Maybe it is time to refocus our anti-harassment training.

For the last eleven years my anti-harassment training has focused on sexual harassment for the most part with a passing acknowledgement that Title VII, ADA and ADEA prohibit harassment on the other protected groups as well. The main reason for that, at least from my perspective, is that is what my clients have asked for over that time period and even now. The calls I get for my services still are focused on sexual harassment. The one-on-one harassment training I do is almost exclusively about sexual harassment. This may be an artifact of the way I advertise my services and the fact that most of my referrals come from clients that used me for sexual harassment training. Still, it occurs to me that we might need to broaden the focus of our anti-harassment training programs to ensure that we are doing all we can to protect our organizations, and in the past few years my training has moved, albeit slowly, in that direction.

In January, the EEOC announced that 93,277 workplace discrimination charges were filed with them nationwide in fiscal year 2009. This represents the second highest number of complaints ever and resulted in over $294 million in damages and that does not include the $82 million resulting from litigation. Unfortunately, the way the EEOC reports their charge statistics on their web site precludes any conclusive analysis. A single claim may contain claims of discrimination in a number of categories. For instance, if you add the number of charges from each category it totals somewhere over 170,000 or nearly double the number of individual charges filed. The monetary benefits in the cases that are resolved are not divided but reported in each of those categories. I am not being critical here but only explaining why we need to exercise caution when interpreting these complaint statistics.