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Comment by nkoren | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine experienced a somewhat worse level of harassment at her job. She lawyered up and quickly received an offer for a non-trivial silver parachute, and a mutual non-disparagement agreement on her way out the door.

Seemed like a fine solution, but it soon became evident that she had, in fact, been blacklisted: 18 months passed before anybody would even give her an interview, and that was only after deciding to change industries altogether. That silver parachute was, in hindsight, wholly inadequate compensation. Meanwhile her harasser has continued his career with no repercussions whatsoever.

When these problems are cultural / institutional, the threat of a lawsuit will neither benefit the victim nor effect any real change. Takes something more sustained and substantial than that.

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Blacklisting employees for reasons like this is unbelievably crazy illegal, just so everyone knows. I strongly encourage anyone with knowledge of or possessing any such blacklists to blow the whistle on this, hard.

It's not necessarily really a blacklist, but when the court case comes up when the employer googles your name... companies like to claim to be pro-equality since they get good press for it, but they're not actually going to put that to any sort of test. Much easier to hire somebody who's not proven themselves willing to stand up for their rights.

It sounds like it was settled before anything went to court, so it's unclear that anything would even come up in a Google search. And yet employers are still finding out somehow.

Word of mouth is powerful.

Oh yeah, it's not remotely legal by any standard whatsoever. The problem is that it's virtually impossible to prove.

In my friend's case, she was at the director level of a large publicly-traded company. Particularly as you approach the top of the that kind of corporate hierarchy, the world becomes very small, and good-old-boy dynamics start to dominate. There's no formal blacklist, of course -- just the opportunity to meet your frenemy from her previous employer down at the bar, where he can confidentially warn you to "watch out for that one: she's a troublemaker". Nothing more needs to be said, and certainly nothing needs to be written.

I suspect that hiring decisions at lower levels will be both more process-driven and better-documented, so it might be more possible to prove the existence of blacklists there (even if it's still far from easy). But near the top of the pyramid, I have great trouble seeing how the punitive legal action can realistically be used to break up the good-old-boy network.

Seeing this play out has actually changed my mind on the necessity of having gender quotas for management and boards. Previously I'd been opposed on vaguely libertarian grounds; now I see it as the only practical way of disrupting the good-old-boy networks that genuinely do a lot of harm. (Society is genuinely damaged -- depriving itself of so much talent -- by systematic bias against women).

I believe that blacklisting is something that happens in cases like this, and I wonder how it gets coordinated. Especially when there's no public record of a court case. Simply that every time her previous employer was called for a reference, they gave her an unflattering one? Or is it more proactive, like some sort of list that's known in the HR world of certain industries?

Employers aren't supposed to call previous employers for references unless you OK it first, and many employers have explicit policies to not give references because of the potential for being sued.

Of course, it does happen, in various ways. The way to find out is to find a sympathetic recruiter (or, a "recruiter" who's really your friend), and have them call for a reference for you. There's good fodder for a lawsuit here.

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