People on top of the hierarchy, particularly men as they play power games with women, have often felt it their right to sexually harass women. Servers in restaurants are one group who may encounter that harassment frequently.
An article in Mother Jones states that the #MeToo movement has helped unearth instances of sexual harassment
and impropriety at dozens of restaurants across the country. The article provides a few practical ideas on where restaurants can start to try to address the problem, including a color-coded system that quickly replaces harassed female servers with managers or big hunky men.
Servers in 43 states are paid as little as $2.13 an hour on what’s called a “tipped minimum
wage.” Because they supposedly make up the rest of their wages on customer
tips, “they have to tolerate whatever a customer does to
them, because their customer is paying their bills, not the employer,”
explains Saru Jayaraman, head of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.
Just 33 percent of restaurant businesses are majority-owned by women. Women make up just 19 percent of chefs and 7 percent of head chefs. And one reason is financing. “Getting loans and getting people to invest in your
company can be harder if you’re a woman—particularly if the people
lending the money unconsciously or consciously have specific biases
against a female-run business,” New York Times‘ food writer Kim Severson says.
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2018/04/sexual-harassment-poster-harasser-restaurant-customer/
