Associates at big law firms don’t normally burn out right away. They arrive bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, raring to go. This is their moment! Grasp the golden ring!
If you look closely, though, you’ll notice a few poor souls who burn out immediately – sometimes within a few weeks. These folks look awful almost from Day One, dread coming to work, don’t talk to the others, can’t sleep and wonder how to get out – like, immediately.
That’s because they’ve been sexually harassed.
Oh…that.
Right. That.
I know. Sexual harassment is a drag of a topic, the stuff of tedious lectures by gender theorists and “Human Resource professionals.” Nothing new to say, just standard material: wince-inducing scenarios, tired platitudes about respect and crossing the line and what’s appropriate in a workplace blah blah blah…boring, scary, boring.
I hear about sexual harassment all the time from my clients, so it’s a little less boring for me, and a lot more real. There is stuff worth talking about. But I’ll keep it quick.
First, to be clear, I’m not talking about law firm sex in general. I’m as sex-positive as the next guy, and this isn’t about sex. And I’m not naïve. I’ve heard all about the “hanky-panky” – ill-advised and otherwise – that goes on at firms. Associates get it on in their offices. Partners seduce young summers. Some of those partners are married. So are some of the summers. And it’s not just a straight thing – gay associates and partners get caught up in this stuff, too.
When you’re working together around the clock at a big law firm, there’s a lot of pent-up sexual energy, so there’s oodles of sleaze. Stuff happens. That stuff might be fun, or un-fun, no big deal or something you’ll regret for a while. That’s not our topic.
Harassment is never fun or okay. It’s unwanted, unasked-for, undesired, unexciting, unpleasant, unsexy, unattractive, uncool sexual attention.
I have a theory that everything is more interesting if you stick the word “extreme” in front of it. Barbecue is okay. Extreme barbecue is way better. The same thing goes with sex. It intensifies things. Cool becomes super-cool if you add sex. Likewise, bummer turns into super-bummer if it’s sexual. Harassment is a bummer, and sexual harassment is a super-bummer.
Here’s what sexual harassment looks like:
- That overweight, bearded guy you could not be less attracted to – the young-ish partner with the photo of his wife and kids on his desk – leans over during a meeting alone with you in his office one evening and says “I’d really love to kiss you right now.” And you’re staring at a draft of a motion to dismiss and thinking you’d prefer to be anywhere else on Earth. And then he won’t leave you alone. You start getting emails telling you how hot you are.
- The fratty, a-little-too-intense senior associate you found out you’ll be reporting to next week gets drunk at the firm’s new associates retreat and won’t leave you alone. After the dinner, he invites himself along with you and some junior associate friends, then proceeds to act as though he’s on a date with you, making double entendres and generally implying that you have some sort of sexual relationship. It’s embarrassing – and now you have to go into the office and face this freak who’s supposed to be your new boss on a big case.
Welcome to sexual harassment. Yeah, it sucks. I wish it didn’t. And there’s no winning, either – no quick solution to make it go away. It’s just a bummer all around.
Some of my clients try to ignore incidents, and get on with their lives. That might sound like a good idea, at least initially. The hope is everyone will pretend it never happened and move on. The problem is that guys who sexually harass the women they work with often don’t stop after making jackasses of themselves once – they keep on making jackasses of themselves. The inappropriate stuff in his office or at the firm event turns into inappropriate stuff on the phone, on the trip to the deposition, or wherever and whenever.
Ignoring harassment also means you’re ignoring the official procedure regarding harassment as promulgated by HR, which is to report it immediately. And it means everyone will ask you later why you didn’t report it, and hold it against you and read into it and so on.
So eventually you will probably report it.
Now, in case I haven’t made this clear, I’m a shrill, strident feminist. I totally, fully, utterly, 100% urge each and every woman who has been sexually harassed to feel fully empowered to report it. Every woman – every person – who shows the courage to take this step is a hero.
…but I can’t pretend it doesn’t suck. That’s because everything about harassment sucks, including reporting it.
