It has no fixed face. It can be a supervisor who quietly reroutes career-making trips and workshops toward whoever he’s pursuing rather than whoever earned it. It can be a national service person, eager to convert a placement into a permanent job, who senses that impressing the boss has come to mean something it shouldn’t.
It can be a job seeker who discovers, once alone with the person doing the hiring, that the promise came with conditions never mentioned in the interview. And, though it is discussed far less, it can be a man on the receiving end of a female superior’s advances, too embarrassed or too disbelieved to report it. This is workplace sexual harassment an old abuse of power that only got a name fifty years ago, and one that still shapes who gets rewarded, who gets promoted, and who quietly gives up and leaves.
Where the Name Came From
Astonishingly, “sexual harassment” did not exist as a phrase until 1975. That year, a Cornell University administrative assistant named Carmita Wood resigned after years of unwanted touching by her supervisor, physicist Boyce McDaniel. When Cornell denied her unemployment benefits on the grounds that she had quit for “personal reasons,” a group of feminist organisers at the university’s Human Affairs Office led by instructor Lin Farley held a public “Speak Out” to give Wood’s experience a wider hearing. Woman after woman at that event described being groped, propositioned, and pushed out of jobs by men they worked for, with no shared word for what had happened to them. Farley coined the term at an April 1975 hearing of the New York City Human Rights Commission, and the New York Times covered it, carrying the phrase into public use for the first time.
It took over a decade for the law to catch up with the language. In 1986, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson that a bank supervisor’s years of coerced sexual contact with a subordinate carried out under the implicit threat that refusal would cost her the job violated federal civil rights law even though she never formally complained while employed there.
The Court’s reasoning mattered: harassment did not need to come with an explicit “sleep with me or you’re fired” ultimatum to be unlawful; a persistently hostile, sexualised environment was enough. That single case became the legal foundation on which nearly every workplace sexual harassment claim since has been built.
Anita Hill and the Hearing That Changed the Conversation
No case did more to drag the issue into mainstream public consciousness than Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas in 1991. Hill’s connection to Thomas began, ironically, through an ordinary career move. After graduating from Yale Law School, she took a position at the Washington law firm Wald, Harkrader & Ross.
She met Thomas through a mutual friend, and when he was appointed Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights, he asked her to come work as his assistant. She accepted and later followed him again when he became chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the very federal agency responsible for investigating the kind of workplace misconduct she says she then endured from him directly.
When President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991, Hill’s allegations reached the Senate Judiciary Committee, and she was called to testify publicly. Before an all-white, all-male panel and a riveted national television audience, Hill described unwanted sexual comments and repeated requests to go out with him.
Thomas denied every allegation and characterised the hearings as, in his words, a “high-tech lynching.” The committee, chaired by then-Senator Joe Biden, ultimately confirmed Thomas to the Court, where he still sits today. Hill’s testimony didn’t win her case in any legal sense, but it did something arguably larger: it gave millions of working women, for the first time on live television, a vocabulary and a public reference point for something they had quietly endured alone. The following year’s wave of female candidates elected to the U.S. Congress became known as the “Year of the Woman,” and EEOC harassment complaints rose sharply in the years after.
The Pattern Repeats, Continent to Continent
Ghana has its own reference point, decades before most people had ever heard of #MeToo. In 1999, the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) ruled that the Chief Executive of Fan Airways was guilty of sexually harassing a former female employee a ruling that dominated headlines and remains one of Ghana’s most cited early workplace harassment cases.
Ghana’s Labor Act, 2003 (Act 651) now formally defines sexual harassment as unwelcome sexual advances by an employer, superior, or co-worker “whether the worker is a man or a woman,” and Ghanaian courts have read Article 17 of the 1992 Constitution’s equality guarantee to cover it as a form of discrimination. Still, Ghana has no single standalone sexual harassment law victims must build a case through a patchwork of the Labor Act, the Criminal Code’s indecent assault provisions, and constitutional argument, a structure that puts a heavy evidentiary burden on the person reporting.
Kenya offers one of the starkest recent illustrations of how long institutional silence can last. In one case recently detailed by the Daily Nation, a worker identified as Nancy was physically assaulted by her supervisor in 1991; she reported it, and nothing was done. A second supervisor harassed her again six years later, in 1997. It took decades, and a shift toward accepting electronic evidence like WhatsApp messages and recordings in Kenyan courts, before cases like hers began to result in multimillion-shilling compensation awards.
Kenya’s tea industry produced an even more infamous case: a BBC Africa Eye investigation into sexual exploitation on tea plantations led to the dismissal of Ekaterra Tea Kenya managers implicated in the report, though at least one dismissed manager separately went to court over his termination. Across African newsrooms more broadly, a multi-country study covering Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe found that when survivors did report harassment, their organisations responded in fewer than half of cases, and the most common response was simply to warn the perpetrator rather than remove them.
