When Reporting to Management Doesn't Help

This is part 6 of a series of articles on sexual harassment, assault, and discrimination in financial services. You can read more about the genesis of the project, as well as the other installments to date on the series landing page.

Women who experience harassment, assault, and discrimination often don’t report the episodes for fear of retribution. Some women rightly fear retaliation that could ruin their career or bring mental or physical harm to themselves and their families. Of the many incidents I personally experienced, I only reported one, because I feared reporting the others was not worth the risk to my career. This fear of reporting silences victims and allows a culture of harassment and assault to continue.

When women do report, their reports are often dismissed or brushed off. The incident I reported was dismissed immediately (with no repercussions for the harasser), and is among the stories included below. The stories below are told by the women-in-finance who experienced them. The stories are shared with their permission, in the words of the women who wrote or spoke them to me. I edited some submissions for clarity, length, and to remove identifying details of all parties.

Content warning- some of these stories include graphic descriptions of sexual assault and/ or harassment.

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I was working for a industry leading asset manager. During a client event, we had a restaurant dinner with colleagues, relationship managers, and clients. After a drink at the bar, we sat down for dinner. I started to not feel good, so I excused myself to the ladies room. The cocktail waitress came into the bathroom right behind me, asked if I was ok, and said “One of the men at your table put something in your drink.” She went on to describe who it was- it was a client. I wasn’t sure what to do but knew I could not stay there. I drank water from the bathroom sink, went back to the table, made some excuses and went to leave. The same client that had drugged my drink got up with me and offered to walk me back to my hotel room. Thank goodness for the waitress who saw this, put herself between me and the client and offered to walk me out. I knew I needed to tell someone, so I told my immediate supervisor, a woman. She first asked “are you sure?” and then followed up by telling me we had to be careful about reporting this because “he’s a really big client.” Apparently careful meant not doing anything. I realized that wasn’t a place I wanted to work anymore and I left shortly after. The event was horrible, and the reaction from my supervisor made it even more painful. I might have expected that kind of response from a man but I certainly didn’t expect it from a seasoned woman executive.

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After experiencing gross and explicit verbal sexual harassment by a conference employee, I reported the incident to the CEO of the conference organization. His response, “Yeah, I know. We do have a bit of a frat house culture around here.” The guy who harassed me continued to work there and was in the same role at the following conference.

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After my team executed a huge, multi-year project based on an idea I had, the CEO of our division gave credit to a young, straight, white man who didn’t even work in the division during the time we executed the project. When I told my direct boss that he should go back to the CEO and clarify what happened because it was so public and humiliating for a leader at that level to get it SO wrong, my boss said I was “overly sensitive” and it was probably no more than a slip of the tongue.

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I was on a leadership development course, a coveted course within my organization which involved delivering a presentation to a small group and giving feedback to each other. One of my colleagues, to the shock of the rest of the participants, focused his feedback solely on my physical appearance and alleged “coquettish” behavior when giving the presentation, and was completely oblivious to how inappropriate and far from constructive his comments were. The course organizer seemed more worried that I would make an official complaint than she was about dealing with the individual in a forthright way.

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A male manager threatened to fire me when I asked to take a longer lunch break to attend my son’s birthday party at his daycare center. While the manager approved my request unwillingly, his exact words were, “Next time, you will have to choose between being a mom and working here.” Luckily, there was a reorganization and I was assigned a new manager.

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Imagine the stories that women wanted to tell me, but didn’t due to fear of retaliation. In fact, one woman who shared her story with me, later asked me to remove it from the series prior to publication (which I did) because she was worried her supervisor would see it, know it was him and take revenge on her. This fear of retribution is absolutely valid, and is one of the reasons women don’t tell our stories publicly.

Another reason we hear so few stories told publicly is that most employment contracts in financial services are bound by forced arbitration provisions, including for sexual harassment and assault. If a woman makes a legal claim, it usually goes through arbitration and any settlement will include non-disparage agreement. In writing this series, I had multiple women tell me they wanted to share their stories but they couldn’t because of non-disparage/ non-disclosure agreements. This legal silencing allows harassers and abusers to continue to work at a company while victims cannot speak out or warn other women. This recent in depth reporting on harassment and assault in financial services finds that “most of the accused men we were able to identify stayed in their careers. In one instance, a senior executive remained at his bank for 16 years after the firm lost an arbitration over his sexual harassment of a female colleague. We also found that, thanks to a broken system that allows brokers to exclude harassment and discrimination cases from their regulatory records, some became serial offenders who hopped from job to job in finance while continuing to harm female colleagues.”

Now What?

HR and supervisors often protect company revenues at the expense of the victims of harassment. We rarely see examples of this publicly, but last week news broke of an arbitration between Christine Carona and UBS; Carona accused UBS of gender discrimination and the public details offer a rare glimpse into what retaliation can look like.

How can we better support our colleagues and employees when they are victims of harassment, assault, or discrimination?

I don’t pretend to have all of the answers but below I’ve offered one idea to consider at the systemic level, and a couple at the individual behavior level.But before we jump to working on solutions, I urge you to first continue listening to women’s experiences to better understand the problem.

Systemic: Reconsider the notion that protecting harassers protects company revenue. This view is short sighted. Keeping a harassing employee on staff will cause your company to repeatedly lose female talent and introduce risk of litigation. (Also, creating safe and respectful workplaces is the right thing to do and shouldn’t require a business case.)

End the practices of forced arbitration, non-disclosure agreements, and non-disparagement agreements for sexual harassment, discrimination and assault. Force The Issue describes the benefits of ending forced arbitration: “Getting rid of forced arbitration for sexual harassment is the right thing to do. By requiring a worker’s silence, it’s likely that companies are making workplaces statistically less safe for millions of people…By privatizing the justice system, corporations are protecting serial sexual harassers and normalizing illegal behavior. Workers should be free to take cases to court.”

Individual Behavior: Check your company’s employment agreements and ask management to consider ending forced arbitration for harassment, discrimination, and assault to facilitate a more equitable workplace.

If you are a supervisor or manager and an employee reports harassment, assault, or discrimination to you, please take her report seriously and act accordingly.

If your company is working on this issue, I would be happy to share learning resources, and I would be pleased to help you advance the conversation at your next conference or event.

Sonya Dreizler is a speaker, author, consultant and subject matter expert on Impact Investing, ESG, and SRI. She is the founder of Solutions With Sonya and a former financial services CEO with 15 years of industry experience. Her clients include RIAs, BDs, custodians, mutual fund families, and fintech firms. Find out more or connect with Sonya on LinkedIn or Twitter.