Revisit POSH provisions for HEIs

The debate over sexual harassment in India’s higher educational institutions (HEIs) is unending, as highlighted by a recent episode in the The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), Kolkata.

The POSH Act 2013, originally designed to empower, protect, and benefit working women as a homogeneous group, is often misused to the detriment of the most vulnerable and marginalised individuals. 

HEIs often exhibit a lackadaisical attitude towards sexual harassment complaints, rooted in the societal logic that either ‘the female called for it’ or ‘the act was a male’s natural impulse.’ As a result, most instances of sexual harassment in HEIs remain unreported. Complaints that do reach POSH committees are frequently withdrawn by the complainant due to a loss of faith in the institutional procedure or pressure tactics from committee members.

Although HEIs might establish POSH committees, appoint faculty and student facilitators, and initiate gender sensitization programmes on campuses, these structures and processes operate only nominally. Victims prefer to endure their trauma rather than be labelled as ‘troublemakers’ or ‘attention seekers.’ 

The display of aggression, both active and passive, by those in power to maintain masculine privilege, control, and domination over employees is accepted workplace logic. Women in leadership positions are rare in both corporate and academia.

The few who do hold significant positions in HEIs often operate under the ‘Feminism Lite’ model, acting as mouthpieces for male authority and supporting them to maintain the appearance of gender diversity. This phenomenon is magnified in HEIs, where the culture emphasises complete obedience, upholding the optics of discipline and academic standards.

Sexual harassment remains a pervasive issue, as whenever the two sexes interact, friction can occur. The goal is not to exclude women from workplaces but to reconsider the current understanding of sexual harassment in various contexts, including HEIs, sports, and politics. In HEIs, the question is: should actions such as extending probation, denying promotion opportunities, salary cuts, or delays, and issuing constant warnings to a female employee by a male boss to adopt a ‘more cordial conduct’ or ‘make the right friends’, be categorised as sexual harassment?

Prima facie, there appears to be nothing ‘sexual’ about these acts, and they can be seen as a boss simply using a carrot-and-stick approach to encourage better performance.

However, important follow-up questions are often overlooked: Would the male boss treat a male employee the same way? Conversely, is the female employee treated this way solely because she is female? Is her professional performance overlooked, and is she denied positions, status, and benefits she deserves because of her gender?

Hannah Arendt’s concept of  ‘impotent bigness’ can explain how male bosses tend to use aggression only to feel powerful over vulnerable employees, such as spinsters, lesbians, transgenders, Dalits, single mothers, divorcees, widows, non-English speakers, indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, contractual employees, interns, and probationers. Women engaged in ‘feminized jobs’ like receptionists, personal assistants, and secretaries often have to silently endure the mood swings and eccentricities of male bosses.

Arguably, a false complaint of sexual harassment may be brought by a female professor against the male registrar or vice chancellor of a HEI to tarnish his reputation and career forever; as such, this is a clear case of a notorious woman crying wolf.

This is certainly true in a few cases where a senior female professor might put her position to bad use by making victims, in turn, chiefly of those male colleagues in office who are gentler, more inoffensive, and least inclined to be tyrants. These women have long been denied the rightly deserved accolades and positions at the workplace. But such cases are rare and cannot be a valid reason to suspect the veracity of all complaints. After all, a huge power imbalance generally exists between male and female colleagues; societal conditions and familial pressures require women to preserve their honour.

Evidently, real barriers prevent female students and faculty from seeking redress in sexual harassment cases against powerful authorities in HEIs. The mechanism, legal language, and culture are so male-centric that women’s experiences are invisibilized.

The POSH Act’s one-size-fits-all approach cannot work effectively in every workplace where male-female power dynamics vary and resultant friction takes different forms, much beyond the traditional categories of the Act. There is a need to have a separate law for HEIs that does not exclude and reduce women’s sufferings.

(The writer is an asst. professor at the NLSIU, Bengaluru)