It’s no secret that the shift to remote work during COVID-19 has been stressful and isolating. But for many, the online workplace has also led to increased harassment, hostility, and harm.
It’s no secret that the shift to remote work during COVID-19 has been stressful and isolating. But for many, the online workplace has also led to increased harassment, hostility, and harm.
McKensie Mack, Caroline Sinders, and Yang Hong are co-authors of a new report from Project Include all about harassment, harm, and hostility in the remote workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study included data from almost 3,000 survey respondents as well several first-person accounts of how remote workplaces can exacerbate harm. The report aims to provide not only a comprehensive picture of the trauma faced by various groups of tech professionals but also tools for companies to correct harm and become more trauma-informed.
There are a lot of ways in which, for example, trans women and non-binary people experience transphobia in the workplace, and it's not considered to be harassment. And I think it has a lot to do with the ways in which we define what harm is. And so in our work, especially, the fact that trans people are nearly twice as likely to have experienced gender-based harm than their peers, the fact that Black non-binary people, Black women are nearly three times as likely to experience race-based harm in the workplace as their peers, it tells us a lot about the ways in which gender impacts how people are experiencing harm in a workplace and how it amplifies that experience.
—McKensie Mack, CEO of MMG and co-author, Project Include report
We talk about:
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara talks steps for using your privilege to speak up against a toxic work environment. Ask yourself: what are the harmful behaviors that you've been tolerating in your team or in your company? What's stopping you from speaking up about those? Is it that you are afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing? For all this and more, head over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
Links:
McKensie Mack 0:00 If the expectation is that your employees work 80 hours a week, and then you give them access to a wellness app, right? That is not going to help their mental health.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher 0:21 Hello and welcome to Strong Feelings, the podcast all about the messy world of being a human at work. I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and today I'm talking with not one, not two, but three guests: McKensie Mack, Caroline Sinders, and Yang Hong. They're co-authors of a new report from Project Include all about harassment, harm, and hostility at work during the COVID-19 pandemic. So the report is from a study that included almost 3,000 survey respondents, plus a bunch of interviews. And there are a lot of really fascinating findings in here. So I want to share a couple of them before we get into this interview. First up, did you know, 85% of all people in the survey reported an increase in general anxiety during the pandemic?
1:03 Okay. Maybe that one's not that surprising. Maybe it's most surprising it wasn't a hundred percent. Okay. But despite all of those, "Take a break if you need it," messages from corporations, two-thirds of all respondents actually said that they're working more hours now than they were before. And it's not just overwork and anxiety that's in the air. It's also some outright harm, hostile workplaces, harassment that people are reporting. For example, since the pandemic began more than one in four respondents said that they experienced an increase in gender-based harassment at work.
1:38 Now, when we start looking specifically at gender in the report, it gets even clearer. 36% of women and 40% of non-binary respondents reported increases in gender-based harassment at work, more than before the pandemic, compared with just 2% of people who identified as men alone. And to be clear the way they did the survey, you could identify as multiple genders. So this is the people who identified as men alone versus men and non-binary, for example. Okay. Now, 42% of trans people of all genders said that they saw increased gender-based harassment, which is 1.7 times the level of cis respondents. And then when you look at race, you see a really stark picture there as well. So 42% of Black people reported increases in hostility at work during the pandemic compared with only 1% of white respondents.
2:31 So what's so striking about these numbers is how many of the stories would get missed if we weren't looking at the intersections of the data. So not just women, but what's happening with trans women, what's happening with Black women? And so we talk about that a lot in this interview, and there's a lot of really interesting conversations about what happens at those intersections. So let's go ahead and get into it. And if you want to get a copy of that report first, head to https://projectinclude.org/remote-work-report/.
SWB 3:05 I'm so excited to welcome our guests today: Caroline Sinders, McKensie Mack and Yang Hong, authors of a new report from Project Include on harm and harassment in tech workplaces during COVID-19. Caroline, McKensie, and Yang, welcome to Strong Feelings.
MM 3:18 Thank you so much for having us. We're so excited to be here.
SWB 3:21 Yeah. Well, so first up there are three of you here, which is a whole bunch of people. Let's start out by hearing more about who each of you is and how you got involved with Project Include for this. So McKensie, let's actually start with you.
MM 3:34 Sure, so my name is McKensie Mack. My pronouns are they/them/their, and I'm the founder and CEO of MMG, a global social justice org that focuses on metrics-driven strategies for organizations. And I got involved because I was contacted by Caroline and Ellen Pao, and they told me that they were doing this amazing, amazing report and research that was going to focus specifically on the state of harm and harassment within the remote workplace. And when I heard about it, I said, "I want to be a part of that." You know, "I want to participate in that."
SWB 4:05 Yeah. So it was Caroline who got you involved. So Caroline, tell us about yourself.