It is unpleasant and embarrassing, telling serious up-tight law-firm senior partner types, whom you work for – the folks responsible for your bonuses and advancement – that some idiot (one of them, in fact) couldn’t control himself and tried to kiss you during a meeting in his office.
And yes, the story will probably get around the firm, and probably embarrass and humiliate and perhaps piss off the guy who’s been harassing you, and get him in trouble or even cost him his employment – which he richly deserves, especially if, as some of these guys do, he sort of threatened your job at some point with an idiot insinuation about how he’d hate to see you trying to transfer to another department because it could affect your chances of success at the firm (yes, that happened to one of my clients, and it was as shocking and hateful as it sounds.)
But it’s no fun being the person who brings someone down when that someone works at your office, even if he was utterly inappropriate and deserves it. And it is no fun being at the firm when there are big, hush-hush meetings and everyone is whispering and you are suddenly removed from all the cases you were working on with such and such senior associate or partner, and then you are suddenly moved to an office on the other side of the building, or he is, and everyone notices that and it’s all they’re talking about. And then you walk in the next morning and there he is – Mr. Harasser – standing in the elevator next to you but pretending he doesn’t see you since he’s under strict orders to leave you alone and you try to ignore him too and the whole thing is really weird.
And maybe now you can’t do any anti-trust, or real estate work – which is why you came to that particular firm – because he was the head of that department, or he was the partner with all the work in that department. And maybe the firm is slow, so you go from having lots of work and plenty of billables to no work and no billables, which affects your bonus, or simply your chances to learn anything. And you can only wonder what your reviews are going to be like, now that you aren’t doing anything and were pulled off everything you were doing right in the middle of it – and the guy who should be reviewing you was talking to you last week in his office alone about how he wants to see you in your underpants while you were trying to sort out an outline for a deposition.
And your friends keep saying you should have taped him, or written it all down and kept a precise paper trail and sued the firm and tried to get one of those settlements worth a few hundred grand, which would have paid off your debt and left you sitting pretty, even if it killed your law career, which you think it might have done, or maybe not, who knows? In any case you didn’t, and maybe you should have, but it still seems ridiculous to get rich because this idiot made a fool of himself. Maybe not. Who knows? People do it.
So you reported him, and it sucks… now what?
You wonder who you can talk to about it. There’s your one pretty good friend at the firm, another female associate in your department – but she’s the one who started all this by talking to HR after saying she couldn’t stand listening to your stories of harassment. And you know she was right, and maybe you’re relieved that she got it over with, but now she’s looking at you like she wants to talk but you feel a wall has gone up, and somehow you don’t want to talk about it with her anymore – you just want to work here, for a change, not be “harassment girl.”
And there’s the female partner, your “mentor” who logically should be someone you can talk to, but she’s kind of, well, a bitch, and you feel – have always felt – she resents your existence at some level because you are young and pretty and oh, who knows – you just don’t like her.
And there’s the gay guy, the associate you met and have lunch with sometimes, who seems nice, but on the other hand, he doesn’t really seem to care – he’s got his own life.
And there’s the HR lady who keeps saying you can always talk to her, but she looks like she’s scared you’re going to sue, like she’s walking on eggshells.
And there’s that nice older partner, but he’s the one who decided it was appropriate to warn you not to let a senior associate into your room again, which seemed like blaming the victim – like you somehow should have known better and expected that creep would start getting weird. Maybe you should have known better. But shouldn’t the creep have known better, too – isn’t that the whole point?
And shouldn’t any of the partners, maybe just once, have followed up and asked you how you’re doing – which they never did, not once, as though everything were resolved, filed away and done – like there’s an implicit suggestion you should feel that way, too, and if you don’t there’s something wrong with you?
And you don’t think you can talk to mom anymore – it only freaks her out and gets her all upset. And you don’t even want to go there with dad.
So you talk to your therapist. And maybe he gets it. And working with him, you can start to get your head wrapped around this entire awful experience.
And now all you can think about is leaving. You’ve been at the firm a whopping two and a half months. Other people might hate it there too – but at least they had time to learn to hate it.
