Workplace Harassment in the Age of Remote Work

Last spring, as offices closed across the country and kitchen tables became desks, contemplating the possible upsides of the new professional conundrum felt like a means of survival.

There was much tumult, and there were many questions. Among them: Once we all became boxes on Zoom or text bubbles in a chat, and once we were physically separated from colleagues and clients, would incidents of workplace harassment drop?

That flame quickly went dark.

What is virtual harassment?

Kalpana Kotagal, a partner at Cohen Milstein in the Civil Rights and Employment group, says workplace harassment of any kind occurs when an employee uses protected characteristics — things like race, gender, sexual orientation, seniority or socioeconomic status — to hold power over a colleague or staff member. The result is a so-called hostile work environment — a workspace that feels unsafe, can feel threatening to someone’s identity or inhibit employees from doing their work.

“Words can be harassing, images can be harassing, and threatening behavior can be harassing, whether it’s in-person or not,” Ms. Kotagal said.

What surprised many was the extent to which remote work made it easier for some employees to exert power over those who were comparatively vulnerable. That’s because the channels through which remote work occurs — text, phone, video — are often unmonitored, unrecorded or occur outside employer-sponsored platforms.

Knowing that no one’s watching can embolden foul play, too. In an in-person office setting, bystanders can be “a source of protection if they are trained, able or brave enough to step up,” Ms. Kotagal said. But working from home deprives us of witnesses; the colleague who may otherwise overhear an off comment in the office is not present when we’re on a call at home.

Complicating things is the air of informality around workplace communication, which increased with the shift to remote work during the pandemic. “Since the start of the pandemic, employees have felt as if online environments are the Wild West, where traditional rules do not apply,” said Jennifer Brown, a diversity, equity and inclusion expert and the founder of Jennifer Brown Consulting. That can exacerbate misconduct, especially given how difficult it can be to discern intent from text stripped of tonal cues.

And pandemic-imposed stress compounded these realities. “We know that stress impacts manipulative behavior, making people more likely to snap or quickly get angry,” Ms. Brown said. “So if we already have our filters down in this more informal online environment, and we’re being careless because we’re under a lot of pressure, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

According to a Deloitte survey, Women at Work: A Global Outlook, 52 percent of women have experienced some form of harassment or microaggression in the past year, ranging from the belief that their judgment is being questioned because they are women to disparaging remarks about their physical appearance, communication style, race, sexual orientation or caregiving status. Women of color and L.G.B.T.Q. women were significantly more likely to experience these noninclusive behaviors.

Another report from Project Include, a nonprofit organization that aims to accelerate diversity and inclusion in tech, found that 25 percent of respondents experienced an increase in gender-based harassment during the pandemic, about 10 percent experienced an increase in race- and ethnicity-based hostility, and 23 percent of respondents who were 50 years and older experienced increased age-based harassment or hostility.

“The big learning we had is people will harass people and be hostile to people no matter what the environment — they will find a way,” Ellen Pao, chief executive of Project Include, told Reset Work, a new business publication distributed through email.

“For them, it was easier to harass remotely, because there was so much privacy in those interactions. I don’t have a colleague next to me while I’m yelling at somebody, so nobody is seeing me or overhearing me being a harasser. It made it easier in many ways, because they could text or they could chat. All of a sudden, these one-on-one communications became normal, and you could invade somebody’s privacy in their own home in a way that you couldn’t do at the office.”

Our responsibilities uncovered

While obscene instances such as Zoom masturbation become headlines, more common examples of incivility and harassment can include unwelcome comments about an employee’s appearance, demeanor, physical surroundings, productivity or political beliefs.

Taken in isolation, these remarks can seem benign, and they sometimes are. Noting that a colleague is wearing pajamas during a meeting is “not necessarily an invitation to sex,” said Vicki Schultz, a professor of law and social sciences at Yale Law School. “This is a mischaracterization of what sexual harassment actually is and misses its meaning as behavior that undermines equality,” she said, noting how common it is for businesses and public figures alike to exploit the general public’s misunderstanding of sexual harassment.

These circumstances do not necessarily engender sexual harassment, but they call attention to gender in a way that women have worked for years to undo, Ms. Schultz said. “It’s the eye rolling, snide commentary — the kinds of things women experience when they work in low numbers,” she said.

Comments about bringing children to meetings or being unavailable due to care responsibilities, for example, can make women, parents and caregivers feel as if they are not valued in the same way as other employees. “It can be subtle, but we know that subtle things can be meant and experienced as microaggressions,” Ms. Schultz said.

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