Caroline Sinders 4:09 Sure. Hi, I'm Caroline Sinders. I'm an artist and researcher. I run a research and design lab called Convocation Design and Research. And I've spent the past almost nine years looking at online harassment in digital spaces, as well as community health and equitable technology. And I work across for-profits and nonprofits. And generally, I'm trying to look at how do you take complexities inside of technology, but also just society and make them more human-understandable. And this report, the idea of the research actually came out of a digital event Ellen and I were both attending, and we had followed each other on Twitter a few years ago. So we were actually on Zoom sort of messaging each other, being like, "Oh, it's so nice to meet you. It's so good to see you." And we both were just talking about different themes and things we had noticed during the pandemic. And Ellen had asked, you know, "Do you know anyone that studies, like, online harassment for workplaces?" And I was like, "You know, I actually don't really know anyone looking explicitly at that."
5:02 And in the online harassment space, we usually talk about platforms. We don't really talk about work tools and we don't really talk about studying remote online workplace harassment in the same way we study online harassment. And Ellen was sort of saying from, you know, the workplace harassment side, she hadn't really seen anything either in terms of racial justice or, like, diversity, equity, and inclusion work. And so we thought maybe this is something we should look at. We started thinking about what this report would be like and who we wanted to work with, and Ellen had worked with Yang in the past, and I had worked with McKensie. And so that was kind of how it all came together.
SWB 5:39 Oh, that's so great. And for anybody listening, who isn't aware, Ellen Pao is one of the founders of Project Include, couldn't be here today but is the other co-author on the report. And Yang, how about you? So welcome and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Yang Hong 5:52 Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. So Ellen and I had worked a couple of years now on, uh, just generally focused on tech specifically in the workplace, but we realized a lot of these more systemic issues around, like, the barriers that people face all from interviewing all the way to management. You know, I think anecdotally, we were hearing a lot of people say the pandemic is not a scapegoat for all of these issues coming up in remote work. And just because, you know, vaccines are coming out now, it doesn't mean all of these problems just go away. And for me personally, I've been running my own independent data and machine learning consultancy, but really with a focus on societal issues, which means it's imperative that I think about data justice and data equity. And I think it's been really revealing what we've been able to uncover in this research by taking that kind of an approach and to see how, you know, for some people, things have gotten better, but for some people, things have gotten actually worse.
SWB 6:50 Yeah, absolutely. I really want to dig into some of what you found in this research, because I think what I was really hearing as I was reading it was how much this current moment has sort of exacerbated or laid bare problems that existed already. Let's dig into that a little bit. So what was the sort of way that you set out first to do this research? So who did you talk to? What did you do? And then we can get into some of those findings.
CS 7:14 Sure, yeah. Ellen and I tried drafting out, like, an initial hypothesis. And engage in some initial stakeholder interviews. So we talked to, like, five to six people about their experiences in the workplace from people that either were managers, people who are providing support towards remote workplaces, or people that were also working directly in looking at harassment and harm in the workplace. And from there we realized our, some of our initial hypotheses were pretty correct that this was a problem, perhaps it had been a problem prior to the pandemic, and that it was worth pursuing the project. So from there we drafted out a research plan, started fundraising, and we knew we were going to rely on mixed methods in terms of writing a pretty robust survey and also having qualitative interviews.
8:03 It was very collaborative, like, the survey, all of us here wrote. And we then spent a lot of time doing outreach, supporting the survey. From start to finish it was about an eight-month to 10-month timeline, and that's including doing some of these initial stakeholder interviews to think about like, is this a project? And then also some of the fundraising, and in terms of just doing the research, I want to say it was something more like eight months in terms of the whole project itself. But, you know,we worked really hard to make sure that we had a fair amount of respondents to the survey and also really trying to build out some of the qualitative interviews.
SWB 8:46 Yeah. It ended up being almost 3,000 people responding to the survey, right?
CS 8:50 Yeah. Almost 3,000.
SWB 8:52 Well, so one of the things that I noticed in the report, kind of a big theme throughout, was that, you know, obviously the pandemic and remote work has been hard on everyone and there's increases in lots of things like stress and anxiety across the board. But there were some groups that are really disproportionately impacted. And I want to ask a little bit about that. In the findings, you know, what did you see was universal? Like, what's sort of a challenge across the board, and what's not, what are the things that are really happening to specific communities?
CS 9:22 Generally, what we saw was almost regardless of gender, work level, or location that mental anxiety is affecting everyone. And that was one of the sort of highest findings we found. But I would say one of the things we saw, and this is where working with Yang was so important, was if we had looked at the responses just as-is without doing an intersectional breakdown, it would look like actually overall harassment had gone down. But when we started to break it down across gender, race, and other demographics together, we saw that actually it had gone up for different groups. And Yang should really speak to the process that she took in doing this kind of data analysis.
YH 10:01 Yeah. One thing I'll note is our methodology section, you know, rather than being a paragraph as it usually is, is about 10 pages. You know, I think it's very significant to talk about that because we actually go through an example in the methodology of what happens when we take a more intersectional lens. So one thing we asked about are people's experiences with race-based hostility and gender-based harassment. And when we first take the average, it looks like things are not too bad. But then what you realize is, every average will always favor whoever's an overrepresented majority. In this case, reflective of people in tech, the overrepresented majority was predominantly white, predominantly cisgender. And so if we just look at the average of everyone, we're predominantly looking at that one experience.
