Claire Schmidt Leaves Fox to Head Startup Combating Workplace Harassment
Claire Schmidt is stepping down from her post as a VP at 20th Century Fox in order to join new startup AllVoices, a website “where anyone can anonymously report instances of harassment, discrimination, or bias directly to their CEO and company board,” Deadline reports. Schmidt’s last day at Fox will be Friday and after that she will serve as AllVoices’ CEO.
When it is up and running, AllVoices will compile its users’ reports and anonymously email the results to company CEOs and boards. And the tool is not designed solely to fight sexual harassment: users can also report mistreatment due to race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, or disability.
Susan Fowler, whose own experiences of sexual harassment at Uber will be the basis for a feature film, is an advisor at AllVoices.
“A lot of these companies, when they find out there’s a culture problem, it’s already too late by the time the culture problem is out in the public,” Schmidt told Yahoo Finance. “They say, ‘We just didn’t know. We weren’t aware.’ Our goal is to give them the data as early as possible so they can’t say they didn’t know.”
As a sexual assault survivor herself, Schmidt was moved to action by the women and men who have shared their stories about harassment and abuse in the recent weeks. “The recent onslaught of courageous women and men coming forward to tell their stories about assault and harassment has been incredibly inspiring to me,” she wrote in the blog post announcing AllVoices. “But it is also an indication of how far we still have to go … As I read news article after news article, I kept thinking: Have we done enough? Have I done enough?”
Schmidt isn’t the only one who has been galvanized in the wake of the Hollywood abuse revelations. “The Hunting Ground” filmmakers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick are currently collecting research for their documentary about the widespread assault in show business. Meanwhile, Women In Film is organizing a sexual harassment Help Line and pro bono legal service and Los Angeles DA Jackie Lacey is forming a sexual assault task force.
