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Stopping Sexual Harassment: Taking Harassment Seriously, with Gretchen Carlson, Journalist and Advocate, Author, Be Fierce
Attack harassment from every side
Unfortunately, fixing sexual harassment in the workplace is a complicated matter. I wish that there was just an easy fix. I’ve made it part of my life mission now to attack this from every side. And it turns out there are a lot of sides. So it’s legislation, changing laws to help victims. It’s the way we parent our kids. It’s the way in which we allow women and men to come forward in the workplace, making it safer. It’s the training we provide our employees to give them the courage to come forward. It’s the tone we set in our own organizations from the top down. It’s all of these things working together.
And if there’s been one constant thing about my life it’s been that if there’s a challenge in front of me, I usually go for it. I had no way of knowing what was going to happen to me when my story broke. And I had no way of knowing that trying to fix this problem would be so tangled.
Join the cultural revolution
This takes effort by companies. And my hope has been that since we’re living in this cultural revolution right now that more and more companies are being introspective. And they’re saying, yeah, there’s laws on the books. And yeah, we provide the training legally. But can we do more?
And my hope is that companies will want to really take a serious look at this issue, because, ultimately, it affects the bottom line. Every study shows that when you retain women in the workforce, your own bottom line increases. So we don’t really know how many women we have lost in our workforces across America because of sexual harassment. We have no way of knowing if that is thousands. I know for sure it’s thousands. But could it be millions? And here is what I heard from the thousands of women who reached out to me to share their own personal stories. When they found the courage to complain and were promptly blacklisted, demoted, and fired, 99.9% percent of those women have never worked in their chosen profession ever again.