10:53 So then when we start to filter that down, I think one of the biggest things we find is that, for example, in gender-based harassment, we want to be inclusive of the fact that when we say "women," we're very clear, we mean transgender and cisgender women, but we also want to make sure that we're specifically looking at the transgender and cisgender experience, as we do see twice as likely of a difference for people who are transgender are experiencing more gender-based harassment. And when we start to look at people who identify as non-binary and women, we see that 40% of them are experiencing more gender-based harassment compared to 2% for people who exclusively identify as men, 9% for people who identified as nonbinary and men. And so I think, you know, that level of analysis is something that brings to recognition a lot of people's experiences in a way that we weren't really seeing in a lot of other reports like this.
SWB 11:51 Yeah. I'd love to hear more about that because I know so much of the data that you see in tech and about something like harassment in tech, it tends to really just talk about women in general. And I know that that ends up defaulting to meaning white women quite often, and so much gets left out there. And I'd love to hear more about that, McKensie.
MM 12:09 Sure. I appreciate what both Caroline and Yang shared. And I'll say that typically the default is white women and cis women. And there are a lot of ways in which, for example, trans women and non-binary people experienced transphobia in the workplace, and it's not considered to be harassment. And I think it has a lot to do with the ways in which we define what harm is, right? Cuz when we talk about harassment, for example, at the outset of our research, when I was sort of having conversations with Yang, and Caroline, and Ellen about our work, I said, you know, "When you all use the word 'harassment,' I just want to make you aware of the fact that there are going to be a lot of folks of color, so like Black folks, specifically other folks of color, trans folks and non-binary people who experience harm every day in the remote workplace and who would never call it harassment. Because for us, the conditioning is harassment is something that happens to cis white women." Because when we talk about it, those are typically the groups of folks that are being most centered.
13:07 And so in our work, especially, and I think Yang had already touched on this, the fact that trans people are nearly twice as likely to have experienced gender-based harm, you know, than their peers, the fact that Black non-binary people, Black women are nearly three times as likely to experience race-based harm in the workplace as their peers, it tells us a lot about the ways in which gender, right, impacts how people are experiencing harm in a workplace and how it amplifies that experience.
CS 13:35 And just to sort of also emphasize and riff off of points Yang and McKensie have made, it was really important in the survey for us to cast a wide net in terms of thinking about harm. In previous work I have done with other clients like Amnesty International and doing just different social media, online harassment-based work and gender-based violence work, that harm as McKensie has pointed out, can have many different definitions and levels to it. And one thing that's really important to capture in this are the kinds of systemic lower "forms" of hostility that people face. Sometimes we call it "conflict." Sometimes we call it "toxicity," but it's really important to try to capture that because there is a lot of, again, general harm people deal with in the workplace that is normalized and/or is either specifically designed to not break a rule or is systemic harm targeted to a person based off aspects of their identity.
14:35 And in this case, it was really, really important to also capture that, to recognize that people may be working in very, very toxic work environments. So we use the term "hostility" in the survey, but it was one, it was something that was really important to focus on, and some of our qualitative interviews also really sort of illuminated that point as well, that there's all different kinds of varying levels of harm and then different kinds of harm. So not even just levels, but the kinds of toxicity or, you know, the kind of actions that people are facing in the workplace, be it remote or not remote.
SWB 15:10 Yeah. And I'd actually love to ask a little bit about that because I think this is really valuable, this conversation about widening the net of what we refer to as "harm." When you started looking at the data and looking at the responses and the qualitative piece, what are some of the "lesser harms"? The things that maybe wouldn't get categorized as harassment, maybe wouldn't be explicitly against the policies within an organization, but that you were seeing coming up over and over harming people?
CS 15:38 So some of the write-in answers would talk about jokes people would hear or face in the workplace. And that could be things that are based on sexual identity or gender identity. Some of it could be more misogynistic in nature. Some of it would also just be things that at first wouldn't necessarily sound like harm, but would sound more evocative of a dysfunctional workplace but when repeated over and over again, were actually causing harm to workers. And that could be things like a lack of structure in terms of how assignments are given out or tracked for example. This can be used to kind of like target or weaponize someone. An interviewee mentioned the weaponization actually of best practices. So sort of presenting this kind of elusive thing of "best practices," not defining what that is, and then using that to sort of critique and antagonize workers that they aren't meeting this standard. We saw some things I think directly related to remote working, but I would say remote working more in the pandemic in the sense that companies had to immediately shift to being remote, kind of against their choice. Maybe they hadn't designed or planned on the workplace being remote. And they were having to do this, you know, very quickly under duress, but that switching to remote during the pandemic there, wasn't really a lot of good structures put into place. And then workers were really facing toxicity from that.
17:01 And again, that is the way someone's work was being tracked, had been on a whiteboard and now the solution to sort of turning in their work had been just Slacking their manager. And their manager presented this case that they actually weren't doing their work when in fact they had been, but there was no way for this employee to, kind of, show proof that that wasn't the case. Or in some instances, companies not understanding what remote productivity looks like and instead filling the day with a lot of meetings and then people having to work longer hours to actually accomplish their workday. So one of the things that sort of came out that maybe would initially sound like to anyone being "toxic" and was this sort of dysfunctional workplace, if you will.
