When legal rights charity Rights of Women published a survey on workplace sexual harassment at the start of this year, one woman’s story stood out. Having started working from home as a result of the pandemic, the woman’s work meetings had shifted to the online conferencing platform Zoom. While that allowed work to continue in as seamless a fashion as possible, it also gave her boss an opportunity to harass and humiliate his staff.
“The director of the company uses Zoom to take screenshots of myself and other women which he shares with colleagues making derogatory statements and implying the photos look like we’re doing sexual acts,” the woman reported. The company was not named.
But she is far from alone. According to the Rights of Women report there has been a surge in online sexual harassment as a result of the pandemic, with harassers taking advantage of the reliance on platforms such as Zoom to continue intimidatory behaviours they had already honed in physical workspaces. Almost half (45 per cent) of those reporting workplace harassment said it had happened remotely, with close to a quarter (23 per cent) saying it had escalated since they had started working from home. Nor does the harassment simply take the form of indecent comments and unwanted advances, a further report from London-headquartered law firm Slater and Gordon found that women are being discriminated against by employers, who think nothing of asking female staff to “look sexy” on video calls in order to lure clients.
One woman said she felt her privacy had been invaded because colleagues could see her bedroom while she was on video calls and that meant “the men now have more ammunition to mock me with”. Another said the online forum heightened the victimisation they felt because “the fact it’s on Zoom in front of others in a jokey manner makes it difficult to address”.
Deeba Syed, senior legal officer at Rights of Women, says that while it was generally assumed that homeworking would be good for breaking the cycle of workplace abuse, the reality is it has just given harassers another means of accessing their targets. “Women tell us that they experience multiple incidents of sexual harassment by perpetrators who abuse their seniority,” she says. “Sexual harassment happens online, via WhatsApp, email, social media or text, as well as in person, we heard from women how it did so before the pandemic and it continues to do so now.”
Though the Rights of Women report found people had been harassed via Teams and Slack as well as Zoom, the latter’s meteoric rise to prominence during the pandemic means it has become the poster child for all that is good as well as all that is bad about the move to video conferencing. It is something the platform, which says it “strongly condemns harassment of any kind in the workplace”, is acutely aware of. A spokesperson stresses that online harassment is “not an issue particular to Zoom”, but notes that the organisation has introduced a number of measures to help combat it.
“We are always working to enhance the user experience and make Zoom an efficient, collaborative and inclusive platform,” the spokesperson says. “We have a number of default settings and security features, including the ability to remove and report participants.” These settings include allowing users to hide their own homes by using a virtual background or blurring their backdrop. Meeting hosts can also pause conferences to make use of the Suspend Participant Activities button, while anyone attending a meeting can report a person or leave at any time.
That is all very well if an employee feels confident enough to drop out of a meeting hosted by their boss, or if the harassment is obvious and the perpetrator can be caught on camera and booted off. But, while most people have heard of the New Yorker journalist who was fired for masturbating live on Zoom, Syed says the reality is that most online harassment is far more subtle. Identifying and calling out harassing or discriminatory behaviour is therefore much easier said than done.
“We’re trying to get past the image of someone getting their dick out on Zoom,” Syed says. “It’s much more insidious than that. Women are being harassed by people who have a position of power over them and who will punish them for rejecting their advances. People tell us they have not been invited to meetings as a result or have been muted in calls. It’s easier to ostracise people when they’re working from home.”
This chimes with the findings of the Slater and Gordon study, which discovered that the shift to online meetings has led some employers to make unreasonable – and sexualised – demands, predominantly of female staff. The firm found that women were being asked to wear make-up and “dress sexier” for video calls, with bosses justifying their requests by saying it would please clients and help win business. Just under 40 per cent of the 2,000 women who took part in the research said they were targeted when their male peers were not. They said the experience had left them feeling “objectified, demoralised and self-conscious about their appearance”.
“If you think about calls on Zoom or Teams, it’s all focused on what you look like,” says Slater and Gordon employment lawyer Jo Mackie. “Prior to lockdown it happened overtly – there was a big case where a woman was told she must wear high heels on reception – but covertly it can be done via Zoom.”
Similarly, Georgina Calvert-Lee, head of the equality team at Berkshire law firm McAllister Olivarius, says while she is dealing with one case where a woman was on a video call with a masturbating male – and “it wasn’t entirely clear what he was doing until the woman realised” – that is at the extreme end of what is being reported. In general, harassment is far less obvious, especially as it can begin under cover of everyday workplace practices.
“Clients have told us that because we all went into lockdown very quickly there were very ad-hoc measures taken to keep in touch,” she says. “People used WhatsApp and were therefore asked to give their personal mobile phone numbers, but once you’ve been asked to give that and there’s an office WhatsApp group you can’t just switch it off. That gives the sexual harasser access to your personal phone.”
For Mackie, there is a feeling that some employers believe that because they had to make up their home-working policies on the hoof normal employment rules such as the Equality Act do not currently apply when they do. Calvert-Lee agrees, noting that “employers sometimes forget that the law relating to harassment and discrimination hasn’t changed – they think it’s a bit of a free for all”.
The fact that normal human resources practices have also been upended by the pandemic – making it harder for people to report harassment – will not have helped dislodge that impression. “HR managers are not as accessible,” Mackie says. “It feels like a much bigger deal to have to make a meeting with them online rather than being able to knock on their door.” This was highlighted in the Rights of Women report, where one woman said it took a long time for her employer to answer her emails reporting harassment and it “had a huge impact on the way the situation was handled”.
From the point of view of platforms like Zoom, there is little they can do to control the behaviour of people using their technology and, while they could potentially develop algorithms that would pick up explicit language or images, that would be to the detriment of people who use it to interact with consenting partners. For Calvert-Lee, it is up to employers to protect staff by making full use of the functionality that is already available. “An employer could require all employee calls to be recorded - that would have a deterrent effect, but would also get evidence against anyone who was abusing it,” she says.
Even if employers were to take this step, Mackie says the government’s lacklustre attitude to what can and cannot be done under current regulations does not help bosses make sense of how and when they should act. When the high heels case Mackie referred to hit the headlines a few years ago, the woman affected – Nicola Thorp – petitioned the government to ban discriminatory dress codes. It refused, saying that “the scope for redress already exists” under the Equality Act, but that is a piece of legislation people must fight costly legal battles to enforce. Cases that are fought are generally settled out of court but, as the terms of those settlements are kept confidential, there is little in the way of case law for either claimants or defendants to refer to. A mooted law that would ban the use of non-disclosure clauses in settlement agreements – something Mackie says protects “bad apples” to the detriment of other staff – has yet to come to fruition.
Having failed to address the fact that in-person harassment moved online as a result of the pandemic, the problem employers now face is that, as they prepare for the return to the workplace, the issue will continue to follow them. “The lack of prevention is the problem,” Syed says. “This speaks to the power perpetrators often have, and the normalisation of sexual harassment at work. Sexual harassment at work will remain a hidden issue, with many women made to feel they have no choice but to endure the harassment, until employers face up to the realities of this crisis in our workplaces.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK