Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

In California, all managers are required by law to take three hours of sexual harassment training every other year. One thing that stood out to me is that there is no need to make a formal harassment claim: when anyone mentions they have experienced harassment to a manager, even in a private conversation, the manager is required to report it and investigate. If the employee says they want to keep the conversation in confidence, the manager is supposed to say they can't do that. If a manager doesn't follow up, they can be personally liable.

Several companies I've been at also have a mandatory "managers and the law" training class. I didn't talk to anyone for several days after taking it. :)

IANAL, but my understanding is that one job of HR is to protect the company. One reason they investigate is to produce evidence that could be used in the event of a lawsuit to prove they took the allegation seriously. Trying to argue with the employee that it didn't happen would put them in a really bad position if they were sued, because it could be used to demonstrate a hostile work environment.

I've seen complaints happen a few times in my career (not involving me directly), and, in those cases, HR took it gravely seriously. They talked to everyone involved and documented the crap out of it. Most of the people I've met in HR seem to genuinely care. I disagree with advice that HR should not be trusted, but my advice for someone who is in a situation where they are uncomfortable is to document everything. Keep emails of all interactions with your manager and HR and send follow up email to summarize conversations you had in person.

I had friends at a company with serious security breach. There was a hullabaloo, all sort of important people in the company upset and questioning whether they should fire the head of tech. To calm the waters, the head of finance hired an outside firm to investigate. All good, right?

Here, the head of finance liked the head of tech and trusted him. The outside firm, knowing who buttered their bread, fished around for clues on how the report was supposed to land. And as expected, the report was, "some flaws, a couple of dumb mistakes, but basically sound." From the same facts, a hostile auditor could have come to the opposite conclusion, that the dumb mistakes were indicative of deep flaws and the whole company was put needlessly at risk.

Specialized audit companies have to get paid. They claim to be neutral parties, but they have an inherent conflict of interest. If you choose the right one, you can get a better result than an internal investigation. But you can also choose one that serves the interests of whoever's paying the bills.

That sounds like you're saying the supervisor didn't do anything wrong, but rather that your coworkers took a reasonable gesture the wrong way? If so, that doesn't really jive with "One day, one of my supervisors jumped to my defense at a team event, in an awkward display of sexism"

I'm really not trying to be confrontational, just trying to understand. Is it that the "jumped to defense" thing was clearly sexist? Not asking for a direct quote, but what was the basis of the defense...something gender related, or the high quality of your work, or something else?