MM 17:45 I would love to add to that because what I saw all that continually came up was the fact that we have a lot of workplaces in tech that are punitive. So if you don't do something that I want you to do, I need to find a way to kind of punish you so that you don't do that thing again. As opposed to building workplaces where we actually are teaching people, we're modeling for people how to build communities, or when you have conflict, or when somebody does something you don't like, or when you're frustrated or you're upset, or you're overwhelmed, you're not going to punishment as it means to managing that, that conflict or that relationship. But instead, you're asking yourself, "What is it going to take for us to build the kind of community where folks can actually have really hard conversations? And what is it going to take for us to create the kind of environments in tech where we're not looking for shortcuts, but we understand that a lot of these issues are systemic and that means you're going to require a systemic solution."
SWB 18:37 Yes. I love this idea of moving away from sort of the punitive workplace. And I think, you know, we've seen a lot of this sort of punitive approach during the pandemic, and before it as well, where there's more of this like surveillance model of managing people and the kind of constant sense of needing to be on the right side of things. And it creates a lot of stress for people. And what I really saw in the report was also this idea of all of that overwork and all of this, like additional hours people were working really coming also from that punitive place. And I'm wondering how do we start thinking about work in a less punitive way and in a less surveillance-oriented way? Like, what do we do to think about our work days and our work culture that would be more generative?
CS 19:26 I think one of the things companies can do, especially in a remote workplace, is understand rather the time it can take to do something as opposed to looking at the number of tasks completed as a sign that work is done. I'm reflecting, personally, on an experience I had, when I was working in a workplace. I had a manager who was not a researcher, and I worked in a remote environment. Often it was really hard to sort of show to my manager that, you know, I maybe did one thing today, but that one thing was reading seven, eight, or nine user interviews and writing up thoughts on that and attending, like, two meetings. And that's actually an entire workday. And so I think one thing managers can think about is, are they understanding and adequately measuring what a workday is, and are they also allowing for flexibility in terms of the pandemic? Are they allowing for empathy to understand that it's harder to complete work now? That other people, if you're having to work with other people, maybe have other things going on, so like there's all different kinds of delays? It's not just, you know, an individual person, all of society is trying to deal with this right now. And so I think being able to shift from almost like this checklist of things completed, but rather a different space of understanding would be pretty key.
SWB 20:45 Yeah. You know, you said something there that got me thinking about an article I read the other day from Anne Helen Petersen, where she was talking about being against the "take some time off if you need it" approach to management, which I think we've seen a lot of during the pandemic, this sort of vague call to like, "Yeah, I mean, you know, if you're struggling, take some time off." And I think what you just spoke to there, Caroline was that message of things feeling a little fuzzy when it comes to what is actually appropriate for how much we should be getting done, what are expectations of people. And, you know, I'm curious about your perspective, all of your perspectives on how we can do a better job telling people like it's okay to slow down in ways that are meaningful and in ways that people can trust.
YH 21:32 I think the last word you just said, "trust" is really at the heart of all of this, and we can't talk about trust without also acknowledging power dynamics, without acknowledging the role accountability has. I think there's this great quote from Mia Mingus which says you know, "True accountability is not only apologizing, understanding the impact your actions have caused on yourself and others, making amends or reparations to the harmed parties. But most importantly true accountability is changing your behavior so that the harm, violence, abuse doesn't happen again." And I think that's a big piece, especially, you know, for leaders who have so much impact on those around them. Whether, you know, if you're a line manager or if you're the CEO, it's both you leading by giving that permission to rest for others and giving that permission to yourself to rest.
22:24 You know, we talk about the fact that anxiety is high across the board from the intern to the CEO. And if you're a CEO and you are not allowing yourself that time to rest, you're not giving yourself that time to take a break, no one will trust or feel safe to do so below you even if you say that it's company policy. And I think the other aspect of this is if you are making a mistake, which we're all human, we're all going to accidentally cause harm to someone at some point, whether we know it or not, it's owning up to that and also reflecting how do we change so that this doesn't repeat itself over and over again? And I think those two things together really allow for a more trusting environment where, you know, hopefully in the future, people are able to bring their whole selves to work and not feel like they need to be micromanaged because they trust that there's accountability in power.
SWB 23:17 Yeah, I love that because I think, you know, in this conversation around, "take some time off if you need it," there's such a question that comes up for people that's like, "Well, am I the kind of person who needs it, or am I the kind of person who doesn't need it?" And there's oftentimes a lot of pressure to be that latter kind, to be the kind of person who doesn't need the "extra time" of being human, right? That there's like a perception of weakness there, a fear that you'll be thought of differently or thought of in negative ways if you take time. I would love to see workplaces that really account for that, that really account for making that space in sort of more intentional ways, and I'm wondering, you know, what are some other things that workplaces can do to be more intentional in that space-making?
