The Harvey Weinstein in Your Industry

harassment pretty much everywhere. Yeah. I think some of the early reactions were to say, look at Hollywood, this is an industry that's just set up for powerful men to

abuse women. And actually it's it's not just Hollywood, And I think that it's a mistake to look at one industry and try to point fingers, because very quickly lots of other revelations about women in all kinds of workplaces started coming out, And following the first wave of allegations against Weinstein, there was the social media campaign hashtag me Too that I don't know about you, but I saw everywhere on my Facebook and Twitter, and it asked women

either specifically or generally to post on their social media if they've been assaulted or sexually harassed in the workplace, and basically pretty much everyone has. My first thought was this applies to literally a hundred percent of the women I know, like so that if anybody isn't posting this hashtag, it's because they decided that they weren't going to, you know, make a personal social media post, not because you know, they can't find an example of something like this happening

to them. And it really has, as you say, it's everywhere, and it has I think been somewhat successful in raising the level of conversation here to just show the ubiquity of what goes on. And you know, lots of women have examples of little small things or much bigger and more traumatic things that have happened to them. But part of the goal seems to be to just raise awareness,

and I think it's really done that. Yeah. I think something that does feel different than before, maybe I'm being optimistic, is that it's not even just more conversation, but more things seem to be happening because of this. It seems like people are calling out for identifying the Harvey Weinstein in your industry, because there definitely is one. We saw this in our own industry. There was something called the Shitty Media Men List that quickly surfaced shortly after the

Weinstein allegations. It was a Google doc that had anonymous allegations against men and media. It was very controversial and quickly got taken down. But I think the point of it was to show like, this is happening in our industry and people want to do something about it, and just to drive home how not specific to one industry. This is we quickly compiled. It didn't take us very long, a not at all exhaustive list of industries that have had harassment scandals in just the last year so, just

following the Weinstein allegations. Employees have complained about an abuse of workplace and sexual harassment at Fidelity, where at least one person was forced to resign because of his behavior. There was a big scandal that emerged out of the National Park Service last year that revealed this huge issue with assault and harassment against female park rangers. In the linguistics world, there was a big scandal a major professor at the University of Rochester has been accused of harassment

by his grad students. If you thought industries that market to women might be safe from these kinds of scandals. You were wrong. The company that owns K Jewelers had its own scandal where widespread allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination caused the retailer to have a huge board change and stock plunge. And of course, there was the Fox News scandal involving Roger Ales and Bill O'Reilly. There was the scandal at uber, which has forced the company

to completely rethink its entire strategy and leadership. In the fintech world so far has been dealing with its own harassment allegations. I think we should just start naming industries because we're gonna run out of time here. We have Antarctic geologists, um, the California State legislature, the military. Oh, and let's not forget the President of the United States of America. So it's wide spread everywhere. This is not just Hollywood, This is not just media. This is probably

happening in your industry too. What's interesting is a lot of these stories have things in common. It's usually powerful men against people in positions with lass power. Obviously that's what happened in the Weinstein allegations. Are a lot of these high profile actors at big media companies. There's often an underlying element of every buddy kind of new or kind of suspected. Either certain bad actors had a bad reputation or there was a culture that everyone kind of

accepted and nobody, no individual took a stand against. Yeah, we see that kind of thing play out with the shitty medium endless that we mentioned earlier. A lot of these things are open secrets, are are part of whisper campaigns,

and it's just being codified on a document. People don't feel confident making allegations, maybe because they've only heard rumors or you know, they've been warned away from someone or something did happen to them, but it's so normalized in the company or industry culture that they rationalize it, or they wonder if it really is a big enough deal, or if they reported is going to cause more trouble than one little comment or a bunch of comments or

a bunch of being interrupted in meetings or passed over for promotions. Yeah, and then you a list kind of has power because it shows you that maybe you aren't the only one that's happened to And other people are saying that it did make them feel like they were harassed and it can it can give your experience a lot more power. Yeah, it kind of explains why a lot of these allegations seemed to come out in these

huge waves. It's not like all of these people just woke up, you know, and a couple of subsequent mornings

and decided to accuse someone. It's it's that they gain strength from other people making reports that they themselves had either been discouraged from making, or had just made the decision not to make for their own careers, or another thing we see in common as people do make the reports and they're not taken seriously, either by their own companies, or they're either paid off to keep quiet, or they just leave the company. That happens a lot or the industry.

