上月，NBC早间节目《今日秀》元老级主持人马特·劳厄尔被炒了鱿鱼。

据报道，NBC News不久胶收到投诉,详细列举了劳厄尔在工作场合的性骚扰行为。劳厄尔1997年就在这档节目工作，就这样走人了。

CNN报道称，此事并没引起太多惊讶。许多人都知道，包括《纽约时报》在内的多家新闻机构都在紧盯着劳厄尔。娱乐新闻网站Variety纽约分部负责人拉明·赛图德在推特上写道：“过去两个月，伊丽莎白·瓦格梅斯特和我一直在跟进劳厄尔被指严重性骚扰的事。有好几位受害人。”

NBC最大牌的节目之一《今日秀》就这样被当众打脸。随着爆炸新闻传出，很多人对劳厄尔的工作也产生质疑。

演员科里·费尔德曼公开披露过小时候在好莱坞遭强奸和虐待的事；在采访中，劳厄尔看起来在批评他没努力帮助其他受害者。还有人指称劳厄尔在NBC举办的Commander-In-Chief Forum电视辩论上对参加大选的克林顿和特朗普态度差异明显。劳厄尔还曾问通用汽车首席执行官玛丽·巴拉感觉能否既当好妈妈又当好CEO，被指仇视女性。

有很多混迹传媒、娱乐行业以及政界的著名男性，他们手中掌握着各种大众喜闻乐见的节目，制定出急需的政策，背地里却可能做着背叛和掠夺的勾当，劳厄尔就是其中之一。没错，他们的所作所为非常令人担心。

借用一位以言简意赅著称的电视性栏目作家的话，人们似乎应该问：你能否在性骚扰别人的同时做好自己的工作呢？

坐在家里对男性公众人物逞口舌之快意义可能有限，真正困难的是计算数百万女性默默放弃有前途的事业，或者被迫离开低收入岗位陷入贫困和崩溃产生的机会成本。沉默忍受的代价很高。损失的生产力真真切切。所有这些都要算一算。

如果她们所在的行业不那么引人注目，或者被指侵害的人并不是很出名，也没有上热搜的作品，追究起来会特别困难。而这些领域经常出现最严重的性侵害。

美国进步中心主要研究女性经济安全问题的乔斯林·弗莱尔最近对《华盛顿邮报》表示：“低薪劳动者特别容易受到性骚扰。”

弗莱尔上周发布报告，分析了10年来提交给美国平等就业机会委员会（EEOC）未公开的性骚扰投诉数据。虽然男性和女性都受到过骚扰且涉及各行各业，但她的报告指出，逾四分之一的性骚扰投诉来自有很多服务人员的行业，这些行业里女性从事着大量低薪岗位。近四分之三的投诉者都表示遭到过报复。

弗莱尔写道：“情况最差的是有色人种女性，她们往往得同时面临人种、民族和性别歧视的影响，其性观念或性意向可能受到侮辱性的偏见，被骚扰的风险也增加。”

行业组织餐饮机会中心的另一项研究得出的结论与之类似。虽然美国只有7%的女性从事餐饮工作，但EEOC接到的性骚扰投诉中有37%来自该行业。

报告指出：餐饮行业的男性和女性从业人员受到上司（66%）和同事（80%）很多性骚扰。顾客骚扰比例也非常高，达到78%。在餐饮场所，为挣小费上班的服务员里三分之二是女性，受骚扰的几率尤其高。

酒店工会组织UNITE HERE芝加哥分会会长卡伦·肯特说，酒店员工受骚扰的情况特别严重，得发给客房服务员紧急呼救器防身。卡伦最近告诉美国国家广播电台，调查中63%的工会成员表示工作时曾遭到性骚扰。

“客房服务员一般独自打扫房间，从事的女性往往是有色人种、移民女性，和一晚上花几百美元住酒店的客人相比身份差距巨大。如果客人意图不轨，呼救基本没人能听到，想逃走也很困难。”

人与人之间的差距总是存在的，正因如此才需要掌权人士全力支持，否则问题很难解决。从哪儿着手呢？彻底杜绝骚扰行为和实现领导层多元化都是办法，实实在在地去算算账也有必要。量化计算性骚扰对女性个人以及整个公司带来的成本方面，可用数据少之又少。是该从商业角度讲讲道理了。（财富中文网）

译者：Charlie

审校：夏林

The world wakes to another shocking revelation: Matt Lauer has been fired from his job as anchor of NBC’s The Today Show.