CS 23:57 Well, in our research, I think this made the report, someone we interviewed mentioned how their workplace was trying to make this kind of space and just wasn't really quite succeeding. And so it was a bit more formalized than "take time if you need it," it was more, "We're going to make sure that people can take time off and still have their jobs." And one of the people we interviewed was trying to access that support and found out there were all these roadblocks in place. I think part of that was unintentional in the sense that the company didn't actually make it very easy to access this, not in that they were hoping people wouldn't access it, but rather just didn't think through the user experience, if you will, of accessing this benefit. And what this interviewee found out was actually, this was intended more for parents, but that hadn't been made explicitly clear. But then their workplace also tried to pass something called a "No Zoom Day, but they didn't really design or change anything in the workplace to alleviate the Zoom. So instead what they had was a day where there are no Zooms, but then those Zooms ended up on other days they had more Zooming.
25:02 So I think there are times that workplaces think that they're giving a benefit, but haven't really sat down and thought, "Okay, structurally, how does this work? How do we make this benefit actually really be the benefit we want it to be? Can't just give a "No Zoom Day" unless you look at your workplace and really say, "We need to retrain or shift managers' perceptions of like what a meeting is, or we need everyone to all together alleviate one meeting. So if you were in charge of placing a meeting on someone's calendar, you need to at least eliminate like one or two of those." Right? I think of them as like more minute changes, but they have really big impact because they're structural changes.
SWB 25:43 Yeah, it sounds like it's such a simple concept where it's like, "Think it all the way through," and "Think about the implications of this and how do people make this real?" And so often that just seems like it doesn't happen at all.
MM 25:54 I agree. And I think what I would add to that is that we need a redistribution of power. Because oftentimes also what happens, our company will hire someone, even if it's at the C level executive space, to kind of lead the EDI work for the organization and then not listen to that person. And then the person doesn't have power to actually make decisions and to define the strategy, so it becomes a performance of EDI, but it's not actually something that's going to bring about structural, transformational change. So I think in addition to that, it's how are we thinking about leadership? Are companies investing in audits of their culture? Just like companies have financial audits, are there cultural audits so we can actually offer people within the organization an opportunity to talk about the ways in which they are experiencing equity, the ways in which they're experiencing and equity, harm, repair, et cetera. Because that also can help to inform an organization's long-term organizational development strategy. So that's important.
26:52 And then speaking to a point that you shared earlier, Sara, around mental health, I think if the expectation is that your employees work 80 hours a week, and then you give them access to a wellness app, right, that is not going to help their mental health. So it's, you know, thinking about making changes that are holistic and that are not contradictory, you know? That actually, if you're saying, "We care about the mental health of the people that we have hired to work with us to help us to grow our company," that it means those folks are going to need time off. They're going to need to be able to breathe. Their brains are going to need to be able to rest as well, especially living through a global pandemic and all that comes along with that. And then in addition to that, they're going to need to be in the kind of environment where they can feel like they can trust their manager. They feel like they can trust their CEOs, their boards. And that takes a lot of communication, a lot of training and education work, too.
SWB 27:42 I love this idea that corporate wellness perks like throwing in some mindfulness apps, throwing in some therapy benefits is not a solution to the problem that we're facing, to the sort of large scale, slow-rolling trauma that we're facing right now. And I'm wondering, you know, when you think about that shift to an organization that really values communication and an organization that is ready to invest, like, what do organizations need to understand about trauma right now?
MM 28:14 That's a great question. Oh my gosh.
SWB 28:16 So much, right? Everything.
MM 28:19 Yeah, basically. There are a lot of folks in positions of leadership that are not trauma-informed. And so when people come and say, "Hey, you know, I love the work we do, and I want to contribute, and I want to be present, and I want to be here a long time. But the work culture that we've created is actually harming me, like, it’s traumatizing me. I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm worried about, you know, if I submit a report on time, or I'm thinking about something that I said during a meeting, I think about how people perceive that. And like, it's traumatizing me." And I think there are a number of leaders that because they've not had the education, and some of whom, because of the ways in which they experienced privilege have not had the experience of, of like that kind of harm in the workplace, there's a lack of understanding. And it creates a kind of communication gap where nothing gets done, it doesn't get addressed. So I think we kind of laughed about it, but it's true. Like everything there needs to be far more education, especially for managers and those mid-level management positions, that specifically is focused on the ways in which we think about harm, the ways that we address harm, and also the ways in which we create relationships where people can come to us and say, "Hey, this is the harm that I'm experiencing," and we're not responding reactively in a way that dismisses them or that completely ignores or dilutes down the problem.
SWB 29:35 There's so much fear amongst so many people in tech of talking about things like emotions and grief. And as I think about that, there's a sentence in the report that really struck me that said something like, "We're no longer in pandemic firefighting mode.” Remote work is a lasting thing, even outside of the pandemic. Companies are changing. This is not going to go away. Also the impact of the pandemic is going to be felt for quite some time. What do you hope organizations start focusing on and thinking about as they go through the rest of 2021?
