A lot of lawyers — particularly ones who have no direct experience with it — feel like sexual harassment is largely a thing of the past. But some select quotes from a new survey about sexual harassment in the legal profession shows otherwise. Just take a look at some of these statements:
“A judge put his hands under my suit jacket to cop a feel… in his chambers.”
“A male lawyer invited me to interview right out of law school, but instead offered me crappy pay, [and] then tried to get me to give him a blow job.”
“I had partners touch my hair, try to kiss me, hug me and pat my bottom. I was propositioned by a judge in his chambers.”
Those pull quotes are from a new survey done by Women Lawyers On Guard, a national non-partisan organization, and reveal the profession is “Still Broken” when it comes to this important issue.
In conducting the survey, WLG spoke with over 2,000 people in the legal profession, which broke down as follows:
Of the more than 2120 people who responded to the Survey, 92% identified as female and 7% as male (less than 1% preferred to self-describe or not to answer this question). The distribution of race and ethnicities paralleled that of lawyers in the legal profession and the age of respondents fell within a “bell curve.”
Of the self-identified women surveyed, 75 percent of them said they had direct experience with harassment, compared with only 22 percent of male respondents. Ninety-one percent of the harassers were identified as male. And as the chart below reveals, the frequency of harassment has decreased over the last 30 years, but not as much as one might hope:
And of the respondents who say they’ve experienced harassment, only 14 percent say they reported the incident. Thirty-five percent say they wanted to, but didn’t report, and 51 percent say they did not report the incident. Of those who reported sexual harassment, 41 percent say that those they reported the incident to were not supportive or actively harmful. Forty percent say the reporting process was supportive or very supportive and 19 percent say it was a neutral experience.
The report found that the barriers to reporting have not changed significantly over the last 30 years:
Most people do not report sexual harassment and very significant barriers to reporting still exist. Reasons for not reporting have remained stubbornly consistent over the last 30 years, including fear of job loss and other negative career repercussions, concerns about safety, the person to report to is the harasser, and doubts about whether reports will be believed.
And the study also investigated negative impacts to those who experience harassment — whether or not they reported it:
The real and lasting consequences to those who have been harassed have been largely a silent story. Respondents believed their careers and personal sense of well-being had been negatively impacted (often significantly and sometimes with lasting economic consequences) whether they reported or not. They experienced anxiety about their careers and well-being; feared retaliation; and lost productivity.
While the consequences for harassers remain frustratingly light:
Half of respondents reported that there were no consequences to the harasser even after they reported the incidents. Many more did not know if their harasser faced any consequences because the employers did not inform the respondents of any. For some respondents, the conduct got worse; the harassers often continued to work with (and some continued to harass) those they targeted. The most prevalent consequence reported by respondents was that managers gave the harassers written or verbal warnings, but this happened in only a small percentage of the situations.
All of which leads to WLG’s strong conclusion: sexual harassment in the legal profession is “sapping individual productivity and adversely impacting organizational economics at the very least, and destroying careers and organizations’ productivity, at the worst.”
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).