I think that's one of the sadder things that I've noticed as a theme in scandals across all these different industries, is people saying, I just you know, my only option was to was to walk away from this field. You saw that in many of the reports from people who made allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and we've seen it in other industries to people saying this. And the sad thing is, as we're realizing there's no industry that's safe from this.

So you might just get fed up with the culture in your own industry and decide I'm going to step out of this, But you'll be pretty hard pressed to find another industry that doesn't have its own, similar but slightly different set of problems. When you put it that way, the problem sounds really insurmountable. But even though all these cases have a lot of things in common, each industry and company needs to deal with it in their very

own specific ways. Our guest today is a great example of someone who saw need in her own industry and took some small steps that are adding up to hopefully some bigger changes. Beth Alpert Nicai is an archaeologist and an associate professor at the University of Arizona that saw a problem with gender based harassment in her field, But when she wants to find research on it, she is that there were more papers on the significance of pigs

than on women. She's not researching the problem herself. So when did you realize that sexual harassment and gender based discrimination was a problem in your field? I would say that it's always clear that it's a problem in the field. Um, when I began going to professional meetings of the Annual Conference of American Schools of Oriental Research, which is the professional organization for mostly North Americans but some others who do archaeological field work in the Middle East, North Africa,

but around the Mediterranean basin. It was clear that almost everybody there with a man. And it's always been clear that pretty much everyone who runs an excavation project in

the field is a man. So the information it has always been there, but I didn't really articular the problem of dangers in the field per se until two thousand and fourteen when I read an article that for Biological Anthropologists published I'm the results of a survey they did on harassment and assault in anthropological field sites, field projects um in remote locations. That I realized that this is something that made it can be dealt with in my own field as well. And what is it about a dig?

And maybe for those of us who aren't familiar, you can give us some sense of what a dig is like. What is it about a dig that opens it up to more opportunities for just sort of discrimination and harassment. So for people who are working on excavations abroad, and I'm only going to speak about the area I'm familiar with. Of course, we're all people who have traveled. Most of us have traveled from some place else. We're living in.

Often we're moat field locations in UM countries where we may we're unlikely to know the legal system, we may not know the language, we may not be familiar with the country in general, know how to move ourselves around, how to access help people talk about that and not just for archaeologists, as a state of exception, which both makes people vulnerable too things happening in this kind of isolated setting, but also makes some people feel like whatever

they do they're there, they can do the laws at home where the social morays that they have at home no longer applied to them, So it um. I mean, excavations can be and often are really great places to

work and exciting and positive. But they also have the potential setting a lot of people together um who are on most of them on summer vacation from their normal law of doing something very physical, very intense and in a fine space and living together five or six days, and we also has the potential to to allow for problems to take place. Can you give us some idea of some specific examples of what discrimination and harassment might look like in this really specific field. A lot of

what I heard about. I launched a survey in two thousand and fourteen, and I relaunched it in two thousand and fifteen and called its survey on Field Safety Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin. I ended up with

over three hundred responses. And the kinds of violations that people talk to me about often were things relating to abuse of power, where people, particularly women, felt that their contributions were value, that they lost control of their own work on a site, so um they weren't able to continue working on material they were working on on the site once they left that excavation project, and that hadn't

been what was anticipated. So there were problems. Some problems related to like an abusive authority that resulted in hampering people's professional progress, whether they Most commonly that was for people who are doctoral students, but also there were stories of physical assaults or demigrations. Instances many were people were made to feel unsafe physically or where they were unsafe physically and they had no recourse to help. Excavations might not have often don't have a set up, at least

at that time. It's getting better now, but have a setup where if something happens in the in the States, you might think, oh, well, I can call the police, I can report it to the human resources department in my UM university campus. But out there it's hard to know who to report it to. If the excavation directors are not supportive, then people are pretty much out of luck. And so those were the kinds of, say, two different kinds of problems that people that people UM kind of