CS 30:12 I would hope that workplaces would not view the time during the pandemic as lost time. Or rather any findings or any self-reflection people have had that they let that carry on with them into whatever a post-pandemic looks like. And also maybe let go of the fact that we may never return back to a normal of which we had prior to COVID-19. But I would hope that they take this time to really think about that this is a time for structural change, that people are dealing with trauma, but that trauma has been here before, and it has affected their workers who have varying degrees of employment with companies, so there are part-time workers who do not have full-time employment at companies and thus don't have benefits or support. That they are dealing with varying forms of trauma, and that trauma has existed for so many people in so many different ways. Just because we may be entering a time where there is a vaccine that doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep doing hard structural work. And that's one thing I'm concerned about is people sort of reverting back to where we were before without realizing that that wasn't a good workplace, either. That people were still facing harassment, and that harassment is disproportionately affecting all different kinds of people, right? So it's not just affecting white women. It's affecting Black women more, right? It's affecting trans people more. You know, I don't want us to sort of go back to the way things were. And I think that that was a big sentiment in the report was also that, of like, this is a time to make things better than the way they were before. And we shouldn't be trying to return to 2018 or 2019.
SWB 31:52 No, please not. I think you said something there that was really powerful to me, which is like, "This is not lost time." Leaders and organizations can look at this as a time of learning and a time to like, let this change you and let this change how you see your work and how you interact with people forever and ever. I hope that everybody takes you up on that. I think it's a good challenge. Where can everybody get the Project Include report?
YH 32:17 You can find the project include report at https://projectinclude.org/remote-work-report/.
SWB 32:26 Awesome. Well, thank you so much for telling us about this Project Include report. I read the whole thing, and there was so much in there that I was just like, highlight, highlight, highlight. So I hope everybody downloads it and people look at it. Okay, so, the solutions and ideas in the Project Include report are, I think, very rightly aimed at organizations, right? Places that can change policies, change cultures. But I want to take a moment here and think a little bit about our listeners who are much more likely to be workers, you know, to be in some of these environments. And I'm wondering if I can take a moment and ask you some questions as individuals, as people who are out there working in tech and dealing with some of this stuff. I'm wondering, what would you personally say to someone who's listening in who's dealing with remote harassment?
YH 33:19 I think unfortunately it's something I've also personally dealt with, and I just want to shout out a few people, and tools, and companies out there that are really helpful. So the first one is Block Party. I think anyone who's faced online harassment, you know, unfortunately has found huge value in Block Party. Another one is a company called Unit Workers which helps people who are at companies to more easily unionize with their coworkers. And, you know, I think this goes back to what McKensie and I had mentioned earlier around just power, shifting power and accountability. And I think the last one is just around your personal attack surface area. And I think that goes to like, where can you be reached? Who knows about various accounts or names that are tied to you? What blockers can you set up? And I think the last thing I'll add is just community, friends. As an Asian American woman, I'm part of various collectives and communities. There's been a lot of anti-Asian hate crimes, and it was very healing for me to be able to process that in community, in a place where I felt safe and felt understood.
SWB 34:30 Speaking of community, I think that's so important. I mean, given that it would be great if everybody had access to a union, it would be great if companies changed, you know, given that so many of us feel alone facing these issues, I love talking about reaching out to others. On the other side of that, how can each of us do a better job of being there for, and taking care of our colleagues and our peers?
YH 34:52 You know, I think a lot of times we have sort of very surface level relationships with our coworkers and our friends. It's not really a safe space for us to talk about things like racial injustice or, you know, the deep personal trauma we deal with, whether it's workplace PTSD or personal, you know, abusive relationships. There's this concept of pods and pod mapping which is led by Mia Mingus. A pod is a very intentional, handpicked set of people that you invest and cultivate these more, like, radical, resilient, antifragile relationships with that allow you to talk about these gnarly issues that you might otherwise not feel safe talking about and allow you to make mistakes without sort of saying, "Hey, you're done for, that's it, you're a bad person." And instead say, "What have you learned from this mistake? How are you going to, again, change your behavior so that you're not going to repeat this kind of harm again?" And they actually have a pod mapping worksheet for people who want to start their own pods.
SWB 35:52 Oh, that's great. We'll get that into the show notes for anybody who wants it.
CS 35:55 I think those are really, really beautiful suggestions, Yang. Thank you for that. Mine, I guess may be slightly different in the sense that I feel like part of what would be great to see would be those with more privilege, so if you're a cis white man, a cis white woman, to be a better ally, to actually call out injustice, when you see it as opposed to just back-channeling people and saying like, "Oh, I'm so sorry this thing happened," or, "Oh, I really agree with this point you made." But actually really taking the fact that they have privilege and that they probably will not be chastised or retaliated against and saying something. I sort of hesitate in the workplace of giving people advice on what to do with knowing that the workplace can be an extremely hostile environment. And that even coworkers can be hostile to each other, just due to the nature of the environment, like if it's an extremely toxic workplace. But something that is sort of related to, I think what's called the Bystander Effect, but effectively where someone with more privilege intervenes in harassment by saying, "Hey, like, why are you doing that?" or, "Oh, that's really harmful or hurtful. Like, why would you do that?" There was, like, a study done a while ago on individuals that were white and male presenting who did this in digital spaces and were able to cut down on harm from a harasser. I think part of the idea behind this was the harasser one, had more respect for this individual since they were of a higher privilege. They were able to help mitigate and sort of less than that, but also I think helped change the behavior of the person engaging in the harmful action because it was someone who the harasser respected sort of saying to them, "Why are you doing this?"
