached such a high decibel with people gunning for Chaudhary? Clearly, because the expose`s that tehelka conducted over the years. And it all for the one and only one end as a hope – closure of the magazine. I doubt it is about the girl or even about all the girls who have been, are being and will be molested by seniors at their work place. If that were true, over years of judicial pronouncements and legislations, this particular event would have never happened.

 
I just hope that the spirit of the magazine continues in some form or the other and the journalists who took to exposing the weaknesses of our society don’t decide to keep a low profile and let the worst continue to happen. We as a society need magazines like tehelka to counter the level of misinformation that happens. Their exposes have included apart from the political system and bureaucratic systems, the police , naxalites, defence, …basically no holy cows. I like that.

 
I subscribed to the magazine for 10 years. This time when the subscription fell through and they did not bother to remind me, I decided I am okay reading for free on their website if they don’t particularly want to chase me. So no I am not completely enamoured by them. Yet, I just hope that like Sunita Narain kept CSE and Down to Earth going after Anil Aggarwal, someone will keep tehelka going. That is the least India can do after what tehelka went through in the hands of the NDA government. Shankar Sharma and Devina Mehra, alumni of IIMA, suffered immensely for just being investors in the website.  Lest we forget, this is what a foreign paper had to say those days. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/jan/06/newmedia.india