discoursedrome:

amodernobject:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: feminism is the embodiment of all the stereotypes it claims are false.

sigh

so the single most important rule when evaluating internet news is “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is”, and yes, “good” includes “likely to go viral by confirming people’s suspicions about their enemies”,

Even a cursory google on the subject (e.g. here or here) will show that the actual objection was that the woman was that “that four colleagues bullied and harassed her, including sexually” over a period of 21 months, and then when she finally snapped and reported it to her manager, he responded with the headline comment.

This is a bit old but the reason it’s making the rounds is because BAE is appeaing the amount of damages; the interpretation taken from the headline is the argument being advanced by the defendant’s lawyer, someone who is required to misrepresent situations in his client’s favour as part of his job.

I didn’t bother trying to dig up all the proceedings since this thing has been ping-ponging around the tribunal for a while, but here (.doc format) is the first decision I was able to find relating to the case – it’s from one of the cross-appeals relating to the amount awarded. As a general rule, judges’ decisions are a drastically better source of case details than newsmagazines. A few excerpts:

There were a number of allegations made by the Claimant about the period of 21 months leading up to a particular incident in April 2006.  On 26 April 2006 the manager, to whom we have already referred, made a remark to the Claimant that the Employment Tribunal dealing with what has been called the liability hearing, namely the Employment Tribunal presided over by Employment Judge Cook (“the Cook Tribunal”), decided was an act of sex discrimination contrary to the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.  The Claimant described this as “the last straw” and she went off work the following day, 27 April 2006.  Just over a year later, she asked to return to work, but putting matters briefly, the Employer refused to allow her to do so and subsequently dismissed her on 23 July 2007.  She complained to the Employment Tribunal and her complaints were heard by the Cook Tribunal, which found that her dismissal was because she had raised allegations of sex discrimination.  It therefore amounted to victimisation contrary to section 2 of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.  It also held that the refusal to allow her to return to work without conducting any risk assessment and without making any reasonable adjustments to take account of her ill-health amounted to disability discrimination contrary to the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and by its decision of 8 October 2008 the Cook Tribunal also held that, because the dismissal was sex and disability discrimination-related, it was an automatically unfair dismissal.

Based on other parts of the document, BAE’s counsel appears not to dispute that the history of harassment and discrimination occurred – his argument is based on the fact that these individual incidents were either not brought to the tribunal as distinct complaints, were rejected, or were determined to have happened too long ago to warrant awards. He’s therefore arguing – as I understand it – that the manager’s comment is the only one that “counts” on the basis that it was the only case upheld as sex discrimination under the letter of the law. The plaintiff’s argument, which appears to have won the day, is that the context of the complaints matters because a) the business knew about it and b) it’s not possible to split off just the harm done by that one incident without taking the others into consideration, even if the others by themselves would not have received a reward.

Needless to say, it is a lot of trouble to dig into this shit even a little, and no one who read the original post is going to fucking see this. The “teachable moment” lesson is as follows: this is why it’s important to have a low-cost bullshit screen before stories go viral.