37:34 And so I think about that a lot and how beneficial that could be if people, and by "people" I mean "white people," if they did the work. So that's one thing that comes to mind to me, but I think also for people, if you're facing harassment in the workplace, you have a right to be safe. And how you create that safety, I would say is up to you in the sense that you should do what will make you feel safe and same with online harassment. And, you know, people that are facing forms of online harassment often have to go through a really terrible emotional negotiation and tension of making choices that can limit their freedom of speech or their ability to freely act in terms to protect themselves. And so that can be things like being forced to leave a platform, being forced to sort of abandon their account and come back later or being forced to go private. And while those may seem like minor things, it feels extremely invasive to an individual to be forced to do that against their will. But that that is one of the things that will often, like, mitigate or lessen the harassment. And I routinely provide security advice and consultations for people facing online harassment that I say, "You know, I hate to suggest something like this, and this may feel awful, or it may feel invasive, but something that can help cut down the harassment is to go private or to not use your account for a few days." And that is such an imperfect suggestion and there so many problems with it, but that is sometimes what it takes to cut down on harassment.
SWB 39:05 Yeah. That message of doing what you need to, to feel safe, I think is really important. I think there's a lot of shame and guilt people start to feel like, "Oh, I should just not let this get to me." And that's not what it's like. Right? Like things get to you and that's okay. And to say, "It's okay to do what you need to do."
CS 39:21 I mean, that's something I say a lot in talks and workshops where like harassment is designed to hurt you, and so you are not any less of a person. You are not any less strong if it hurts your feelings because it's supposed to hurt you. If someone says something really awful or egregious to you, any kind of identity-based harassment: a death threat, a rape threat, even just saying you're dumb, like that's supposed to hurt. And so if you are hurt, that doesn't mean you're any less strong or any less of a person. You're just experiencing harassment. And I feel like there's sometimes a greater problem we have when talking about digital harm, and I hear this a lot from people that I feel like don't have a lot of empathy or sympathy. And I also hear this at times from older generations who maybe haven't been on the internet as long, but like, this idea that online life is not real. And so if someone says something to you, it should be less harmful. But if someone said any of those things to your face in the street, you would be upset, or if they said them over a phone to you, or if they said it to you in passing or in a group, those would all be harmful. So why do we think it should be less harmful or hurtful just because it's said online?
SWB 40:25 Absolutely. It's like this place where we live and work, the place where we have our community, and our livelihoods, and all of those things feel threatened, so I think that's really important to remember. Thank you for that. I'm wondering, you know, doing this work is so important, talking about harassment, harm, hostility, violence, done to our community and people we work with. Talking about this stuff can also make each of you a target for more harassment. And I'm wondering how do you keep yourself safe and think about your own safety as you work publicly on these issues?
MM 40:58 So for me, it's interesting because some of the things that were already named by Caroline and Yang are things that I do to help me with when it comes to sort of facing harm in digital environments and within remote workplaces. And I find the pod mapping to be really helpful. So I have a community of folks and especially Black and brown folks and other people of color, queer and trans folks, who I can call on who offer me support and knowing the kind of experiences that I might have, or have had previously with this kind of harm. And that helps me a lot. Also like, you know, if we're sort of thinking about the ways in which we're modeling for folks that might be listening to this podcast at a later time, for me therapy helps a lot too. And I think a lot of times within these spaces, we don't like to talk about feeling because we think to talk about feeling means that our products are less strong or less secure, less valid, that our research isn't as strong, isn't as valid or shouldn't be affirmed. But the reality is that we are talking about feeling, we are talking about emotions. And so for me, having folks there who can really offer me that support, who I can call on helps me a lot. I think also for me being very clear about what kind of work I've chosen to do and why helps me a lot too.
42:09 adrienne maree brown talks a lot about principled struggle. So the idea that there are struggles that we have in our lives, and there are things that we cannot choose. And then there's specific work, especially when it comes to organizing, you know, around harassment and harm within the remote tech workforce that we know it's going to be challenging, we know it's going to be difficult, and we still take it on because we care very deeply, not just about our health and safety and our wellbeing, but we care about everybody's safety and wellbeing, and especially those who are most marginalized. And we want to do everything that we can to be able to intervene in the harm that's being done. So for me, that kind of reminder of like, you know, why I do what I do coupled with the ways in which I thankfully developed pillars of support in my life of people who have been there for me and continue to provide me the support as I do this kind of work.
SWB 42:55 This concept of principled struggle is so valuable. I think we should end on that note. I hope everybody can find their space of principled struggle like you all have. Thank you all again so much for being here. And I hope everybody again, goes and reads the Project Include report on harassment and harm. And please go check out Caroline Sinders, Yang Hong and McKensie Mack. Thank you all so much.
MM 43:19 Thank you so much for having us. This was great.
CS 43:21 Yeah. Thank you.
YH 43:22 Thank you so much.
