Women wary of reaching out to human resources

Many women in the auto industry who experience sexual harassment say they have two choices on how to handle it: Ignore it or leave their jobs.

Employee handbooks often recommend human resources as the place to report issues with co-workers or managers. But many women surveyed by Automotive News said they fear being labeled as troublemakers and don't trust the HR department to protect them.

About 18 percent of the Automotive News Project XX Survey respondents said they reported unwanted advances from colleagues to their HR department, while nearly a quarter said they didn't say anything because they believed reporting the issue wouldn't have made a difference.

Thirty percent of those who reported a situation said they were not at all satisfied with the result, while just about 6 percent said they were extremely satisfied.

HR departments often end up failing victims because they adopt strict procedures that treat issues in legal terms, according to Anna-Maria Marshall, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has studied workplace harassment. In other cases, they take no action at all.

"I am not at all surprised at the widespread reluctance to report to HR and the disappointment when people do," Marshall said. HR often processes complaints as if it is putting them through a legal system, she said, insisting people have proof, such as witnesses or emails, to document the harassment. If they don't have evidence, HR says it can't do anything.

"And nothing gets better," she said. "HR departments need to think creatively about addressing sexual harassment, ways that are less adversarial and more proactive."

A 2016 task force commissioned by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that workplaces with significant power disparities, monotonous work or a critical mass of young employees are fertile ground for unwanted sexual advances.

While some aspects of gender imbalance have improved in the past decade, with more women moving up the management chain, experts say much still needs to be done to ensure women receive the same respect as men in the workplace.

"You can certainly point to cases where there was egregious harassment, and there appears there's been a lot of progress," said Carol Miaskoff, acting associate legal counsel for the EEOC. "At the same time, it's a very persistent and difficult problem."

One Automotive News survey respondent, described as a new-vehicle dealership director with 10 to 20 years of experience, said complaining about such advances "makes it worse."

"When you are the only female, others gang up on you," she said.

Cheryl Thompson, 51, is a former global powertrain prototype operations manager at Ford Motor Co. who now runs her own consultancy. Thompson worked at Ford for 31 years, during which she was subject to unwanted sexual advances from a plant manager. Thompson told HR about the situation in what she thought was an off-the-record meeting, only to find out later the manager was fired, and co-workers considered her to blame.

As a result, she said, she had a much harder time working with her majority male colleagues at the plant. In a managerial role years later, Thompson said, she still didn't feel like her employees were sufficiently protected.

"I felt like I was thrown under the bus," she said. "I wish I had handled it differently."

While some responses to complaints may be taken too far, others aren't taken seriously enough.

Lauren Cowan, 31, left a position at an East Coast dealership for a job at a dealership farther from home and with less pay. She took the new job to get away from her previous manager, who would constantly berate her, she said.

"He would bring me into a closed office with the lights off and yell and scream at me," Cowan said. "It got to be too much."

When she complained about the general manager's behavior to HR, he was reprimanded by the dealership group owner. Things got worse. The manager started telling her she was too emotional.

She gave up her job for a calmer work environment, but she would have preferred to stay in her old gig.

Management at dealerships may not be properly trained to handle cases like Cowan's, especially in dealerships where the culture has yet to adapt to a more diverse work force, said Kathy Gilbert, a founding member of Women in Automotive and a 20-year industry veteran who is now director of sales and business development at CDK Global.

"It starts with the culture of the dealership, and that hasn't really changed," she said.

Gilbert said managers need more comprehensive education about situations that could occur in the workplace, and more women need to be involved in training and leadership roles to ensure balanced representation. At smaller companies where there may not be a dedicated HR person, employees need a trusted channel to anonymously report issues, even if it's just a confidential email or suggestion box.

HR departments of any size need to take a more flexible approach to dealing with harassment reports, said Marshall, rather than apply a strict code to every situation.

However, she added, this type of organizational transition won't come easy and requires self-awareness in the upper levels of management.

"Organizational cultures change really slowly," she said. "There's no silver bullet that can fix everything. It requires getting managers to take these complaints more seriously and think of more creative responses."