‘HR may not be looking out for you’

The former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson has warned workers against reporting sexual harassment in the workplace to HR.

Carlson argued that because it’s the companies who pay HR professionals it's therefore important to have new reporting mechanisms in place.

"Is human resources really the right place to go? Because what I always equate it to is: Who's giving them the paycheck?” she said.

“In the end, if the culture's being set from the top and it's trickling down to the lower levels, human resources may not be looking out for you.”

Carlson was prominent in the media last year after she sued the TV network’s CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment which led to his resignation last July.

Speaking at a Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership dinner, Carlson said that after she filed her suit against Ailes, she inadvertently became the “face” of sexual harassment.

“But when I found myself in that role and started hearing from women who needed me, it became my life mission,” she said.

Carlson is currently working on a book that will be released later this year offering “new ways in which we might look” at sexual harassment, including different ways to actually report it (besides going to HR).

She noted that there’s a lot more work to be done, and that if people end up not reporting sexual harassment out of fear of repercussions, “the predator [can] still keep working and you’re gone.”

Some companies, such as Fox News, have already put sexual-harassment hotlines in place as an alternate way to report abuse.

According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, there are three potential reasons why instances of sexual harassment are not reported. These include fear of retaliation, the bystander effect, and a masculine culture that permits sexual harassment.

Carlson’s advice comes a few months after allegations of HR failures in dealing with sexual harassment at tech giant Uber.

In the blog, Fowler made allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at Uber, claiming that management repeatedly ignored her complaints, protected a repeat offender and threatened to dismiss her for raising concerns.

“When I joined Uber, the org I was part of was over 25 per cent women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another engineering organisation, this number had dropped down to less than 6%,” Fowler wrote.

“Women were transferring out of the organisation, and those who couldn’t transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: there was the organisational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organisation."