For the last eleven years my anti-harassment training has focused on sexual harassment for the most part with a passing acknowledgement that Title VII, ADA and ADEA prohibit harassment on the other protected groups as well. The main reason for that, at least from my perspective, is that is what my clients have asked for over that time period and even now. The calls I get for my services still are focused on sexual harassment. The one-on-one harassment training I do is almost exclusively about sexual harassment. This may be an artifact of the way I advertise my services and the fact that most of my referrals come from clients that used me for sexual harassment training. Still, it occurs to me that we might need to broaden the focus of our anti-harassment training programs to ensure that we are doing all we can to protect our organizations, and in the past few years my training has moved, albeit slowly, in that direction.

In January, the EEOC announced that 93,277 workplace discrimination charges were filed with them nationwide in fiscal year 2009. This represents the second highest number of complaints ever and resulted in over $294 million in damages and that does not include the $82 million resulting from litigation. Unfortunately, the way the EEOC reports their charge statistics on their web site precludes any conclusive analysis. A single claim may contain claims of discrimination in a number of categories. For instance, if you add the number of charges from each category it totals somewhere over 170,000 or nearly double the number of individual charges filed. The monetary benefits in the cases that are resolved are not divided but reported in each of those categories. I am not being critical here but only explaining why we need to exercise caution when interpreting these complaint statistics.

In FY2009, there were 30,641 harassment complaints that resulted in $80.5 million in damages and there were 12,696 sexual harassment complaints which resulted in damages of $51.5 million. Clearly, there is some overlap between these two statistics, but even taking that into consideration, the numbers suggest that damages awarded for sexual harassment complaints are generally going to be higher than those awarded for other forms of harassment. Add to that the fact that sexual harassment complaints generally seem to be more newsworthy (typically because of the high-profile individuals involved, e.g. Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton), and it is easy to understand why sexual harassment training continues to get the most attention.

 If we look closer at those statistics, we see that over this decade the number of sexual harassment complaints has slowly dropped from 15,836 in FY2000 and has stayed relatively stable around the mid 12,000’s. The dollar amounts have varied a little but tend to stay around the $50 million mark across that time span. In that same time period, harassment charges in general have risen continually from 24,239 complaints in FY2000 to 30,641 in FY2009, and the monetary awards have also risen steadily from $47.4 million to $80.5 million. This seems to suggest, to me at least, that all of our training efforts are have at least some effect on sexual harassment, but there is a need to expand that training to place more emphasis on the other protected groups that the EEOC watches over.

Some may pass this off as temporary, or perhaps, a result of our sagging economy but I don’t think it is that simple. I think we are seeing the same thing we saw with sexual harassment in the 1990’s. As people become more aware of the laws and the protections afforded to them by those laws, they become increasingly more likely to come forward and complain. The good news is, from the perspective of the working managers who have to deal with this it doesn’t change much. True, there are a few more laws to learn and understand, but from a practical perspective the way these issues are handled is no different than how sexual harassment is handled. It comes down to the same point. We have a responsibility to provide a respectful workplace for all of our employees. Besides, that’s just good business.