You want to go somewhere else, and start over, like none of this garbage ever happened. But the headhunter says you have to stay at least a year – and then good luck finding work as a second year.
Oh…that.
Yeah. It totally sucks.
========
This piece is part of a series of columns presented by The People’s Therapist in cooperation with AboveTheLaw.com. My thanks to ATL for their help with the creation of this series.
If you enjoy these columns, please check out The People’s Therapist’s new book, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning
I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy
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The People's Therapist 
On the other hand, sometime if you report it the guy gets his ass kicked.
This happened at my old firm where a partner made a drunken pass at one of the junior associates during a Christmas party. She reported it and the guy was simply kicked out of the partnership and thrown out of the firm. Pure and simple. Interestingly he also got disbarred at the same time. He now remains in our collective memory as “the pervy partner” and talked about in hushed tones. Nobody remembers who he harassed though…
It really, really sucks when it happens but when it does, my view is, don’t let it pass. Make a stand kick up an all mighty fuss and hopefully the guy/ woman (I’ve heard of it happening with women too) will never do it again.
Something else was going on with this guy. His Xmas party antics were just the last straw.
Skip, they did indeed discover a lot of other things when the antics happen. Whether they knew or suspected it before I don’t know…
reading your article I feel incredibly cheated. How was that supposed to help exactly? We get that it sucks. There are not many upsides to being female and trying to practice. But what is your advice or helpful piece of wisdom here? it sucks. you should report it. that will suck. you pretty much suck because law is still an old boy’s network that will use everything in their arsenal to never have to give that up. thanks people’s therapist. way to help out.
I’m only a therapist – I can’t make sexual harassment go away, or make it pleasant to deal with. But I’m speaking truth. That’s a novelty in biglaw – and I believe it helps a lot.
The harassment at big law firms is a two-way street. Female partners (and even associates!) do it to men, too. I’ve been a victim of it and so have my friends. It’s creepy.
Or you report it, and the female partner who is supposed to be investigating it never finishes doing so and instead tells you stories about how when she was interviewing she had male partners put their hands on her knee, and the partnership’s overall general response/resolution is just not to have the harrassing partner write a review for you – never mind that he was the only one who saw you do a great direct examination at trial or argue significant motions, and then the firm uses the lack of the review to ease you out saying you don’t have enough trial experience. (‘Course, that’s after they laid off 10% of their associates, so it’s not like anyone could expect them to be a stand-up place).
Yeah, I’m not bitter or anything. You wonder why law firms have trouble retaining women sometimes. At the very least, that’s one law firm this inhouse counsel will NEVER hire.
My experience after a bunch of years in biglaw:
1. the type of sexual harassment you describe still goes on, but not very often
2. the most common sexual harassment these days isn’t about having sex, its about assigning female lawyers to subordinate roles, asking female juniors to make copies while male juniors do actual legal work, preferring male lawyers for high-profile tasks, that sort of thing. And don’t get me started on female lawyers getting passed over because they’re perceived as being on the mommy track.
IMO a young female lawyer is far more likely to have their career damaged by something behind door #2 than be attacked by a drunken male colleague. It would be interesting to know how firm policies (which seem to deal pretty well with perverts) deal with more subtle harassment. Or if female lawyers just leave quietly.
I have to disagree with your first point – sexual harassment as described by Will is still very much alive in biglaw. At the firm where I worked for many years, it was so pervasive that there were even more junior male associates sexually harassing more senior female associates. And if you’re in that situation, it isn’t any easier to report and deal with it – you are still put in an extremely uncomfortable situation that can cause damage to your career.
Regarding your second point, firms (or at least the ones I know well) do not deal with subtle harassment. At all. They just cry about their retention issues with female attorneys, and never bother to address the real issue. As someone mentioned above, law is still very much an old boys network, and the men in charge have little incentive or desire to change that.