According to reports, NBC News received a detailed complaint alleging inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace on Monday night. Lauer has been associated with the show since 1997. And then, he was gone.

According to CNN, the move was not a complete surprise. Many people knew that several outlets, including The New York Times, were working on in-depth investigations of Lauer’s behavior. “For the last two months, @EWagmeister and I have been reporting on a story about serious sexual harassment allegations against Lauer,” tweeted Ramin Setoodeh, the New York Bureau Chief from Variety. “There were multiple victims.”

It is a public blow to one of NBC’s most valuable franchises. But along with the shock comes a public unwinding of Lauer’s work which, to many, now seems suspect after the fact.

Actor Corey Feldman has gone public with allegations of rape and abuse when he was a child in Hollywood; in this interview, Lauer appears to be blaming him for not doing more to help other alleged victims. Lauer has also been accused of treating then-candidates Clinton and Trump very differently during the Commander-In-Chief Forum interviews. And he endured charges of misogyny after he asked the CEO of GM, Mary Barra if she thought she could be both a good mom and a good chief executive.

He now joins a long list of very famous men in media, entertainment, and government, who have been shaping products we readily consume and policies we desperately need, while allegedly operating behind the scenes as betrayers and predators. Yes, we should be very worried about their output.

To parody a famously reductive television sex columnist, the world seems to be asking: Can you be a sexual harasser and still be good at your job?

While it may be instructive to armchair-assess the performance of men who work in public, it’s much harder to quantify the opportunity costs paid by the millions of women who privately abandon promising career paths, or who would face poverty and ruin if they were forced to leave their low-wage jobs. Suffering in silence is expensive. The productivity costs are real. We need to do the math on all of this.

It’s particularly challenging when the industries aren’t glamorous, or if the abusers in question aren’t bold-faced names or SEO hitmakers. But that’s where the worst abuses often occur.

Jocelyn Frye, who studies women’s economic security at the Center for American Progress, recently told The Washington Post, “Low-wage workers are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment.”

Frye’s report, out last week, analyzed a decade’s worth of unpublished sexual harassment complaint data filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). While all genders experience harassment and no industry is spared, her report finds that more than one-quarter of sexual harassment charges were filed in industries with large numbers of service-sector workers, including many low-wage jobs that are often occupied by women. Nearly three-quarters of those charges included an allegation of retaliation.

“Women of color, in particular, often must confront the combined impact of racial, ethnic, and gender prejudice that can result in degrading stereotypes about their sexual mores or availability and increase their risk of being harassed,” she wrote.

Other research from The Restaurant Opportunities Center, a trade group, paints a similar picture. While only seven percent of American women work in the restaurant industry, some 37% of all sexual harassment claims to the EEOC come from the restaurant industry.

From the report: Restaurant workers of all genders experience high levels of harassment from supervisors (66%) and co-workers (80%). Customers account for a whopping 78% of harassers. Two-thirds of all restaurant workers who work for tips are women, making them uniquely vulnerable to this sort of abuse.

The situation for hotel workers is so bad, that Karen Kent, president of the Chicago chapter of the hospitality union UNITE HERE, had to issue panic buttons to housekeepers. She recently told NPR that sixty-three percent of union members surveyed said they had experienced an incident of sexual harassment on the job.

“Hotel housekeepers work alone, cleaning rooms. And oftentimes, there’s a power imbalance between the women who clean them, who are often women of color, immigrants, and guests who have those rooms who pay hundreds of dollars a night. If something happens with the guests, they often can’t be heard or possibly can’t even get away.”

I would argue that there is always a power imbalance, which is why the situation will not be solved without the full support of the powerful. Where to start? In addition to rooting out the behavior and diversifying leadership, it might be nice to actually do the math. There is woefully little data quantifying the cost of harassment to individual women and organizations as a whole. It’s time to make the business case.