Abstract
In this #MeToo era, so much important work is being done (and so many stories are being told and listened to), but very little of the work focuses on retaliation. And none of the work focuses on situations where the fear of retaliation is not necessarily job loss (although that certainly happens) but rather, it is the fear of harming workplace relationships. This Article will use a real-life story of harassment to demonstrate how much workplace relationships matter-especially to women-and how the fear of harming those relationships often affects an employee's willingness to report harassment. Thus, this Article argues for reforms surrounding harassment and retaliation law that recognize this reality. Right now, courts penalize victims of harassment for not reporting harassment soon enough because they feared harming their workplace relationships; or, when they do report, courts penalize them by holding that the relationship-based harm they experienced after reporting was not a real harm worthy of a remedy. These courts reason that reasonable employees would not and should not be deterred from reporting harassment because they fear relationship-based harms. And yet, most of the empirical evidence shows that the opposite is true: reasonable employees (sometimes men, but especially women) often do avoid reporting because they fear harming their relationships in the workplace. The law should reflect this reality.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-2020
Publication Information
72 Florida Law Review 797-839 (2020)
Repository Citation
Porter, Nicole B., "Relationships and Retaliation in the #MeToo Era" (2020). Faculty Publications. 2229.
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/2229