It definitely goes on, and isn’t subtle. It’s particularly awkward when you’re a summer associate, and don’t realize that someone’s asking you out on a date, not to a summer lunch event. Maybe you sort of have a sense that they’re “interested” (which strikes you as really weird, since this guy is ten year older than you, and not attractive, and theoretically has a girlfriend waiting at home, when he bothers to leave the office and go home), but you figure it would be rude to turn down lunch, so you go. And you assume they’ll be other people there, which there always are. But this time it’s just the two of you, and it turns out the reservations are at some fancy, romantic place, and he’s trying to hold your hand under the table. So you recoil in horror, and he still doesn’t seem to get it, and starts following you around in the hallways, and stopping by to chat late at night, and calling to ask why you’re not answering his emails. And in the end the whole thing gets so weird and uncomfortable that you’re happy to get a cold offer and get the hell out of there, except that then you’ve got to figure out what to do next, which isn’t exactly ideal. Particularly when you know that the same thing happened to several of your friends over the summer, too, and it’s not clear that there’s a “safe” firm anywhere…
mike, that is NOT sexual harassment. it is gender discrimination. there is a big difference. SH is when someone is physically or verbally molested in a sexual way. or put in a similar uncomfortable sexual scenario even after indicating their lack of interest.
There is not a big difference. Sexual harassment is simply harassment based on sex. It does not have to be sexual in nature. They are the same thing.
“sexual harassment…does not have to be sexual”
your words (heh)
my dictionary:
sexual harassment
noun
harassment (typically of a woman) in a workplace, or other professional or social situation, involving the making of unwanted sexual advances or obscene remarks.
stand corrected?
Sexual harassment is is defined as all forms of harassment based on a person’s sex. Federal law and the EEOC states that:
“Harassment can include “sexual harassment” or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature. Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general.”
How depressing. This happened to me, although not at my horrible law firm — it happened when I worked at a law school. I ended up getting fired, while 9 months pregnant, shortly after a friend of mine reported to HR what had happened. What happened to the dude? That would be nothing.
Oh, I’m exaggerating. Something DID happen to him! He got promoted and transferred to a more desirable location.
Our managing partner is pig that can’t keep his hands off the single women in the office. The firm had already settled several suits against him by former associates by the time I arrived (this wasn’t in the recruiting brochure of course). This was an open secret known to everyone in the office and the other attorneys even joked about it. So what happened? Well….
– a senior attorney that got sick of watching his junior mentee get groped decided to speak up about it, and in return got passed over for partner. He left the firm shortly thereafter.
– when it was finally reported to our firm sexual harassment committee, the committee head, who happened to be a VERY good friend of the managing partner, spoke with a few women in the office, had lunch with the managing partner and nothing was ever heard from him again. the woman that had launched the complaint left the firm and later had a nervous breakdown.
– a female partner asked several women point-blank if they were having affairs with the managing partner. These were women that were being (quite openly) sexually harassed by the managing partner. The lesson being, if he’s groping you, you must be asking for it or putting out.
Meanwhile, the managing partner has been promoted to our policy committee which means he decides whether or not you make partner. Filing a complaint against him is just not practical. I would advise anyone in this situation just to get the hell out….I was blinded by my ambition and my incomprehension (this CAN’T be happening to me, can it?) from getting our right away, but it’s so clear in retrospect. And by the way, this is at one of the top Biglaw firms, a name even those outside the legal profession would recognize.
Yep, in two firms, I’ve seen the harassed associate be shown the door, and the Perv stay (though sometimes he suffers a small punishment, like loss of “Practice Group Leader” title (but maybe not loss of compensation)). It is like labor law doesn’t apply to law firms….
I really don’t believe that reporting misbehavior in a law firm can lead to anything but punishment of the victim. That’s how I’ve seen it play in sexual harassment, and religious discrimination. As long as the perp has status, he/she is safe.
