Dame Emma Thompson is an Oscar-winning actress with decades of experience and accolades to her name. Yet, when she released a letter detailing her refusal to work on an animated film because the same production would employ a man accused by several women of sexual harassment in the workplace, it resonated. Back in February, she wrote that one John Lasseter, who left his role as head of Disney in mid-2018 following the allegations, may deserve a second chance, but questioned why women working for him on the production of Luck should have to be the crash test dummies of his rehabilitation. (For the record, Lasseter has apologised for his ‘mis-steps’).
The letter, published by the Hollywood Reporter, went global, and consequently, well, Thompson is out of a job. Lasseter, meanwhile, still has his.
Of course, Thompson’s career is far removed from the rest of ours. In fact, the world that #MeToo and #TimesUp played out on red carpets and big screens, has been criticised many times for being unrelatable to the average woman. Despite this, the movement is as urgent as it’s ever been for women in the workplace. Data released by Yahoo Finance UK this month showed that half of women have experienced harassment, bullying or inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. Further to this, the British Polling Council found during a survey of 2000 UK adults that 34% of women “are confused as to whether incidents that made them feel uncomfortable in the workplace should have been reported”, and the same number of women fear that reporting an incident might have a negative effect on their career.
Yasmin LaJoie, 29, was warned of this by others when she started exposing sexual harassment in the music industry. ‘A lot of people told me, “Yasmin, be careful, you’re pissing a lot of people off”,’ she told Grazia. Having witnessed many incidents during her time working in the sector, she began collecting others’ stories of harassment, uncovering coercion, sexual assault and rape occurring on company property. In December 2017, as #MeToo took hold, she said on national TV there was ‘absolutely no doubt that there are people working in the industry today who should be in prison’.
While she was applauded by feminists on social media, her efforts didn’t have the impact she had been hoping for. 'I had quite high expectations,’ she said. ‘I wanted there to be a sea change and there just... wasn’t.’ In fact, when her previous employer conducted an internal investigation following her claims, she says, ‘their concern didn’t seem to be about sexual harassment and misconduct happening, it seemed they were worried I was going to sue.’
Jane*, 29, works in advertising, and has also seen a change in her industry, yet it only came long after a complaint of hers fell on deaf ears. In 2015, as a reward for her hard work with a client, she was invited to a dinner with him, her managing director (MD) and the chairman of the company.
Upon arrival, her MD joked that ‘good client servicing meant holding my client’s penis when he took a piss’.
‘The MD and my client were getting more and more drunk,’ Jane explains of that evening. ‘The client was touching my leg under the table, repeatedly and kept on joking about wanting to sleep with me. My MD egged him on throughout.’
Jane complained to her line manager. ‘The feeling was that if I complained about the client, he could lose his job. If I complained about my MD, it could damage my career. They got the client to apologise to me, face-to-face, but nothing was escalated, and I never got an apology from my MD.’
Ultimately Jane felt ‘demeaned by the whole process - it made me feel disgusted and upset that there wasn’t anywhere to go.’
Luckily, for Jane, office life began to change ‘around the time #MeToo was in the news’.
‘We now have an HR person,’ she says, ‘a woman who is also on the board, and would take matters like this really seriously. Someone else on the board has since come up to me and said “I’m so sorry for the way you were treated during that time, I now get it.”’
Jane would still like a formal apology, and still maintains that, without more female role models, ‘the boys club makes it feel like there is nowhere for your career, as a woman, to progress’. Yet she appreciates that now, ‘The jokes aren’t made, the inappropriateness isn’t there’ and explains the MD ‘was eventually pushed out of the door because of his behaviour.’ Ultimately, for Jane, ‘knowing it won’t happen to someone else, or would be dealt with in the way it should be, is enough from my point of view.’
Marie Le Conte, a freelance political journalist, thinks similarly: ‘I’d like to hope that quite a few men who normally would have felt they could behave the way they wanted to perhaps now have the fear of god in their heart. I’d hope to think they have the idea “Shit! Should I do this, or will I get in trouble?”’
She reached this conclusion after outing a ‘fairly prominent’ political writer and barrister who’d been using his online clout and unpaid role at a national magazine to access younger women who he would then, Marie tells Grazia, harass. Post-#MeToo, he’d ‘really gone out of his way to play the good guy’, Marie tweeted at the time, but ‘Plot twist! He is a fucking creepy media man.’ After her tweets, which didn’t name the man outright, she was inundated with privately-messaged allegations against him from ‘literal dozens of women’.
The allegations were so serious that, rather than share them online, in tune with the confessional nature of the #MeToo movement at that time, Marie ‘collated a bunch of allegations’ and emailed them to the publications this man wrote for. She told editors, ‘This is just some of what I’ve received, make your choice about whether you want to drop or keep him, it’s your call’. He was later dropped by two publications and tweeted an apology for his ‘sub-optimal’ behaviour. As Marie puts it, he 'fucked off for a whole month’ before once again writing for major, well-read publications.
Marie, meanwhile, was accused on social media of destroying this man’s career – but, of course, it remains intact. She counts herself ‘lucky,’ she says. ‘I’ve never been seriously sexually assaulted, so I didn’t have trauma to relive. As a freelancer, I don’t have employers who might frown upon what I say.’
Furthermore, all three women agree that we are in a time of relatively rapid change – even if that is borne out of fear of repercussions of the voices speaking out, rather than hard and fast rules being addressed.
For Yasmin, that can be seen in the buoying responses of other women (like one who, at an afterparty for the Brits, called Yasmin her “hero”) and in giving them the confidence to tell their own stories. Even though Yasmin suspects she hasn’t improved her career by coming forward, because ‘People think I’m a troublemaker’, she is certain that ‘I know I’m good at my job, so there’s that!’ That goes for the work she’s taken on elevating other women’s stories: ‘One friend had accused a man at work of sexual harassment,’ she says, ‘and her bosses had been really supportive. He was fired immediately.’
All in all, Yasmin is certain that if well-intentioned strides towards equality don’t do the job, cynical, image-motivated adjustments will: ‘In the wake of #MeToo people are so much more careful now.
‘Whether that’s because they genuinely care about the welfare of victims or whether they’re more aware that things can get litigious quickly, it doesn't matter. Because, overall, we’re getting the results we want.’
*some names have been changed
If you suspect you are being subjected to discrimination at work, please check _Citizens’ Advice’s guidance___on how to identify illegal harassment.
There are three types of harassment - the first is when others’ unwanted conduct towards you relates to a ‘protected characteristic’ such as sex or race, the second is when you are subject to unwanted conduct of a sexual nature, and the third is where you’re treated worse because of rejecting or submitting to types one and two of harassment.
Citizens’ Advice are on hand to guide you on how best to record and report harassment. Its website will also guide you on what your rights are depending on the form your work takes and who you work for.