Lee Rice

Milani Gosman is a server, barback, and everything in between at a bustling sports bar in Cambridge, MA, where the average customer is a cis-man ranging between twenty-something to sixty-something years of age. As a college student, Gosman bounced between minimum-wage jobs in the Boston area, but finally decided to enter the service industry because of the amount of money promised from tips. However, it wasn’t an easy choice. Gosman says she was hesitant to enter a restaurant job for one reason: client perpetrated sexual harassment.

“It especially happens when customers get drunk,” Gosman says. “They think that I can’t hear them a lot of the time. Customers will point to me and be like, ‘she’s hot, isn’t she?’” This kind of unwanted attention has even affected the way Gosman presents herself when she comes into work. “I try to dress a little more on the side where people can tell I’m gay, but I had an encounter recently where [a woman] asked and she started coming onto me. I even cut my hair because I anticipated a change [from men], but it has only shifted to women, now.”

Milani’s uniform consists of all-black attire. She personalizes her outfit with accessories as a means of self expression.

Milani’s feet often ache as a result of her being on her feet all day during work, her girlfriend notes, as Milani sits on the end of her beed to massage the balls of her feet.

Milani works at a bar because of the healthy tips that patrons ensure so she can support herself in her Brighton apartment.

Gosman’s experience is one that is universal amongst nearly every female presenting person who identifies as a service worker. Researchers Hillary J. Gettman and Michele J. Gelfand from the University of Maryland studied client sexual harassment (CSH) and found four main causes responsible for CSH: client power, client gender context, accountability, and work environment pressure. Generally, an inherent power dynamic between client and service worker is evidently a byproduct of the emotional labor required for the role. “Because you’re selling someone a product, if that service inherently feels disingenuous, there is an expectation that you have to be personable and mold into the vibe of that bar,” Gosman said. “There’s me, and the me at work—[at work] all of the sudden I’m this girl who knows the difference between different IPA’s, and it’s a lot of strange balance,” she said. As a result, this notion of boundaries is merely nonexistent within the service industry. “It’s a lot of navigating owing a customer something,” says Gosman.

Juggling both her job and school, Milani’s shifts start anywhere between 3 and 5 p.m. to 10 or 11 o’clock at night.

Aegis Law, a business litigation team based in Illinois and Missouri, collected data about CSH from 2010 to 2021 and found that about 40 percent of sexual harassment cases were resolved by “no reasonable cause.” These cases were dismissed with no further investigation by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity (EOS), even though sexual harassment retaliation charges reached a peak at 3,418 charges in 2019. It’s such an enshrined aspect of the role that women like Gosman often do not confront higher management about it. In Lara Good and Rae Cooper’s article exploring the effects that emotional labor has on service workers, they found that “in the rare cases when employees voice their complaints to managers, the lack of procedure and limited knowledge among both employees and managers constrain…action.” Additionally, according to the study, “formal complaints are constrained because harassment by customers is considered a routine or regular part of the work in these contexts and employees feel responsible for managing incidents of harassment themselves.”

Milani shares a bedroom with her girlfriend whom she met at school. As independent filmmakers, they aspire to share their vision with the world.

Gosman points out that she faces unwanted sexual attention from customers nearly once every shift. “I can’t shut them down because I rely on them financially,” she says. The culture of the restaurant industry makes women servers, including Gosman, feel pressured to uphold unrealistic expectations for financial security.

A simple ponytail is the most practical hairdo for Milani on the job.

On days where she doesn’t have time or energy to cook, Milani will eat leftovers to hold her over before a shift.

From Brighton to Cambridge, Milani’s commute takes a little less than an hour.

Milani commutes using the T, which is about a five minute walk from her apartment.

Emily Begley, a college student studying musical theater, is a hostess at an upscale restaurant on Newbury Street. With a tight schedule surrounding rehearsals and performances, Begley works with other students as a hostess for the flexible hours and good pay. After working there for six months, Begley has both witnessed and been vulnerable to harassment from management and patrons. “In terms of things that have made me uncomfortable, I’ve had my fair share,” she says. Of the least offensive, but nonetheless uncomfortable, Begley remembers her and a fellow hostess being incentivized with a cash-bribe to open up a table. “A guy came in and asked for a specific table but that table had a reservation, and she said ‘no I’m sorry but I can seat you right here,’ and the guy complimented her and told her she was beautiful and gave her a twenty [dollar bill], hoping that the table would open up,” says Begley. While it’s not uncommon for customers to overstep boundaries, it doesn’t negate how strenuous it can be to uphold professionalism and satisfy a client—two of your most important obligations when identifying into service work. About the duality of herself that exists in and outside of work, she said “I just feel like I step into a certain persona for two hours and that’s not me, that’s not Emily—that’s just someone who works at the Capital Burger. It’s kind of a coping mechanism in some ways.” She compared the disassociation she feels from herself and work comparable to imagining oneself in a video game, something her and her coworkers often joke about to make light of their shifts.

