When I was at university I worked waiting tables in a popular cafe by the sea. The cafe was owned by a husband and wife team, who shared management duties. If one of the bosses had the night off, he or she would sit drinking outside. The one manning the till would usually have a glass of white on the go too. They were loud, friendly, small-town socialites; sometimes mean, sometimes generous. The woman wore little makeup but dabbled in Botox and collagen injections. The man brought new cargo pants back from a holiday on the Gold Coast and demonstrated to all the waitresses how a zipper below the knees allowed him to turn his pants into shorts.

This man—we’ll call him Andrew—was a lot more understanding than his wife if you were running five minutes late, or were sick and wanted to swap shifts. He was also the kind of guy who’d back you into a corner to tell you a story you didn’t want to hear, leaning in close so that you could smell the wine on his breath.

“Her face isn’t much,” he’d say of his wife, “but for a forty year old woman she’s got a good body. Seriously,” he’d say, repeating himself until he got some kind of response, “a really good body, and that’s what I like.”

If he thought a woman who came into the cafe was overweight, or ugly, or particularly well endowed, he would point her out and make jokes about her all night, repeating himself at first quietly, then with audible sniggers, until you laughed along or agreed with him just to shut him up. He commented on the length of our legs, the size of our hips, the cut of our tops. It was impossible to ignore him and it seemed impossible, at the time, to ask him to stop in anything other than a joking manner, or to complain about his behaviour. Who could we complain to, his wife?

I was reminded of these experiences, unpleasant and stressful at the time but scarcely thought of now, by the recent resignation of David Jones’ CEO Mark McInnes following an acknowledgement of inappropriate behaviour towards a female employee at two company functions in May and June 2010.

McInnes has both a pregnant partner and, according to rumour, a well known partiality for blondes. Little is known about Kristy Fraser-Kirk, who brought the complaint against him, except that she works in marketing, is ‘blonde and smart’, and has enlisted the services of law firm Harmers, who handled a s-x discrimination case against PriceWaterhouseCoopers in which the plaintiff won a big settlement without going to court.   

It seems unlikely that this case will end up in court either.

McInnes has already publicly apologised for “behaving in a manner unbecoming of the high standard expected of a chief officer”. He has also wished the woman in question well, received what Crikey’s Adam Schwab has described as a “relatively miserly termination payment (by CEO standards) of $1.5 million”, been stripped of $16 million worth of David Jones shares, to which he would otherwise have been entitled, and left the country.

According to The Australian Mr McInnes has said in a statement he hopes his resignation will minimise “the impact of my errors of judgment on all and on David Jones”. Crikey’s Schwab puts a slightly different spin on it.

“While the financial press salivates over the scandal engulfing Australia’s most successful large retailer of the past decade,” Schwab says, “from a business standpoint, the conduct of the David Jones’ board is a rare example of a large corporation hitting the mark in a corporate governance sense.”

Schwab thinks that the unusual alacrity of David Jones’ response is due to the fact that most of the retailer’s customers and employees are women, meaning that the board had no option to “sweep the issue aside”, as is often done.

S-x--l harassment may lead to a workers’ compensation claim if an employee sustains a psychological injury as a result of it. It may, as in the example above, result in legal action. Or it may, as in my own experience, go unreported but fester in the workplace, leading to what experts call a “toxic” work environment.

According to Dr Helen Szoke, Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner, 80% of s-x--l harassment cases fall into the latter category.

“I hope the David Jones case gives women the confidence to pursue claims,” she told the Herald Sun. “S-x--l harassment is still prevalent in the workforce and we anticipate an increase in complaints as people feel buoyed by the David Jones board decision.”

What would be even better is if the David Jones case gives women less reason to complain, because it makes their colleagues and bosses think twice about their behaviour at work and at work functions.

Large payments as a result of s-x--l harassment claims are, Dr Szoke said, rare. Many complainants just want “an apology and acknowledgement”. In the cafe by the sea, we didn’t even want that: we just wanted Andrew to leave us alone, so that we could do our jobs.

Even if workers don’t lodge official complaints, employers are likely to pay for tolerating or engaging in s-x--l harassment via worker disengagement and high staff turnover.

Most of the girls who worked in the cafe by the sea only stayed for a few months. While there, we deferred to Andrew, to his face, and laughed about him behind his back. We had no respect for him, despite the power he exerted over us, and no commitment to making his business do well. And when we weren’t at work, we talked. The cafe by the sea developed a bit of a reputation and, eventually, a couple of years after I left, it closed.

As far as I know, no one ever complained, to Andrew or to his wife. Eventually, however, they did pay a cost.