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Comment by blotter_paper | Hacker News Reader

>Men at work are not harassing every female employee.

Ever work a shitty job in the food industry? Not all men are harassers, but anecdotally it seems like maybe 10-25% of men at these jobs will systematically harass every female employee below the age of 30. Unsolicited back-rubs, ass-grabs, the whole shebang. It's, like, really bad, and when the owner/manager is involved there's not much you can do. I do feel like the "always believe the accuser" narrative goes too far, but I don't think this behavior is really an edge case. It seems like a significant minority of males in unprofessional work environments.

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To play devil's advocate, I have worked shitty jobs in the fast food industry. Two and a half years at McDonald's and then another two and a half at Longhorn Steakhouse. I never witnessed a single incident of physical harassment against any of the girls I worked with, not even once.

There was one guy that pushed the line a little too far sometimes but the girls weren't afraid of or offended by him so much as they took pity on him. He was a very depressed individual.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, only that anecdotal evidence is fundamentally incomplete. It is entirely too small of a sample to be statistically significant.

Of course chain restaurants will have strict anti-harassment policies else they would on hook for multi-million dollar lawsuits. The kind of abuse that above comment mentioned is most common at standalone places.

Yeah, I agree with this and also believe the parent is responding in good faith. I've never worked at an established franchise, and I'm sure there are ma-and-pa shops that actually care, but what I've seen has been abysmal.

>Ever work a shitty job in the food industry? Not all men are harassers, but anecdotally it seems like maybe 10-25% of men at these jobs will systematically harass every female employee below the age of 30.

10-25%? So, in all probability less than 1 in 4, and even close to just 1 in 10?

If only in all areas of life people (men and women) were jerks with merely those odds...

10-25% of people not saying "thank you" is acceptable. 10-25% of people spitting in your face would be totally unacceptable. Let's not brush off sexual assault as if it were a minor inconvenience.

I consider somebody spitting in my face to be much worse than somebody grabbing my ass or giving me an unsolicited backrub. I think it would be useful to break that statistic down into further categories based on how egregious something is. Somebody giving me an unsolicited backrub in my mind is a lot less wrong than somebody grabbing my ass. Lumping all of these together might provide for a big statistical number, but it also makes it more likely that people won't take the statistic seriously.

Heck, I consider grabbing a stranger's ass very wrong (I'd say as wrong as spitting in their face).

What I'd want to know is whether those terrible things the parent describes are of that level, or merely trying to get a dinner with some coworker, or telling them they look good, etc -- which is often classified as some kind of horrible harassment to pad the numbers.

Meanwhile, tons of men to men, men to women, women to men, and women to women, animosity incidents and abuse of no sexual kind in the workplace is glossed over.

Parent here. I've seen the spectrum of abuse you're talking about, I was just talking about the clear sexual harassment that was relevant to the comment I was replying to, and I've seen worse than I brought up (like an owner hugging one of his managers from behind, and then transitioning the hug into a dry-hump of her leg which she was totally not on board with). I'm talking about literal ass-grabbing, though the other points you make are totally valid issues as well.

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