As I sat down to write this blog, I couldn’t help but think about how biased thinking often affects the way we look at work environments. We tend to think of factories or blue-collar jobs as low-class or sexist, while universities or publishing houses are 
perceived as “evolved.” So let’s discuss workplace bias and sexual harassment.
In my work as a keynote speaker who often talks on workplace bias and sexual harassment, I have found the assumptions about workplaces to be dangerously false. For example, I have seen factory environments where there is a lot of respect and kindness and awareness, while I have known “intellectual” environments that were seething with inappropriate behavior – and worse. Anyone believing there is a positive and higher ethical correlation between “intelligent” workplaces versus more humble workplaces would be wrong.
Dartmouth College Settles – Workplace Bias and Sexual Harassment Claim
Case in point is that prestigious and elite Dartmouth College just settled a $14 million sexual harassment lawsuit that involved the school’s Department of Psychological and Brain Science Department. I’ll let that sink in for a second. Within the elite university, perhaps the most aware (human behavior-wise) department, nine women won a case against male professors who created an environment of alcohol abuse, sexual harassment and up to, and including rape.
In a quote following the lawyers representing the women stated, “Together with Dartmouth, we plan to continue addressing the systemic roots of power-based personal violence and gender-based discrimination across all levels of severity so that our experiences — and those of the class we represent — are never repeated.”
The three male professors found in violation of school policy were accused (according to court documents) of “turning the school’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences into a ‘21st Century Animal House,’ treating women as sex objects, groping and also coercing them into drinking.”
The professors are permanently banned from campus. Dartmouth President Philip J. Hanlon said he “cannot express strongly enough my deep disappointment that these individuals violated their positions of trust to these, and other, students and members of our community.”
It is all well and good, but as a keynote ethics speaker on the topic of workplace bias and sexual harassment, my bottom-line response to Dr. Hanlon is “So what?”
Expectations
The professors at Dartmouth undoubtedly knew better. They are/were highly intelligent men who had been hired by an elite school in an environment of elitism and privilege. They knew it too. They understood it and embraced the elitism. They were above scrutiny.
Perhaps within the recesses of their psychologically aware minds, they knew they had crossed lines, but with no oversite and with an atmosphere of fear created by the privilege of getting away with just about anything within “bounds” they continued. Their students, naïve and frightened, were often reticent to complain which is often the case with issues of workplace bias and sexual harassment. The professors knew this. It was power against weakness. They were, after all, men who claimed to be experts on Brain Science.
However, the need was far less erudite; it was about sex and power. They felt no emotional connection, no forethought and obviously, no regret. They were, what many people perceive as occurring in blue-collar workplaces.
The professors rationalized their actions as being above the fray and beyond reproach. Nevertheless, they were not beyond ethics. They thought they were; they weren’t. They needed to get pulled out of their comfort zones and elitism and needed to be ethically aware of workplace bias, sexual harassment and sexual abuse.
What should have been highly positive learning experiences for the nine women were miserable.
There is plenty of blame to go around at Dartmouth College for the creation of this atmosphere. No one, from the president on down, escapes judgment. Ethical behavior teaches us that. Unless tough, no-nonsense, ethical training on issues of sexual harassment is instituted, I am afraid the pattern will repeat.