You forgot the rest of the story. You know, the part that comes after you’ve reported the incident, after you’ve become “that girl,” after you’ve become the one who brought down so and so, the girl who had to be moved and whose work had to be reassigned, the one that the firm had to “accommodate” and “take care of” because you were so valuable, of course the firm really has to do something because you’re really really valuable (and valued!) and we simply can’t have these types of things happening to our valuable and valued female associates, the part after you’ve finally started to think, “okay, I can deal with this, maybe it won’t be so bad, maybe I won’t have to push this to get resolution”… Once you’ve gotten through all of that, you hit the part of the story where your firm has to cut associates because, you know, the ECONOMY is bad, and all of a sudden, you aren’t so valuable, and you’re on the cut list. Now that you’ve been moved off of all of those projects, your billables are down, and, well, you’re not so valuable, and if you’re not valuable, you’re not valued. Not that you were ever REALLY valued to begin with (because if you were, he wouldn’t have been a jackass to begin with, right?). Now that you aren’t valuable OR valued, a partner who knows about this unfortunate mess, this INCIDENT, can feel free to add you to the cut list because, well, the economy is just SO BAD…
This is the part that, in any other business, in any other context, would be clearly retaliatory conduct, but which, in this market, in this economy, in the legal industry where people know better as a matter of law, is obviously (DUH) not retaliatory. It’s just business.
Welcome to biglaw.
Isn’t being laid of in this context more akin to being released from prison?
In the grander scheme of things, I supposed that getting out of biglaw is like being released from prison. The problem in this case is that the prison release brings with it an increased likelihood of financial devastation from loss in income. More often now than ever before, women in biglaw (and the law in general) are the primary breadwinners/alpha earners in their households. So to be “laid off” because you attempted to hold your employer accountable is even more problematic, since you have the loss in income, the sting from being punished for attempting to do the right thing, plus now you’ve been “branded” as the one who had the audacity not to just take the BS (and anyone out there who thinks partners in different firms in a single market don’t talk to each other about things like this is just NUTS).
FBA says:
“So to be “laid off” because you attempted to hold your employer accountable is even more problematic, since you have the loss in income, the sting from being punished for attempting to do the right thing, plus now you’ve been “branded” as the one who had the audacity not to just take the BS”
Sounds like you’ve been blackballed.
In such a situation, the best solutions are probably:
1) Move to another marketplace.
2) Find another career.
Nah, just try another firm.
You are only blackballed if you end up on the front page of the local paper talking about the cigar, groping, etc. Then you might need to move.
Good topic to discuss.
At the same time, I think the other side needs to be mentioned, too, and I write this as a female junior associate.
A lot of women, inside and outside the law, are so insecure that they see any hint of attention as sexual harassment. A more senior lawyer can’t do so much as smile encouragingly when handing over an assignment, or ask a junior associate whether she had a good weekend, before alarm bells go off. This may have to do with the female contribution to the persistence of the gender divide: “surely his gestures can’t mean something neutral or plain friendly,” goes the interpretation, “he’s a man and men only want one thing!” It’s (some) women’s inability to get used to neutral, professional interaction with men.
It also may have to do with insecurity on another level: if someone sexually harasses you, that means that you’re hot! That must mean, then, that if nobody sexually harasses you, you must be unhot. That’s a painful realization, and easier than accepting this inescapable conclusion is to search for signs of sexual harassment, to prove to yourself — and others — that you are sexually desirable.
Let me reiterate that sexual harassment is a serious issue and that firms should take it seriously. The only point I’m hoping to make in this response is that in order to achieve true equality in professional circles, women should be careful with what they call sexual harassment.
Are you sure this actually happens? Because I don’t see overreporting, just underreporting.
You should write an article about drug use at law firms. When I was a summer associate at the law firm I work for, a senior associate showed up drunk, made me give him a ride home and demanded that we (another summer and I) find him some coke…
I think you’re grossly simplifying the idea of sexual harassment here. The scenarios you describe are (1) easily identifiable by anyone as sexual harassment and (2) pretty unlikely to happen to a lawyer (especially in a big firm context) unless the perpetrator is extremely drunk (which, I will admit, is not an uncommon state for big firm lawyers).
Real sexual harassment, the insidious kind, is much more subtle and nuanced. It’s harder to realize that’s what’s happening until things have probably gone too far and you look just as bad as the guy who put you into the situation. And if you are savvy enough to see it coming, it’s impossible to lodge a complaint about it.
This is what sexual harassment really looks like: You are a pretty, single junior or mid-level associate. He is a really good-looking junior partner. He’s the golden boy of the firm. Even the men have crushes on him. He takes an interest in you, starts giving you lots of work. There’s flirtation. There’s a LOT of flirtation. You, stupidly, eat it up because (a) you’re finally getting to work for someone who doesn’t treat you like sh*t (b) coming to work every day is now fun, lighthearted, playful (c) you’re young and stupid. He’s married. Nothing ever actually happens between you, but everyone in the firm becomes suspicious that something is going on. None of TPTB will talk to him and tell him to cut it out, because he’s the golden boy and they don’t want to alienate him. Instead, they go after you and stop at nothing (including bald face lies about your work product) to get rid of you. Your career takes the hit, he’s fine, and the rest of the firm feels smug and self-righteous that they got rid of a little tart like you.
That’s 21st Century sexual harassment. Just FYI.
That’s not sexual harassment.
That’s a preemtive strike against a potential future sexual harassment claim.
UGH. that is NOT sexual harassment. See my postings above on what it means. for christ’s sake, office politics and molestation are two entirely different things. stop “FYI”-ing utter nonsense!
Law student, while that conduct may not constitute “sexual harassment,” it certainly could be gender discrimination under Title VII — the young female associate being terminated for the exact same conduct that Golden Boy is engaged in.
m, i agree.
Perhaps I overstated my case in tone and tenor. She may very well be a victim of lord of the flies office politics. but lets have a look at what she says:
“There’s flirtation. There’s a LOT of flirtation. You, stupidly, eat it up…”
OK, so she admits flirting back or at least being receptive. Either because she is attracted (to an obviously married man!) or enjoys the attention, or both. In such a case, being terminated as a future obstacle to good office relations (IE the common sense rule to avoid dating co-workers where possible, esp if you care about your job) is not entirely unreasonable. She can bitch all she wants about being a poor, young girl, but the key fact is the ‘golden boy’ is the rising star of the firm who’s been there longer than she. Did she really expect he would get the boot in that scenario?
Why does the poster not accept some of the blame of her situation, rather than crying “sexual harassment” and “gender discrimination”. There’s clearly more at play here than the “Im just a girl!” explication she offers. And that is what makes some people not take SH, which is a very serious problem, as seriously as it should be.
Jesus Christ, sexual harassment is harassment based on sex. If she was harassed because she was a woman, or because of her perceived relationship with a man, such that it altered the terms or conditions of her employment, she was sexually harassed.
You simply do not know what you are talking about. Don’t look at a dictionary, read case law on sexual harassment. Ugh.
obviously, this story is your experience. which you are now trying to make into a headline of wallowing self-pity and exaggerated victimhood.
maybe your work product wasn’t as good as you thought it was; as opposed to the WHOLE office conspiring to out you because you didn’t sleep with the “golden boy”
unreal.
FYI to “law student” – yes, there is a difference between your work product not being all that good and being discriminated against “by the whole office for not sleeping with the golden boy” (which is the total opposite of my point, if you were literate). Even us girls can sometimes tell the difference between being total nincompoops and being victims of harassment. One common tell-tale sign is when your supervisors have to make up performance flaws that are total bullsh*t rather than cite anything that you may have actually, in any actual, real context, done wrong. When they have to make stuff up out of whole cloth, things that you can DISPROVE WITH ACTUAL EVIDENCE, that is a RED FLAG that they’re going after you for something they don’t feel comfortable justifying in fact. It means they’re going after you for something that they can’t justify at all.
I am sorry to hear that happened. And yeah, there is a lot more of that sort of thing, where no one says anything bad enough to give you an easy case, but you know it happened.
