‘They would unclasp my bra as they walked by’: Women open up about being sexually harassed at their first job

Ashley Graham sat down with Glamour for their July issue, and she opened up about a time early on in her career when she was sexually harassed on a modeling set at just 17-years-old.

“There was an incident on set of a campaign job when I was 17 years old—I haven’t told this story—and there was a photo assistant who was into me. He was like, ‘Hey, come here,’ and he led me into a closet. And I was like, ‘What?’ I thought he was going to show me something. And he pulled me in, and he pulled his penis out. And he was like, ‘Grab it.’ And I was like, ‘No! That’s disgusting.’ I freaked out. And thank God I was closer to the door, and I just bolted out,” Graham said.

We reached out to girls across the country about their experiences with sexual harassment while working their first job, and it happens more often than you’d like to believe.

The lifeguard

I worked as a lifeguard from age 14 to 19. I had a male boss who would massage our shoulders and call us things like ‘cutie.’ He often drank on the job and when he did he would get weirder. It felt odd shying away from him because he was our manager, but he was in his 70s. He’s since been asked to leave.

The engineer

I was recently hired as a mechanical engineer at a firm in Manhattan. In this team of about 15 engineers I am the only girl and the youngest by 13 years. About a month in, I had to come in and do some weekend work on a Saturday with one other engineer from my team (50 year old man) and a bunch of contractors. The contracting company had just gotten new laptops and the men were having a hard time figuring out how the new technology worked and were trying to figure out which port was for the USB.

‘There’s so many ports on these things I can’t figure anything out, the only thing it’s missing is a sex port,’ said one of the contractors. ‘The laptop doesn’t need a sex port, we have her,’ The engineer said as he gestured at me. They all laughed. I had known the engineer less than a month and the contractors less than an hour.

The writer

I began working as a staff writer in my university’s office of communications when I was 20. The head of sports coverage was about 60 years-old, and had been working at the university for 30 years. He would always sit next to me while I was working at the computer and whisper uncomfortable remarks about my appearance like, ‘nice legs’ and ‘you should wear dresses more often.’

The bartender

I work at a bar on my college campus. In my two years there I’ve come to learn that the male management has a habit of only scheduling the best looking and flirtiest female servers and bartenders for the best shifts. We’ve been conditioned to dress nice and flirt with the management just to get hours. It’s hard to make ends meet competing with the prettier girls for shifts.

The saleswoman

The ice cream server

I was 15, working at a local ice cream parlor. I usually worked with two guys who had been best friends all of their lives. At first it was fun, but after a few weeks it started to get uncomfortable. They would always play ‘games’ like making a ‘Katie sandwich’ where they would trap me between them and ask for a kiss on the cheek each. They would lock me in the bathroom until I begged them to let me out, and untie my apron while I was serving customers. Six weeks into the job I asked our boss, a man in his late fifties, if I could work with different people and when he asked why, I told him everything the guys did to me.

He laughed and said it was harmless. I left the job three months after I started. By then the boys had done things like undoing my bra with one hand over my shirt as they walked by, or pretending to bend me over and grabbing my hips if I was picking something up off the ground.

The server

I was a waitress at a restaurant, and it’s hard to count the number of things that were said to me that I would now consider to be sexual harassment. My strongest memory is having my ass commented on by a particular chef and how he continued to make it clear to me he wanted to have sex with me. He would proposition me constantly even though I said I wasn’t interested. Once he suggested, in front of his girlfriend, that we have threesome. At the time I felt too scared to say anything.

The lab technician

I was a lab tech when I was 18 for a factory that produced food. My first day on the job one of the workers would block doorways I tried to get through. It progressed to him trying to look up my lab coat as I’d walk up stairs. A month or so into my job I was collecting samples from the hands of the factory workers, when I asked for his he responded with ‘I’ll give you a sample’, and he proceeded to pretend to unzip his fly and masturbate. The guys around him were all jeering and laughing along as I stood there feeling an inch tall.

The warehouse worker

I started to work with this guy in a warehouse who kept making sexual remakes toward me and just overall made me feel uncomfortable, but he was my age and my friend’s friend, so I just ignored it. We exchanged snapchat usernames and out of the blue, fully aware of my relationship with my boyfriend, he sends me a naked selfie and then shortly after another picture of a large box of condoms and said ‘I can’t wait to use these all on you’. I brought it to managements attention but they told me since it was online and not at work, they couldn’t do anything. I called him out at work and he apologized, but then later blamed me for it all saying I was ‘over reacting’, ‘I’m not hot anyways’, and basically just made me feel as if my presence was enough to justify his behavior towards me.

Quotes have been edited for brevity and length 

@TheTab