Sportfolio Journalism

In this modern era of communication, human beings have dealt with interactions of diverse nature all the time. But there can be problems when it comes to making inappropriate comments about a person’s attire, appearance or behavior. Such instances of verbal harassment at a workplace such as an office or restaurant can be unfortunate for the person who is victimized or targeted by fellow co-workers or superiors, who could possibly face discipline for their inappropriate behavior.  

These workplace problems have not vanished in the modern era after the #MeToo Movement that held plenty of powerful figures in corporate media companies accountable for actions of sexual abuse towards female employees. According to a poll done by HRAcuity that sampled more than 2,000 anonymous and random employees, there was a 55% rate of them experiencing or witnessing workplace misconduct. That tally is a seven-year high and a 14-point increase from a similar survey done in 2024.  

Among the issues highly reported in the poll were favoritism/nepotism(37%), bullying/intimidation(36%), gender discrimination and sexual harassment(each at 22%), and retaliation(21%). Workplace harassment can also be something that is underreported as well, with 46% of the polled employees citing fear of retaliation as a main reason behind why they don’t report incidents of misconduct.  

Workplace misconduct is something that generations of workers in the United States have faced in the past, and a woman named Mel, who asked her full name to be withheld, experienced this in her younger years of employment. Mel is in her mid-fifties and lives in Southern California, with her working as a schoolteacher. But she had other jobs in her young adult life as a hair salon receptionist and restaurant waitress.  

Mel said that she once was discriminated against for not having “enough makeup on” while working. She said her boss at the hair salon “proceeded to bring me over to his wife, who was one of the hairstylists and he made her turn around, and he made me look at her and said ‘This is what I want you to look like.’”  

“So, after that, every time I came in, I did try to put on more makeup… but then every single time I came in, he kept telling me ‘You don’t have enough makeup on. Your makeup is not bright enough, you need more,’” Mel said.  

As another example of appearance discrimination and gender discrimination by an opposite gender superior, Mel said that as a waitress she had to simply wear a dress as a part of her job due to there being no specific uniform. But her manager at the restaurant told her that the dress she was wearing wasn’t the type that he wanted her to wear.  

In a similar instance to the hair salon situation, the manager brought over his girlfriend to Mel, who recounted her manager telling her “’I want you to look more like my girlfriend’, who was working there at the time, and he brought her over and he showed me her dress.”  

“So I tried to go out and get dresses like that, but every single time, once again, when I came in, the dress was not good enough, it wasn’t flowy enough, it wasn’t flowery enough”, Mel said.  

In both of those instances of discrimination and not pleasing her bosses well enough, Mel remembers getting “less and less shifts and job hours as time went on, to where I just eventually felt like I had to quit.”  

Although there are plenty of workplace harassment incidents that are done without consent, there are unique cases where two people working within the same industry can have an improper relationship with each other.  

One recent example of this is the Mike Vrabel-Dianna Russini scandal, which has been making plenty of headlines in the past several weeks and Russini had to resign her position at The Athletic due to the investigation launched into her relationship with Vrabel, which is extramarital on both sides. As the head coach of the New England Patriots, Vrabel is facing a lot of scrutiny and negative press that might force him to resign his position eventually.  

On the topic of the Vrabel-Russini crisis, Mel said that it is “always a tricky situation to start a relationship with someone you are working with”. With their relationship occurring over the course of the past six years, Vrabel and Russini were documented by a Page Six reporter who took pictures of them hanging out at a resort in Arizona and the story of that interaction was released on Tue, Apr 7.  

Mel also gave some advice to younger employees who might be facing similar situations of workplace harassment as she did. “I would definitely say that if it is another employee harassing you, you should definitely go to whoever the owner is or the bosses of the company [are] and say something.”  

“If you have an HR department, that is somewhere to go immediately. If you are going to go confront your boss about it and he is the one harassing you, that you have another person with you, kind of asa mediator, so that you have someone who is there that can be neutral and who can just also verify what was being said”, Mel concluded.