A WorkPlace Discrimination App
People who regularly experience racial discrimination or harassment at work learn to navigate their work environment nimbly, but with anxiety. They might change their work schedules or slip headphones in their ears to avoid making eye contact and hopefully situations with workplace bullies.
Recognizing that sharing stories of workplace discrimination or harassment requires extensive time on the part of the user, I seek to create an app that would allow for faster reporting and a way to document incidents that would make for a stronger case.
A workplace discrimination-reporting app would help employees feel safer at work by providing a tool where they can log discriminatory actions and encounters by monitoring incidents in real time and submitting them to EEOC and their lawyer if they so choose. This doesn’t necessarily mean action will be immediately taken but it provides a safety net in case the discrimination escalates. Thanks to the app, the employee will have documented history of their experience and a way to take action without retaliation from upper management thanks to anonymity.
The app will allow victims or witnesses to upload, in real time, information about where they experienced discrimination at work. This easier way to report discrimination to EEOC and the option to report it to a victim’s lawyer has the potential to make a difference in how racial discrimination is documented and understood. The hope is that the app will not only serve as a tool to help document race-based discrimination and harassment, but also forms like gender-based discrimination as well as discrimination and harassment that targets someone’s sexual orientation, disability or religion. It will also let you report discrimination you witness, not just what you experience.
Racial discrimination is complex and there are no easy answers for how to deal with it. Even if you decide to retaliate and file a lawsuit, chances are high that the anxieties triggered are strong and repeat the worst feelings experienced during the discrimination. It is sometimes even unclear when the line between discrimination and typical workplace procedure has been crossed.
The goal of this app is to not just aid in reporting but to expose the everyday irritations people of color deal with in the workplace but are expected to shrug off so that they don’t lose their jobs and can continue to exist.
Racial discrimination is problematic because it often gets swept under the rug out of fear that the victim may lose their job. The irony is, that the discrimination usually escalates until the victim leaves or loses their job anyways. This leaves the person responsible for the discrimination open to do it again to the next employee.
Collecting data on organizations where discrimination and harassment occurs enables job seekers of color to receive deeper entail on the places they apply to that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to know. Hopefully this will then lead to organizations getting wind of the notion that management in their workplace is discriminatory and there will be a shift in the culture that tolerates this behavior.