Jesus. I was neither trying to wallow in self-pity, exaggerate any victimhood nor avoid taking any blame. What I was trying to point out is that, by now, even most biglaw menaces are ontop enough of their games to weed out the pussyhounds and perverts who step blatantly into the realm of sexual harassment. Most female attorneys these days feel confident enough to report the senior associate/junior partner who persistently pesters them for sex.
What I was trying to point out is that sexual harassment – the taking of one gender’s side over the other’s – is alive and well in more subtle forms. I was trying to point out that it is not hard for a female associate to suddenly wake up and find herself in a well of SH trouble, where she didn’t intend to walk into it. It’s far less likely for a man to find himself in the same situation I described – there aren’t a lot of “golden girl” junior partners who could be described as “cougars” (because, from my experience, being married and having children is kind of a requirement to become a female junior partner, and most women with young children and bigfirm law careers have too much on their plates to think about being cougars). And when it does happen, the impulse amongst the testosterone-dominated powers that be is to find a way to blame the woman instead of the man.
There’s no “he’s more to blame than I am” here as far as the underlying circumstances. I’m not even complaining about the underlying circumstances, if you read carefully. I’m merely pointing out whose side the biglaw mentality will take when this happens AND THEY (BIGFIRM PTB) DECIDE THAT SOMEONE HAS TO BE RUN OUT OF TOWN ON A RAIL FOR IT. Which is – they take HIS side, they run HER out of town on a rail. That’s the pervasive prejudice. It’s the thing that tells women they have to be more on guard than men do. It’s the thing that women have hanging over their heads ALL THE TIME – BEWARE OF SOMEONE BEING NICE TO YOU (if it’s a man). BEWARE THIS WILL BE INTERPRETED BY OTHERS AS YOU BEING A VAMP. IF AT ANY TIME YOU FIND YOURSELF LOOKING FORWARD TO WORKING WITH A (male) PARTNER, CONSIDER WHETHER THIS WILL BE CONSTRUED BY OTHERS AS YOU CASHING IN ON SEXUAL FAVORS.
heh.
hit a nerve did i? but you never answered the question: in what way, shape, or form does the flirting which you admitted enjoying constitute SH? Oh, the getting fired bit. Right. And that constitutes ‘unwanted sexual advances’ in which way?
so then its not SH, its gender discrimination, right? which would be true if all factors were equal but gender. except theyre not. the golden boy was the star, and had been there longer than you (another point you failed to address in your diatribe and they key piece to this puzzle). you had a chance to be ‘friendly’ by politely reminding him he was married and that you might flirt back when the divorce papers were finalized, or some other such win-win let down of the speaker of comments which now in hindsight clearly offend you so. But you did not, and the office saw a problem, and you went. I admit that’s not an easy pill to swallow, but you can surely see the other side right? Life is tough; if an unwanted but otherwise innocent fetus enters the womb, its not the mother who is aborted, savvy?
Being kept on in a law firm is not solely the product of work quality, as you are now aware of. They can fire you for other reasons, such as flirting (back) with a married man and potentially causing easily foreseeable problems down the road (btw your shrill and belligerent response and non-sequitur ad hominem speak volumes about your personality and openness to dissent). But since your work product was so great, Im sure youll have no problems getting over this and finding a better job where they are more adept at weeding out the ‘stealth perverts’ and not the ‘victims’ who inspire/encourage them so.
but fwiw, my nutshell synopsis of the situation is this: you miss the alpha (tough to find out there, aren’t they?) who you clearly took a liking to, and your bountiful ego took a hit when you got canned. after all, “hell hath no fury like” something-something-something…
Firing someone because they go along with flirtation that they believe they must tolerate in order to keep their job is discrimination based on sex. Firing someone because you perceive her friendliness with a male as being unprofessional flirting is also discrimination based on sex. Because he is in a supervisory position over her, if his “flirtation” was inappropriate, punishing the subordinate for it is discrimination based on sex.
Now, can you prove it in a court before a jury? Not bloody likely, unless people sent a lot of incriminating emails and you manage to figure out who they are and get discovery.
