Why Most Workplace Sexual Harassment Goes Unnoticed (And What Employers Can Do About It)

When I was invited to be the inaugural guest on the OWJN Chronicles, a new podcast from METRAC and the Ontario Women's Justice Network, I spent three episodes on a single argument: the workplace sexual harassment doing the most damage often isn't the kind we picture.

I thought this was worth the time and attention because it shapes what we train, what we investigate, and what we miss. If you're focused on the wrong picture, your workplace harassment policy may technically be compliant, your training may be on schedule, but your culture may still be unsafe.

The picture we have, and what it leaves out

When we imagine workplace sexual harassment, most of us picture a crude proposition, an unwanted advance, or an obviously inappropriate joke. Those things absolutely happen, and they can have profoundly damaging, long-lasting impacts. I'm not minimizing that at all.

But focusing only on that script means we miss the conduct that's often more common, more insidious, and more corrosive over time.

Excessively harsh treatment of the only woman on a male-dominated team. When the same standard is applied with sharper edges to one person because of who they are, that's sex-based harassment, even when no one says a word about gender.

"Locker room" talk between men competing over status. Harassment between men, where the target is another man, is still gender-based harassment when it's grounded in the performance of dominance, sexual prowess, or "real-man" hierarchies.

Pushback against a female supervisor from people who can't quite accept her authority. When the resistance scales with the supervisor's gender rather than her decisions, that's harassment too. Upward harassment is harder to name but very real, and women in male-dominated workplaces describe it constantly.

Harassment that targets gender expression, or that intersects with race, accent, immigration status, or other protected grounds. Gender often doesn't show up in isolation, and the impacts of intersectional harassment can be greater than the sum of its parts.

All of these are forms of sexual harassment under the law. The Ontario Human Rights Code and the Occupational Health and Safety Act define harassment broadly enough to capture them, including conduct that isn't overtly sexual but targets sex, gender identity, or gender expression. Both regimes also explicitly reach conduct that's "known or ought reasonably to be known" to be unwelcome, which means respondents can't hide behind the fact that the person didn't speak up.

The common thread is power. Workplace sexual harassment, in its most damaging forms, is about asserting dominance or keeping someone in their place. It isn't about sexual attraction. When you understand that, you can see it more clearly. And you can catch it earlier and do something about it.

When sexual harassment intersects with race

The OWJN Chronicles deliberately centres the experiences of racialized and gender-expansive workers, and one of the themes I returned to in the episodes is how often workplace sexual harassment carries an intersectional weight that single-axis analysis misses.

Black feminist scholars including bell hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw have long described the impossible position survivors of colour can be placed in when the person harassing them shares their racial background. The well-known American sexual harassment case Meritor Savings Bank v Vinson is sometimes discussed in this light. Mechelle Vinson, a young Black woman, faced years of harassment and assault from her Black supervisor at a bank where racialized employees were a visible minority. To name what was happening to her was to risk being read as betraying her community's broader fight against racism. To stay silent was to absorb the harm.

That tension hasn't gone away. Survivors fear their disclosure will be weaponized against the broader equity work they care about. Survivors don't trust that the response will be racially literate, and so don't take the risk.

All of which makes it that much more important for employers to pre-emptively mitigate this tension. To create cultural safety sufficient to promote disclosure. That means trained intake practices, careful attention to who handles the investigation, and an explicit understanding that intersectional harm requires intersectional response. None of that is part of the standard workplace harassment training package.

Where the law has gone further recently

In episode three of the podcast, I had the chance to work through a recent Ontario Court of Appeal decision, Metrolinx v ATU Local 1587, 2025 ONCA 415, with Stephanie McDonald, an employee-side employment lawyer. Here are two critical takeaways.

Off-duty conduct can be workplace conduct. The harassment in Metrolinx happened on personal phones, in a private group chat, off the clock. Many employers assume that off-duty conduct on personal devices isn't their problem. The Court of Appeal was clear that it can be. It became a workplace issue when the texts were leaked to one of the targeted employees in the workplace and negatively impacted her.

The duty to investigate doesn't disappear when the complainant doesn't want to participate. This one trips up a lot of HR teams. When the affected employee says "please don't make a big deal of this" or "I don't want to be involved," the human impulse is to respect that and let it go. But "incidents," not just "complaints," trigger the employer's obligation to investigate under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. And there are good reasons a survivor might not want to participate, including fear of retaliation, fear of being seen as a troublemaker, ongoing safety concerns, or sheer exhaustion. None of those reasons have anything to do with the seriousness of what happened. An employer who treats non-participation as a release of obligation misses both the legal duty and the human reality.

This is the kind of nuance that doesn't fit into a one-hour compliance training. And it's exactly the kind of nuance that determines whether an employer actually responds well when something hard happens.

Why standard harassment training falls short

If there's a through-line across the three OWJN episodes, it's that the most common form of workplace harassment training, the kind that lists forbidden behaviours and asks employees to avoid them , tends not to work. The research base on this has been clear for a long time. The training teaches people to avoid the obvious script while leaving the more common, more insidious behaviour untouched. Worse, it can entrench the belief that "real" harassment is only the obvious kind, which makes the subtler conduct feel acceptable by contrast. In fact, that "subtler" conduct is so invisible precisely because the underlying gender norms and stereotypes are so entrenched and normalized in our society.

The more durable path is slower. It involves making respect the norm, not as a slogan but as a measurable expectation of how people treat each other day to day. That means leaders modelling the standard, bystanders being equipped to interrupt gently rather than confront, and the workplace handling disclosure and investigation in ways that don't punish the person who came forward.

It's not a one-and-done activity. It's the kind of work that has staying power precisely because it shifts the culture, not just the slide deck.

What employers can do now

If you're an employer reading this, here are three questions to consider.

When was the last time your workplace harassment policy was tested by a real situation, and how did it hold up? Not in the post-mortem sense, but in the practical one. Did your managers know what to do? Did the workplace come out better or worse for how you handled it?

Does your training help your team recognize the harassment that doesn't look like the obvious script, or does it stop at "don't do these specific things"? If a complaint came in tomorrow about upward harassment of a female supervisor or a group of men engaging in the usual locker room talk, would your team know how to respond?

Do your managers know what to actually do when someone discloses harassment to them, including when the person says they don't want to make a formal complaint? How do you balance that worker's safety with your legal duty to investigate?

Listen to the OWJN Chronicles

The three episodes are now live on Spotify and on METRAC's website. Wendy DeSouza, Alero Bovi, Fiza Malik, Andrea Collins-Fitzpatrick, and the rest of the METRAC team built something thoughtful, and I'm grateful to have been part of it. Stephanie McDonald's contribution to the third episode is well worth a listen for the employee-side perspective on the Metrolinx decision.

If you'd like to take this further

If your organization is working through any of this, or wants to be ready before it has to be, two next steps:

Gender-Based Harm Training, built for behaviour change rather than compliance theatre. Half-day workshops and multi-session programs designed for HR leaders, managers, and senior teams. Particularly effective for male-dominated workplaces, post-incident remediation, and organizations whose previous training didn't change anything. Get in touch to discuss.

More writing on workplace harassment and gender-based harm. I write regularly on the legal frameworks, the research, and what actually works in practice. Explore the blog.