Begley also shared that she’s witnessed harassment committed not just by clients, but by management, too. “There was a manager working there for a year who was the cause of a lot of peoples’ uncomfortability for a lot of reasons,” says Begley. “A big thing was his interactions with the female staff. Another hostess that got hired said that he told her she was very inviting and charismatic, and he maybe used the word ‘sensual’ in describing her, and then there was a whole slew of behavior after that.” She adds, “but customers are a little different because I feel like in the restaurant industry there’s this thing like ‘the customer’s always right’ and you can’t really do anything about it.”

The lines become blurred because of an emphasis drawn on treating regular customers with the utmost personability. This relationship speaks well of an establishment, but is more often than not at the expense of those who have to serve them. In their article published for the Harvard Business Review, “Sexual Harassment Prevails in the Service Industry. Here’s What Needs to Change,” reporters Johnson and Madera point to another contributor of CSH, in that “restaurant culture still praises the customer as ‘always right.’” A study conducted for the article found that “managers perceived the same sexually harassing behavior as less negative when it was done by a customer than by an employee.”

Begley sums it up nicely, and speaks for all women when she says “I would love to be protected in my workplace by, I think, an element of benefit of the doubt on my end and what I’m saying. In terms of how to deal [with it], unfortunately, until the world changes the restaurant industry will come with it.”

Sexual harassment in the workplace can begin as soon as you’re able to enter the workforce. The American Association of University Women found that “more than 50% of high school girls reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment throughout a single school year.” It’s so common that, according to the report, many teenage girls don’t know how to recognize it or its varying degrees.

Amy Blackstone, a professor of sociology at the University of Maine, said for CNN that “it’s in high school jobs that people learn the norms of the workplace.” Researchers Susan Fineran and James E. Gruber at the University of Southern Maine state that “in 2005, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed fifteen employment discrimination lawsuits involving teenage workers and sexual harassment.” It was also reported that “80 to 90% of adolescents work at some point during high school and most of them are employed in retail sales, restaurants, grocery stores, and health care,” all of which are service based work and introductory level part-time jobs.

Considering that teenage girls are “young, single, and have low job status,” Fineran and Gruber predicted that teenage girls would be subjected to sexual harassment as a natural result of these aspects which enhance their vulnerability in a workplace setting. Yet Fineran and Gruber note that “it is surprising, however, that the teenagers experienced significantly higher levels of harassment than adults given that they all described their jobs as part-time.” They continue by revealing “it is especially troubling that the girls experienced levels of sexual coercion that were comparable to those of fully-employed adult women.” The results of their study further proved that “similarly, the percentages of [women] who experienced unwanted sexual attention among three occupational groups” were “significantly lower than the figure for teens.” Additionally, it demonstrated that “teenage girls not only experienced more harassment but also that it occurred in a shorter time period.”

Olive Faruq is a student at UMass Boston who currently works at Blackbird Doughnuts on Beacon Hill and has been working part-time since she was sixteen years old. “In high school, my first job was at a Dunkin Donuts, and there was this one customer who would come in, probably in his late-thirties,” she said. Faruq added that “at first I thought he was just being nice, and he just wanted to go out of his way to make the workers feel special,” but she later realized something was off. “He would repetitively come in multiple times a day, and I noticed he would come in significantly more when I was working alone, or working with one or two other girls that were all in high school at the same time as me.” His predatory behavior escalated over the course of nine months. “He would bring me little gifts and he had a pretty unique car, and I would start seeing it. I saw it at my high school parking lot and by my house, just places that a grown adult normally wouldn’t, or shouldn’t be, going to.” After his demeanor ceased to stop, Faruq said that “overtime he just got creepier and creepier each time he came in, to the point where I did talk to management about it, and they didn’t do much.” Faruq later took it upon herself to leave.

In the face of unwanted customer attention, Faruq’s decision to withdraw from her job due to poor managerial response was reflected by other girls in the same study conducted by Fineran and Gruber. Girls in Fineran and Gruber’s study “experienced greater work stress and lower satisfaction with their coworkers and supervisors,” and were “more apt to think about leaving their jobs.” Retrospectively, about her experience, Faruq said “overall it just a scary position especially when you’re sixteen, you’re so naive and it’s your first job; you’re excited, and someone is interfering with that by being a creepy individual.”

Knowing that sexual harassment takes place so frequently to girls and women in the workplace, the natural question to ask is what can be done, what can change to ensure this doesn’t continue? The answer isn’t as cut and dry, but perhaps demands can be pointed to leaders in management and the culture of service work at large. Dating back as far as 1990, Judi Brownwell at Cornell University said about adequate managerial changes: “no longer are the highly rational, mechanical models of the past appropriate.” Sexual harassment in the service industry, above all, need not be interpreted with complacency any longer. In light of the “Me Too” Movement of the recent past, and numerous unions blossoming across the country, never did a more appropriate time arise to turn attention toward how women can be better protected in their workplace.

Lee Rice

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