quester them, that people were particularly concerned about. One of the things that you also found in your research was an ambivalence about reporting. And we see that in a lot of industries. So I'm wondering, why is that something that you're seeing specifically in archaeology. In the field, people

are in such isolated places. And I do think that sometimes, and this may be true for undergraduate to comm as part of it an academic program and work on and excavations UM, the freedom of being abroad and and and and not having the normal constraints of life might make things seem interesting that back home wouldn't have seemed acceptable at all. UM. They might also not have the confidence to something happens that they feel was wrong, they were in some way abused by a supervisor, they may not

have the confidence to go and report it there. So there's that level of you know, it's a foreign country, I don't know quite what to do, I don't know quite who to report it to. UM. I think that's part of the problem, and I'm not singling out university undergraduates. Are a lot of people who end up feeling oppressed by it in some way or intimidated by a superior and don't have the courage to report it. Book For these people, there's no going home. You can't be any

place else. So every day for the rest of the excubation season, you're facing the exact same people and living in that exact same situation that you know you can't just like hop on a bus and get back home again for the weekend and not and not return. It makes it complicated. The other part of reporting is when the people who are abusive our supervisors as and your say a graduate student, your researcher, and your access to the materials you're working on depend on maintaining a positive

relationship with your superiors on the excavation side. Then you lose, you riff, the loss of the materials you might be using for your doctoral dissertation. If that happens, do you have to drop out of school? People do? I mean, I've heard stories about people who said, this happened and I left the shield. This happened to me too many times. I couldn't take it anymore, and I left the field altogether. I'm no longer involved in archaeology. I just saw your

survey and filled it out. So you know, those are professional calls that people make. But when people are graduate students, doctoral candidates, say vulnerable to the whims of their dissertation supervisors or their excavation directors, they don't have control over um their own lives from that from a professional perspective. So, since you've done this research, now you're working on making digs safer, can you talk about some of the changes

that you've pushed. The first part of what I did was of course, collecting data and find out what it is that's what it is that's wrong, and begin to think about what might remediate that, what might fix the problems that people were are experiencing. When I started working on this, I was a member of the board at American Schools of Oriental Research. I had been working in general on women's issues, and I heard the Oranization's Initiative

on the Status of Women, which was newly created. I was or remained the first chair for it, and so I had a platform to begin talking to the board of trustees about gender safety and gender equity issues, and they were at first startled, but then I think UM safety wasn't something that had figured on the agenda previously at board meetings, but supportive, and so I began working within the organization UM within a sort of meeting with

big excavation directors, meeting with UM participants on excavations and talking about the need to have clear codes of conduct, clear reporting mechanisms, someone who is an umbud person who was well trained to help people handle problems, access to good medical care, which excavations surprisingly often don't have. And I say surprisingly because physically can be physically dangerous work, never mind sexual as sol and we're rock and following

you or something. So it's good medical care seems important. And I think that in general excavation directors who were really interested in how they could improve the safety of their digs. I never experienced pushback from them UM and so my original goal was to simply post up on the a soor website and disseminated to all the excavation directors and and people working on digs information about protocols, what how to prevent problems, what to do if there

are problems, um, and so forth. But I I didn't have the language for it. These things are always legal,

and I need a good language. So I began working on my own campus, University of Arizona, meeting with people who for ample run UM Study Abroad program for students undergraduate or graduates to study and do research and foreign countries, or faculty members who do research in foreign countries or teaching foreign countries, everybody who leaves the United States and the protection of Title nine and the been Clary Act. And discovered that there were not a lot of good solutions.

There wasn't language developed. There weren't UM protocols I could post, because every country that people go to has its own laws and its own more rays and customs and so forth, so it wasn't possible for anyone to have and across the board, if you're in trouble, here's the number to call.

Here's what you tell the police, here's how you deal with the situation, here's how you find your local consulate, and here's how they fly you back home if that's what you want to do, because in some places it's not. I have to report about sexualists, so you may end up being victimized. So it sounds like you're at the beginning of the process. People are just thinking about the protocols that they have to have. But I'm wondering if you have heard anybody say that they do feel safer

as a result of some of these changes. I have heard lots of I mean lots of people have, and this comes both from big directors and participants on excavations, whether they're graduate students or their faculty who work on another person's excavation, say that having this discussion and having it publicly is helpful and that bringing all of this out to the public is something that feels positive to them.

