Seventeen-year-old Frankie tried her best to maintain a polite smile when rejecting a 56-year-old man who asked for her number at the gym she worked at. He wanted to reserve a tennis court date for the two of them. While startling and uncomfortable, this was not the first time Frankie found herself in this position at a workplace.
Many young high school women like Frankie, not her real name, look forward to getting their first jobs. One in every three American teenagers, ages 16 to 19, are active in the labor force. However, this time also introduces girls to the harsh realities of harassment in work spaces.
Frankie’s friend Delilah, not her real name, hesitated to start working after hearing many of Frankie’s horror stories. Delilah eventually decided to work at a local restaurant she had been going to since she was a kid, assuming that her familiarity with the family-friendly business would prove itself to be a safer fit. Instead, she found herself dealing with many of the same interactions as Frankie.
“During my first hour of work, I couldn’t help but notice an older man staring at me,” Delilah said. “When I asked him if he needed anything, he would not stop commenting on my ‘exotic appearance’ and how I looked ‘older’ than most of the other girls who worked there. My stomach dropped.”
Upper School English teacher Kristiane Stapleton notes how the harassment young women face in the workplace is no new phenomenon. When she was 16, she worked her first job at a restaurant with her three best friends. They not only faced inappropriate comments from customers but were often made uncomfortable by the older waiters and chefs who worked alongside them.
“Harassment from coworkers was played off as ‘look how fun and silly we can be at this job,’” Stapleton said. “The idea that you would be uncomfortable with that kind of behavior was not really talked about.”
While movements such as #MeToo have shone a spotlight on the sexual harassment women may face, smaller everyday moments still remain unchecked. As of 2024, Only 50% of women felt that their employers would effectively respond to their claims of harassment. While Stapleton notes that there are ways in which harassment is taken more seriously now, she worries that the manosphere, an online anti-feminist movement that has taken the internet by storm, is reigniting a culture in which men feel empowered to treat women however they please.
“To roughly paraphrase Ralph Ellison, who wrote Invisible Man, history is like a boomerang. It goes forward, then it comes backward,” Stapleton said.
Frankie claims that employers such as her own have a higher tolerance for customers’ inappropriate behavior, even if they have an anti-harassment policy among their employees. She also claims that if male clients can get away with talking to female employees in a certain way, the harassment becomes normalized, and they are further enabled while female employees are further isolated.
“When I brought that situation to my manager, he already knew the man by name and was aware that he hits on the younger women who work here,” Frankie said. “I realized the problem wasn’t businesses not knowing, it was them not caring.”
Delilah’s own experiences continued after her first day. After serving an older male customer, he began incessantly commenting on her appearance, the nature of each remark becoming increasingly more inappropriate. Before he left, he gave Delilah a 100-dollar tip. Delilah notes how tipping can be used as a powerful tool to silence women, even if men’s excessive tipping is made with flattering intentions.
“I still felt really uncomfortable about the situation, but at that point I felt like I couldn’t complain because I didn’t want to be deemed as ‘ungrateful,’” Delilah said.
Both Frankie and Delilah note that their jobs have given them many new friends and larger financial freedom. Instead of quitting, they encourage young women to speak when they feel uncomfortable and employers to take concerns seriously.
“All it takes is a manager or a boss making an example of one creepy client to scare the other ones away,” Delilah said.
Frankie acknowledges that it is not all men who make the work atmosphere an unsafe place for women.
“There are also people I’ve met at work who are respectful and take genuine interest in what I do outside of my job, including men,” Frankie said. “It’s definitely not all men, but even one inappropriate interaction among normal ones can make the environment feel uncomfortable.”
