Story 62

Employment attorney who saw the Forbes article and thought a primer on how forced arbitration works might be useful.

Forced arbitration has long been one of the most effective tools corporations use to keep workplace misconduct out of public view. Employees are required to resolve disputes in private proceedings that limit discovery, restrict transparency, and overwhelmingly benefit employers who are repeat players in the system, which is to say they pay the bills for the whole network. For women, this structure has functioned as a silencing mechanism: claims disappear behind closed doors, allowing organizations to treat them as isolated incidents rather than evidence of systemic failure.

A turning point came when Gretchen Carlson filed her landmark lawsuit against Fox News in 2016. Carlson’s employment contract – unlike most – explicitly excluded sexual-harassment claims from arbitration, allowing her case to proceed in court and exposing both the misconduct she experienced and the broader use of arbitration to shield repeat offenders. Her advocacy helped drive bipartisan support for federal reform, ultimately leading to legislation that carved sexual assault and sexual harassment out of mandatory arbitration, allowing women to go straight to court.

What Carlson exposed is what countless women already knew: when misconduct is forced into secrecy, harm compounds. Forced arbitration doesn’t just resolve disputes privately – it protects institutions, suppresses patterns of abuse, and keeps women silent precisely when transparency is most needed.

Unfortunately, the reform reaches only a small fraction of the problem. Most aren’t harmed by conduct that fits the narrow legal definition of sexual harassment – they’re removed by everyday gender bias: retaliation, unequal treatment, skewed performance reviews, and simply not being part of the Boy’s Club, which means the vast majority of cases remain hidden and unresolved.

Credit to the women who did this. I hope it signals a new trend where more women choose to speak up.

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