SWB 43:28 Okay, ya'll, I will be thinking about this concept of principled struggle for a while. I hope you will too. And before we go, I want to come back to one other thing that Caroline said for this week's You've Got This. That's where we break down a concept from the interview and look at how you can apply it in your life. So Caroline talked about choosing to intervene when you see harassment or harm taking place, instead of just being a bystander and then maybe sending a supportive back-channel message after the fact. And I think about this a lot in work environments, how often somebody from a marginalized group is interrupted or talked over and no one says anything. Or how often someone uses sexist or racist language and no one says anything. It's so common for people to leave those who have the least structural power in our organizations to basically fend for themselves and not want to put ourselves on the line in the process. Now, I know that it's really hard to speak up, and you might not feel safe speaking up in every context all the time. You may be part of a marginalized group. And I think that all of those concerns are valid, but I also want to remind you all of this quote that I heard from Heather Champ, who's an expert at building online communities. I heard it at a conference in something like 2012, and I swear it runs through my head at least once a week: "What you tolerate defines your community."
44:49 Think about that, the worst things that we tolerate are the things that ultimately shape and define our culture. So if you're a bystander to racist microaggressions as a white person, and you don't do anything about it, well, you're normalizing racist microaggressions in your community. If you're not saying anything, you're saying, "This is fine." Your silence ends up emboldening the perpetrators of that behavior because they just assume everyone's okay with it. So today I want you to take a moment and ask yourself, what are the harmful behaviors that you've been tolerating in your team or in your company? And then what's stopping you from speaking up about those? Now there are some valid fears in there. The less power you have in an organization, the bigger the risks are for you. But there is one type of fear that comes up a lot that I want to address today. And that's the fear of saying the wrong thing. I hear it over and over: "I want to be a better ally, but I'm afraid I'll get it wrong. I don't know if I have the right words." Now that's a valid fear, but there are two things I think, worth talking about. The first one is, well yeah. Well, whenever we do something new, we risk getting it wrong. We're going to make some missteps and the point isn't to wait until you have all the answers, because that'll never happen. Instead, it's about being willing to take some risks because they're part of your own principled struggle, right? If you haven't listened to the last episode we had with Vivianne Castillo, do because we talk a lot about this in there.
46:15 But there's a second piece to this that I want to talk about, which is there's one way that we can easily screw this up, and that is when we start making assumptions about other people and what they're thinking or feeling or needing. In a lot of workplace situations, as McKensie talked about in the interview, it's not always clear that it's harassment that's happening. It's something more ambiguous like microaggressions. And when we see that kind of thing happening, one of the best tools for speaking up, like I said, when it's ambiguous is to remember to speak for yourself and not on behalf of others. So you might say something like, "I don't think that's funny," not, "That's offensive to Sam." If someone's been interrupted, you might say, "I'm really interested in Lisa's ideas. I'd like to go back and hear more from her," versus accusing someone of interrupting Lisa, which can then result in the interrupter getting defensive, and then Lisa feeling like she now has to say, "No, no, no, it's fine. You didn't interrupt me." These kinds of I-statements, they stick to things that you can know with certainty, you know, what you don't feel right about, you know, what you perceive as problematic. They don't make assumptions about the other person's intentions. And they also don't make assumptions about what the person on the receiving end of the behavior is thinking, or feeling, or wants. You don't have to know whether Sam was offended because you're only speaking for yourself and saying, "I don't think that joke is funny."
47:37 This is really important because it helps you avoid making things worse by putting the person who may have been harmed on the spot. And don't get me wrong, advocating for someone can be great when you know what they need, but in the moment when you see these behaviors happening, you probably don't know. You haven't had a chance to talk with them. And so if you put it back on the person who's being targeted, you could end up making them more vulnerable. The problem is for a lot of us when it comes to sort of owning that, when it comes to saying, "Here's what I think or what I feel uncomfortable with," it's an uncomfortable place to be because we're often more comfortable saying that other people might be offended than we are owning what we are offended by. We all have this desire to belong, and so when you speak up and own your own discomfort, it threatens that sense of belonging. So that could be hard. Will I be the only one? Will I be ostracized? Will they tell me to shut up? Will they tell me that I'm making too big of a deal about something? Will they say I'm too sensitive? We can go down this whole rabbit hole of questioning and questioning and end up keeping ourselves silent. So, this is where I think self-reflection and some practice is your friend, so that you are prepared in the moment.
48:48 So spend some time with that question I posed earlier: what behaviors have you been tolerating? What beliefs and boundaries do you need to get comfortable owning so that you can intervene next time? For more on this topic and tools to practice, head to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast, and remember, you've got this. It just takes practice. That's it for this week's episode of strong feelings, I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and Strong Feelings is a production of Active Voice. Check us out at activevoicehq.com and get all the past episodes, show notes, full transcripts, and more at strongfeelings.co. This episode was recorded in South Philadelphia and produced by Emily Duncan. Our theme music is "Deprogrammed" by Philly's own Blowdryer. Check them out at blowdryer.bandcamp.com. Thank you to Caroline Sinders, Yang Hong, and McKensie Mack for being our guests today. And thank you to all of Project Include for their crucial work. Thank you for listening, and if you liked our show, please, don't forget to subscribe and rate us wherever you listen to podcasts. See you next time.