That they feel that they're gaining, you know, the freedom to say what they need to say, as well from the fact that this is now an open topic. There is nobody in American schools of Oriental research or me at the level of excavation staff excavation directors, UM, senior participants who are unaware of what these problems are. And everybody has access to the statistics, basic statistics, what percent of X, Y and Z happens, who it happens to.

I haven't published the where it happens. What's a safer country or a less saxe country or the same with excavations that keep all that information is confidential. And you know that's the only reason people talk to me is that I don't tell stories publicly. But UM, I think that, I mean, I do have a sense that this has created a positive atmosphere. I'm working on other aspects of creating a positive work atmosphere for women in archaeology UM

as well. And and so there's a whole conversation taking place that UM people are I don't crede it only myself with that you know, I launched it. Let's say, a lot of conversations taking place that wouldn't have been taking place some years ago. UM. And I think that that that people are glad to see that happening. Certainly women and especially younger women who you know, still have a lot of work to do before they are old timeure tackles to somewhere. Um, you know, there is there there.

I feel like this is an endeavor that that has a value and can have a long term value. But you're right, it's a I'm beginning. I I still have to get better information out to excavator is about how to prevent and what are good protocols and so forth. I'm just a bit stimming, and I keep up in that University of Arizona comes up with a great solution packet and then they just email it to me and it'll be good to go. But I fear that's not unlikely to happen because it's just so hard to do. Well.

Thank you so much for taking the time and talking to us, and we really appreciate hearing from you. Thank you. Even in best story, you hear some of the themes that we talked about earlier. She mentioned that there are women who have left archaeology rather than stay and continue to experience, you know, harassment or discrimination. And yet, even though some of this feels so universal across different industries, her experience also makes it clear that there's a lot

of specifics. There's things about archaeology that make it so that it has its own particular pitfalls UM that can lead to discrimination and harassment. And that's that's true for every single industry. Yeah, and even within archaeology. She was talking about how each dig needs its own policies and procedures and that you just couldn't have a blanket statement

that applied to every single site. But I think it's often, as we've seen with all these allegations, that's on women and victims to speak out and speak out until people take them seriously, and then it's usually women who are trying to fix this this them. But I don't think that that's fair at all to put all of this

on women. The journalist Helen Rasner wrote this Twitter thread that went viral and later became a Medium post that was a list of twenty things and I'm sure there's many many more that men can do UM in order to help women and support women, besides just not being harassers, which I think most men would consider themselves to not be UM. And what struck me about her list, and you can find it on Medium, is that it's it's stuff that goes way way way broader than just you know,

piping up about issues in your own workplace. For men, it's about actually incorporating more views of women and supporting women in much more general ways in their lives. And I think her point was when you do that, you bring in perspectives that are different from your own, and they help you see things and empathize with people who might be experiencing something you've never experienced. Let's be clear, none of these illusions are saying that men should avoid women,

because that's definitely not the way to fix things. There have been some people who say they're now afraid to take meetings with women because they might be accused of harassment, which, first of all, many of the allegations of harassment that are coming out are not misunderstandings or miscommunications. It's, you know, someone showing up in a bathroom of naked and asking you to give them a massage. That's not really a miscommunication.

But there are also ways to be professional with women that won't be misconstrued as harassment, and people do it all the time. Right the when something rises to the level of the Harvey Boyingstein scandal, it's because there's dozens

of totally unambiguous examples of bad conduct. So we're not talking here about misunderstandings as you said, there were some men who piped up and said, well, if all of these other little things are also a problem, how can I ever know what to do and how to behave around women so that I don't end up getting accused

of harassment. And the answer is, listen to women, read these accounts, um try to understand how maybe some things that you may have said in the past, while they don't make you a monster, may have not been appropriate, or you know, may have put people in a position where they felt like their job depended on acting in a certain way, or they weren't being given the same opportunities as men, or any of these other subtle things.

