tim's experiment

Well well. “A blind eye to sexual harassment” was the headline on the SCMPost’s leader, complaining that of 6,000 companies surveyed on their attitudes to the matter and procedures for dealing with it, only 198 replied. “It can be assumed”, said the writer daringly, that the others “did not think much about the issue, or had no policies at all.”

The first question which comes to mind on reading a leader like this is: is the Post itself free from sexual harassment, and if so does it have an effective policy for dealing with it? I am told by people with bitter experience of the matter that the answer to both of these questions is “no”. Leader writers need to be careful about avoiding the throwing stones in glass houses syndrome.

Leaving that aside, I can think of a number of reasons why companies might desist from responding to a survey on the matter, which apparently have not occurred to the writer of this piece. Companies in Hong Kong get a steady stream of questionnaires from government departments. I am myself the sole proprietor of a registered business name. The enterprise consists of me, selling my own services. I regularly receive requests from government departments for information about my arrangements for the safety, health etc, of my employees. If they persist I reply saying that there are no employees. There is just me. Sometimes this satisfies, Sometimes it doesn’t. I am quite prepared to believe that most of the 6,000 companies asked for their policies and arrangements on the matter of sexual harassment simply binned the questionnaire on the grounds that it is no part of their job to provide free information to government departments. Some of them were no doubt very small. Some of them probably had no female employees, so sexual harassment was rather a remote problem. Maybe some of them had no male employees, another convenient arrangement.

I also had some difficulty with the statistics presented as demonstrating that this was an urgent problem. Of the 316 complaints received under the Sexual Discrimination Ordinance last year, more than one-third related to workplace harassment. The validity and seriousness of the complaints were not specified. Complaints of this nature commonly vary considerably, from the outrageous (you will not be promoted unless you sleep with me) to the trivial (a Pirrelli calendar on the wall of someone else’s office). Let us say that there were 100 substantiated and serious complaints among those received. Let us say further that the 6,000 companies surveyed were the entire universe of potential harassment venues in Hong Kong. This means that there was a one in 60 chance of the company you work for having a sexual harassment case last year. Or to put it another way, you could work for a Hong Kong company for 60 years before you could expect to be harassed, if that was what you wished for.

No doubt there are other ways of looking at it. But given that there are perfectly good legal ways of dealing with the serious cases, you have to wonder if this is really a serious problem, or a solution looking for one. It is, however, a serious problem at the Post, I am told. So they might want to consider sorting that out before offering advice to the rest of us.