It’s what happened to Stacey Walker after she went to work at Toronto Westen Hospital in September 2008. A co-worker assigned to show her the ropes began rubbing her shoulders when they were alone in a dark processing room. “He told me he wished I wasn’t wearing a bra so he could give me a better massage,” Walker told Maclean’s. She fled. When she told co-workers, they warned her not to rock the boat; the man was popular and had been there a long time. Other women said he’d done the same thing and it hadn’t bothered them. “They were like, ‘Loosen up, Stacey; you’re so serious.’ ” Her female supervisor was dismissive, she says: “She told me, ‘He’s a good guy; he’s not like that.’ ”
Calling out a superior is even more difficult for women in high-level positions, says a female publishing executive. “It’s expected you should just be able to handle unwanted overtures—physical, emotional, whatever it is,” she says. “You’re expected to roll with it.” And that was the very recommendation given recently by Slate’s advice columnist to a young female lawyer who complained about male co-workers’ unwanted compliments and obnoxious conversation. It sparked huge backlash online: one blog post titled “Do women in the law need to get thicker skins?” spurred virulent comments, one that suggested that women need to “toughen up.”
The other overriding message women get is that they’re misreading the situation. When Lisa Rundle complained to HR about years of sexual harassment by Davidar—receiving lovesick emails, his lurking outside of her home and kissing her against her will in a hotel room while they were at the Frankfurt Book Fair—he responded she’d misread his “friendliness.” (Davidar’s former assistant also complained to HR and was told the same thing.) The issue came to a head after Rundle received a promotion that required her to be in closer contact with Davidar. She asked for her old job back, but was let go. This isn’t surprising: she was the more dispensible of the two. Only when she went public after she was fired, and no longer had anything to lose, did Davidar get the boot.
In a statement issued through his lawyer, Davidar portrayed his relationship with Rundles as “flirtatious” but “consensual.” He called her his “closest friend and confidante at work” and admitted he kissed her but claimed she had not objected. The matter was settled out of court with a confidentiality agreement that prevents anyone from talking. In July, Rundle was rehired by Penguin.
Bobbi Olsen, a lawyer with Ricketts, Harris LLP, defended Rundle. She believes sexual harassment is what it always has been: “a vexatious course of conduct or behaviour that is known, or ought to be known, to be unacceptable.” In this new climate, asking someone in the office for a date is not, in and of itself, harassment, says Olsen, unless there is a clear power imbalance. A consensual relationship with a colleague is also not harasment, she says—as long as one doesn’t have power over the other. Problems can also begin, Olsen says, in a consensual relationship that ends: “Then the person dumped can possibly claim, with the benefit of hindsight, harassment.”
As the slew of cases this summer attests, sexual harassment policies offer little protection to the complainant. Toronto Western Hospital, for instance, is part of the University Health Network (UHN), which prides itself on its sensitivity to “diversity” and harassment issues. Yet the institution garnered headlines in the last decade after two female medical researchers claimed they were sexually harassed by male doctors. In 2004, the Toronto Star quoted a staffer at the University of Toronto graduate students’ union saying complaints from students working at UHN were routine but “a lot of people just suck it up or leave the program.”
In fact, shortly after Walker started, she attended a sexual harassment awareness seminar under UHN’s “Fostering Respect in the Workplace” intiative. Yet when she met with the senior manager of HR she was brushed off, she says, and told to take an “assertiveness training course.” After that, her life at work became “hell,” Walker says. She was snubbed and the target of vicious rumours. Co-workers uttered racist taunts, calling her “Shaniqua” and “LaToya.” She filed a formal complaint in January 2010 after the colleague who touched her was looking at a photo taken at the office Christmas party. He referred to her breasts as “ninjas” and asked: “How are you able to conceal them in your scrubs?”
At that point all the right steps were taken: a wide-ranging investigation resulted in a 45-page report that confirmed Walker’s allegations, concluded the workplace was “very poisoned” for her, and that the hospital had made no attempt to fix the situation. It revealed a big machine with broken parts: the senior manager of HR had thrown out her notes from her meeting with Walker and failed to pass the complaint to “workplace diversity” for investigation. And yet Walker was let go in June, a month after the report came out. She was denied her request for a transfer to another location, on grounds she didn’t have the qualifications, and was given three months’ severance.
That would have been the end of it, had Walker not taken her story to the Toronto Star. UHN president and CEO Robert Bell told the paper he could not comment on a “confidential” complaint (Bell was unavailable for comment for this story), but in a message to employees, Bell wrote, “We need to work with this area to re-establish a formal, collegial and respectful work environment for all of the staff.”
Yet the system chugs along: as at Penguin, no other employees have lost their jobs. Walker is skeptical change will come. “The hospital had all these procedures and policies on paper but you dare not use them,” she says. “You’ll be seen as an instigator and troublemaker.” She’s looking for another job, worried about her employability.
She’s also considering legal action. It’s an expensive last resort, but, as Rundle’s example attests, a way to be heard when there isn’t another. Katherine Kimpel, a Washington-based lawyer who represented the female employees at Novartis, agrees. She calls the Novartis victory “part of the cultural narrative to empower women to feel that they have the right to stand up.”
Vella says change must come from the top. “It requires better messaging from the bosses who have the power—and who are sometimes the culprits in these cases.” Law offices are not exempt, notes Vella, who says she has seen senior women take on the role of enforcers: “I know of situations in which women partners in a law firm get together once they get wind of bad behaviour,” she says. “They descend on him and close the door and say: ‘Hey buddy, you think this is fun. It’s not. Stop it.’ That’s often the best we can do.” In the absence of such vigilante justice, other women are finally figuring out they’re on their own.
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