One workplace was really toxic. I gave my boss (the CEO) a presentation about my job on his very first day in the office. Afterwards, he stared at my breasts and said, “I’ll remember you” – no comment about my work at all. In another incident, he called me at 7:30 am and said, “I was hoping to catch you as you stepped out of the shower.” He was utterly incompetent, racist and homophobic, as well as sexist. I occasionally stood up to him. On one occasion, he brought us into his office to share a video of his niece marrying a black man where he mocked the marriage and the black man – I was the only board member who called him out and said he was racist. I was horrified that everyone else remained quiet. After turning the organisation around and winning awards, he came after me and denied me the pay rise I deserved. HR had to step in. However, HR also told me she was batting off daily complaints about him, e.g. smacking his assistant’s bottom after he got them to go under tables to plug in stuff. On my last day, we had a run-in, and he refused to write a reference. I wrote it myself, and then he made personal remarks about me, and I ran out of the room in tears, tripped over a large doorstop and broke my wrist. His response was to get that doorstop painted over quickly. At the same time as this, I had another director saying things to me like, “I’m going to have to smack your bottom” and “If you come to me with your knickers around your ankles”,… he also drunkenly raged at me at an event about something he did wrong… projecting. I complained to HR, and HR told him he made my life worse – coming into my office, picking up The Sun and flicking to page 3. The same director threw a chair at another female director for refusing to give him a budget…. None of these men were punished. For a long time, I thought it was me and that I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to them… but for four years before these men came into the office… I was fine, happy and doing a great job – my work did not suffer during their two-year tenure, but my mental health did. And if I knew then what I know now, I would have left within six months instead of sticking it out.