So it's just it's a chance to reflect. It's not an opportunity to bury your head in the sand and say you don't understand why all of these things are coming up now. And speaking of reflection, let's take it to half big takes, Happy fake takes. If you have your own half pig take, you can call into our hotline. The number is two and two six one seven zero

one six six Francesca, what's your half big take? My half big take is basically just an observation about something odd I've noticed happening recently, people have been stepping on my feet a lot in a subway. This is just this feels recent, So I don't know what's going on. You and I are both subway commuters, um and so

you know, it gets crowded in there. But I feel like foot stepping is something people generally avoid, and in fact, I have a memory of like, years and years and years ago, I had a foot injury and I didn't want to take the subway because I was worried my foot was going to get stepped on. And my boyfriend at the time was like, come on, when's the last time somebody ever stepped on your foot in the subway?

And it made me think about it, and I realized, wow, like human beings generally do a good job of avoiding this thing. You would think everyone did. And then I have had this idea in my head for years that you just don't get your foot stepped on in the subway. But then in the past couple of weeks, every day, multiple times a day, people have been stepping on my feet. So what I want to know is am I doing something different? Or my shoes different or my feet different?

Is my positioning different? Is it a full moon. Has everybody lost their ability to estimate the space? Certain like, what's going on? Has this happened to you? First of all, don't think your feet have changed? Just guessing. Um, I have to say that. I think it's probably an overcrowding issue. But also, just this morning, I stepped on a foot and then and I said sorry a thousand times. Yes,

I'm getting a lot of stories. So this isn't like a gripe about human behavior because people usually notice that they've done it and then immediately apologize. But it just seemed like this thing we had down as a society, not stepping on each other's foot, and then something shifted. Maybe it's yeah, the train was crowded, I was trying to move into make room, stepped on a foot. There you go. I don't know. I still think it's something

in the air. Halloween's coming up, Mercury, Yeah, there you go. Okay, so it's a combination of all those things. Clearly, Becca, what's your half big take? My half big take is that when traveling for work, I don't need your quirky, charm filled hotel. Okay, I don't need it. I just want a giant bed with starchy white sheets and a million pillows that's way too big for me, and a really fluffy robe, and like a nice cleaner than my

bathroom bathroom. You want a totally generic hotel with all of the quintessential hotel e things, right, I mean it should be nice, like not dingy. Yeah, but I don't need you're like boutique hotel. It's kind of small rooms. Not talking about a specific hotel. There's a few chains that this could apply to, so I think you have to worry. But I mean that's maybe nice. You know, they usually boast trendy products like hair products and stuff.

It's not I don't care. I'm probably bringing my own stuff. Like is that are those three ounces of like really fancy shampo? You're paying extra for that room? Yeah, And I think maybe this goes with it where it's like I think airbnb can be a nice option for work if you can stay in a neighborhood, that might be better for your work thing. But again, like i'd either just being a hotel rather be an hotel. Just want

my generic I feel the same way. And for me, I think that it comes from this, like I'm still occasionally able to tap into that childhood glee about like when you get to stay in a hotel. You know, do you remember that when you were a kid and I was like, oh my god, we're gonna stay at a hotel I want? And and that is all the things that you described, like the signifiers of that, the big bed, the soft pillows, the fluffy bathroom. It's not like, you know, cool boutique body wash and like cool light

fixtures whatever. And this has been half big takes, half baked takes. Thanks for listening to another episode of Game Plan. You can find me on Twitter at Arsley Greenfield and I'm at Francesca today. You can call us and leave a message about anything you like, including your own half bag take at two and two six seven zero one six. If you like this show, head on over to Apple podcast or wherever you listen and rate, interview and subscribe.

I just really like hearing from you. You know. I took some time recently to review a couple of podcasts that I like because we ask you to do it every week, and I'm gonna tell you it made me feel good. Good Podcast Karma. Also, if you want to hear more from us throughout the week, You can subscribe to our newsletter by going to bloomberg dot com Slash

Newsletters and checking the game plan box. The show was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus hen Rexon, and the hat of podcast is Francesca Levy And we'll see you next week. Bye. Also say harrassment and not harsassment. I'm definitely gonna sayrsassment.