Bourree Lam: How did you get into this type of work?

Jeffery Tobias Halter: I spent 20 years in sales with Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. I was working in sales training in 1999, when Coca-Cola had a $200 million discrimination lawsuit. Overnight, I was assigned to run diversity education.

I’m a straight white guy. I was wondering what meeting I didn’t go to to be put in charge of running this program at such a contentious time. I heard stories of racism, sexism, and homophobia. I had the white male epiphany, where you realize what privilege is. Then I moved to an advocate role, and I’ve been doing this for 15 years. There are a lot of social issues in this country, and I believe that business is a way to drive significant change.

Lam: Have you been following the sexual harassment story told by one of Uber’s former engineers?

Halter: There are five things that are unprecedented about the Uber discrimination issue. You have a CEO who was completely unaware and came out in the press and said so. That’s so rare for CEOs. Even though in the aftermath he expressed that they are going to correct this, why didn’t he know? There’s a real issue if senior leaders don’t know what’s going on in their organizations on a day-to-day basis. And they need to ask tough questions to find out.

You also have human resources being culpable in the cover-up. That’s very common in many companies, when you have “high potentials” and they’re given free reign. Sadly, most of those “high potentials” are men. You would think, today, companies would have a heightened awareness. You’ve got Silicon Valley, which was put on notice five years ago that their diversity and inclusion numbers are horrible. CEO acuity should be up; HR should be really on top of this and they’re not.

There is also the impact of social media. Susan Fowler is able to publish a blog post and is immediately able to reach millions of people. We have more transparency today than we’ve ever had. The EEOC reports that 70 percent of sexual harassment goes unreported. I think it’s going to go up, because people will go out on social media to make their claims.

Lastly, you have board members who seemed unaware that this was going on. That really raises the bigger question of whether board members are holding senior leadership accountable and asking tough questions about why women numbers in technology have barely moved in the past five years. Most companies are not prepared to have this dialogue, and this is the work I’m doing now.

Lam: Why aren’t companies having that conversation?

Halter: They have no training or expertise. You have maybe 50 companies in the Fortune 500 with progressive, integrated women strategies. They tie executive compensation to meeting strong advancement and retention goals. It links very closely with the fact that men don’t want to do this work, because of the man code.