What can men do to stop sexual harassment?

So Uber is the latest tech company to get called out about its poor handling of sexual harassment, Other companies have a sexual harassment problem.

What can be done?

For starters, it is a wonderful thing that these stories are resulting many supportive comments backing the women in these stories.

The Elephant in the Valley site is instructive. TechCrunch adds more to the conversation.

Women and men are equally angels and sinners. I do not like trying in the Court of the Internet – who is guilty and who is innocent.

However, we can be aware of casual racism and sexism. And we can help stop it.

The answer has to include the *non-managers* in the room. We can defend our co-workers from this bad behavior by:

• NOT laughing politely
• NOT ignoring it and hoping it will go away.

Men have to step up as a group to:

• ask politely that the behavior stop,
• say that it makes *us* uncomfortable,
• say that it is distracting from hitting the quarterly goals.

In other words, don’t defend the victim. Broaden the impact to include the behaviors’ impact on the other team members (males included).

This avoids making the issue just about one person’s sensitivity.

Maybe the offensive person will not change how they behave elsewhere but the goal is to stop the behavior in that part of the work place.

For example,

“Talking about Joan’s breast size in meetings wastes time when we really need to make the hard decision about using Google Cloud or Amazon AWS.”

OR

“While we can all agree that Petra is dressed very nicely, I have another meeting in 10 minutes and I need a decision about our next milestones.”

In other words, give a non-reaction to the behavior. Mention it and refocus on forcing the conversation back to the business at hand.

And do this in a polite respectful way that does not burn bridges.

What do you think?

Here are some thoughts from Aimee Lucido