South Africa’s courts have used some of the sharpest language on record. In one Labor Court case, a company director was found to have made a string of unwelcome sexual comments and physical advances toward a female colleague; South Africa’s Constitutional Court has separately described sexual harassment as conduct that “strips away at the core of a person’s dignity” and stands as the direct opposite of workplace equality. Nigerian courts, meanwhile, now recognise an explicit category of harassment built around exchanging career benefits for sex asking for sex in return for a promotion, a contract, or continued employment precisely the dynamic that turns opportunity into a hidden toll.
It Is Not Only Men Who Harass
The instinctive image of workplace harassment a powerful man targeting a junior woman is real and remains most documented cases. But it is not the only pattern and treating it as the only one leaves male victims with nowhere to turn. In one well-documented New York case, a male executive assistant named Joseph Jackson alleged that his direct supervisor, Sally O’Dowd, touched him inappropriately and subjected him to repeated sexual comments over seven months, and that the company’s own CEO witnessed some of the conduct and did nothing. In a separate case, a Queens, New York salesman named Cory Lashley was awarded $40,000 after a jury found his female boss had engaged in unlawful sexual harassment and retaliation against him after their relationship began at a nightclub and he was hired the following Monday.
In South Carolina, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued a resort company after a female supervisor subjected a male salesperson to more than a year of sexual comments and physical harassment in front of colleagues conduct the company allowed to continue even after moving him to a different department did not stop it. Legal advocates note that the first sexual harassment case filed by a male complainant in the United States only happened in 1995 twenty years after the term itself was coined and that reported cases of women harassing men have continued climbing since, even though stigma keeps many men from ever filing a complaint at all.
The Quieter Version: Opportunity as Currency
Beyond the cases that reach a courtroom or a human rights commission sits a subtler, harder-to-prosecute version of the same abuse of power one that shows up constantly in institutions across Ghana and the wider region, even where no one ever files a formal complaint. It looks like this: a hardworking, deserving employee is passed over for a foreign workshop, a training trip, or a promotion in favor of a colleague whose real qualification was an amorous relationship with someone senior.
It looks like a young female employee invited on a trip that has nothing to do with her actual role, funded by public money, while the workshop it was supposedly for goes largely unattended once she arrives. It looks like a job seeker who was promised a position finding that promise conditional on something never written in any offer letter. And it looks like national service personnel structurally the most vulnerable people in almost any Ghanaian public institution, desperate to convert a year of service into a permanent job being the most exposed of all to this dynamic, precisely because they have the least power to say no.
This version of harassment is corrosive in a specific way: it doesn’t just harm the person directly targeted; it also punishes everyone who didn’t play along. The competent employees who built their case on merit alone find themselves consistently overtaken by people who built theirs on proximity to power instead of a quiet, demoralising signal about what gets rewarded inside the institution. And because public money frequently funds the trips and workshops used as currency in this exchange, taxpayers end up unknowingly subsidising it.
What Can Actually Curb It
Close the legal gap. Ghana’s reliance on a patchwork of the Labor Act, the Criminal Code, and constitutional argument rather than a single, purpose-built sexual harassment law with clear definitions, reporting timelines, and remedies makes every case harder to bring than it should be. A standalone law, like what Kenya’s Sexual Offences Act and South Africa’s Code of Good Practice on Harassment already provide, would give both victims and employers a much clearer standard.
Build reporting channels that don’t depend on the harasser’s goodwill. Every documented failure above shares one feature: the person being harassed had to report to someone with a personal or professional stake in protecting the harasser, or in an environment where retaliation (transfer, exclusion, sidelining) was the more likely outcome of speaking up than any consequence for the perpetrator. An independent reporting channel modelled on the same principle behind whistleblower protection is not optional; it’s the entire mechanism that decides whether policies mean anything.
Make travel, workshops and opportunities auditable. Where trips, training slots or promotions are being allocated, a transparent, criteria-based selection process visible to more than one person removes the discretion that makes this kind of quiet, unreported harassment possible in the first place.
Extend real protection to national service personnel and job seekers specifically. Both groups sit outside normal HR protections in most institutions, service personnel because they’re temporary, and job seekers because they’re not yet employees at all. Institutions that host service personnel should be required to name an independent contact for complaints who are not in their direct chain of command.
Train for the version that doesn’t look like a courtroom case. Most institutional harassment training focuses on overt cases groping, explicit propositions and says nothing about the quieter exchange of opportunity for a relationship. Training that names this pattern explicitly makes it recognisable, and recognisability is the first precondition for anyone to report it.
Take male victims seriously, on paper and in practice. Any policy that implicitly assumes only women can be harassed leaves a real category of victims with no route to report at all as the U.S. cases above show, the number of men willing to come forward has been rising for years, not falling.
Fifty years after Carmita Wood’s case first gave this abuse of power a name, workplaces on every continent still run the same experiment: what happens when accountability is optional? The lesson from Anita Hill’s testimony, from the tea plantations of Kenya, from Ghana’s own Fan Airways ruling, and from the quieter version of this story the overlooked employee, the misused workshop trip, the desperate national service worker is consistent. Where reporting is safe and opportunity is transparent, harassment shrinks. Where it isn’t, it simply moves further out of sight.