You are a fucking idiot if you think that a man who is just being nice to you (or is harmlessly flirting with you) will be totally cool if you tell him to stop cheating on his wife.
And knock out the capt. jack sparrow language. You don’t know what the hell you are talking about, and so you presume to lecture actual lawyers about the law.
Anonymouse,
“You are a fucking idiot if you think that a man who is just being nice to you (or is harmlessly flirting with you) will be totally cool if you tell him to stop cheating on his wife.”
since i don’t say that, your pathetically passive-aggressive chicken-head insult doesn’t register. but since you interpreted it that way, looks like a classic case of projection to me.
PS betcha wouldn’t talk to me like this anywhere other than behind a keyboard, hundreds of KM away:)
Yes, I would say it to your face. If you said what you did to that woman who was harassed. Which you probably wouldn’t. I actually don’t speak differently online then I do in person, particularly when some law student repeatedly misstates the law of sexual harassment and then relies on a bloody dictionary to say it is what he says it is. And engages in ad homs directed towards a poster who was harassed at work.
And yes, telling a man that you’d be cool with it once he is divorced is basically accusing him of inappropriate conduct in connection with his wife. If you can’t see that, that is not my problem.
Not only that, but you try and put some bullshit “alpha male” construction on harassed. So, you’re really not in a position to police anyone else’s tone, when you’re projecting all kinds of nastiness onto someone who was harassed for the sin of being nice to an attractive man who was being nice to her and was her boss.
And PS–I note that you haven’t addressed the substance of any of my posts. So very typical. Not only are you wrong, but once it is thrown up in your face, all you have is a tone argument. Pro tip–most judges are irritated by tone arguments.
Thanks so much for writing this insightful article. I’m an associate in one of the major white shoe management consulting firms and have been wrestling with a similar situation myself.
While I haven’t faced sexual propositions, I was faced with months of verbal insults directed against me and the place of women at the firm by the team I was working with. It was an exhausting situation, and I felt very much like the woman you describe– it was all I could do in the morning to go to work. I discussed my problems with some partners, other associates, and even the firm ombuds but decided not to file an “official HR report” for many of the same points you mentioned.
I’ve recently chosen to quit the firm, but even though I’m relieved that it’s “over,” I was still feeling terrible about it. After reading your post, I found myself feeling a lot better. I think it’s because there’s something about being in a situation like this that made me feel so powerless. And having left rather trying to “tough it out,” I wondered if there was something weak about me for not trying to “push through and overcome.”
Your post helped give me some validation that it’s the situation that takes the power away from someone, and that it’s not me that’s somehow become powerless. Hearing the simple word “It sucks” really helps when stuck in a situation that’s constantly hushed up, pushed aside, and ignored to the point where someone feel like the last sane person in a crazy world. Thank you.
[…] One therapist’s blog contains this description of a client’s real life experience: A partner in a one-on-one meeting with a female associate leans over and says, “I’d really love to kiss you right now.” Then he barrages her with emails about how hot she is. What does she do? She can try to ignore him, she can take her problem to human relations, or she can leave the firm. […]
Reading this article stopped me dead in my tracks. It was like you wrote the story of what happened to me. Thank you so much for sharing it. For the other commenters who were frustrated, all I can say is, yes, it is frustrating. There’s nothing that can be done. It’s an old boys’ club, and I got out thanks to my therapist.
Howdy! This blog post couldn’t be written any better! Going through this article reminds me of my previous roommate! He constantly kept preaching about this. I am going to send this information to him. Fairly certain he will have a very good read. Thanks for sharing!
I informally complained about sexual harassment a few weeks after I started working at my Vault 100 law firm. My hours plummeted, my colleagues (male and female) all ostracized me, and my firm initiated a sexual harassment investigation without my consent.
At the end of the investigation, the firm offered to transfer me to another office to get me away from my harasserं. When I declined, the firm fired me.
This article that you wrote is spot on for every painful, humiliating thing I experienced. It was hard for me to read, but it also makes me feel less alone, since you have obviously talked to other women who’ve had similar experiences.