Over the past five years, almost 300 D.C. government employees have filed workplace sexual harassment complaints, but for the past year, the District government officials who investigated those claims were not always following current D.C. law that defines sexual harassment in the workplace.
Mayor Muriel Bowser issued an executive order in 2017 making it easier to report harassment but also defined sexual harassment as having to be “severe and sufficiently pervasive” to constitute a hostile work environment.
“When I issued that mayor’s order in 2017, it was among the most, if not the most progressive, of any local jurisdiction in the U.S.,” Bowser said. “We did it proactively, not because we thought we had a pervasive problem, and I still don’t think we have a pervasive problem. I want to be clear, we’re talking about 290 complaints right now — the number you just spit out — over 34,000 employees over five years.”
Last year, the D.C. Council passed into law the Human Rights Amendment Act, which lowered the threshold of how the District government defines sexual harassment. But the mayor’s office never updated the mayor’s order.
Council Chairman Phil Mendelson expressed concerns Monday that a year after the law changed and months after Bowser’s closest advisor, former Deputy Mayor John Falcicchio, resigned over sexual harassment complaints, the mayor hasn’t changed her policy.
“It’s been clear for months that the mayor’s order needs to be updated and revised,” Mendelson said. “That needs to happen quickly.”
“I’m not standing here wanting to criticize the executive on this, but to emphasize that the executive needs to move quickly,” he said.
“I don’t know why we didn’t or if it wasn’t a focus of kind of getting that law changed over to the mayor’s order,” Bowser said. “It should happen and it will happen.”
According to an investigation by the Washington Post, over the past five years, using the stricter definition of sexual harassment, less than 30% of complaints have been substantiated by investigators.
The mayor would not give a timeline for updating her policy but said it would be soon.
The mayor’s lawyer who oversaw the investigations that substantiated the claims of sexual harassment against Falcicchio told the Washington Post her office used the current D.C. law and the lower threshold rather than the mayor’s order when it determined those cases.
