Sorry, guys, but this is more treacherous terrain than you might think. Way too many women still find themselves putting up with way too much inappropriate nonsense from bosses for all kinds of reasons. Certainly, I’ve had colleagues who were impressively willing to call bullshit the second a boss stepped over the line. But not everyone wants to kick that hornet’s nest. (And it’s always a hornet’s nest.) Some women are loath to come forward lest they be labeled a troublemaker or—as Carlson says happened when she complained to Ailes about her Fox & Friends cohost, Steve Doocy—an uptight “man hater” who doesn’t play well with “the boys.” Others don’t want to do anything that might endanger their jobs and figure that they can defuse/deflect/manage the boss’s occasional skeeziness on their own. (Been there. Done that. Many times.) If the guy is a great leader in other ways—as so many people assure us that Ailes was—that makes women all the more hesitant to raise a stink. What if no one believes them? And even if they make their case, they’re still marked as the person who brought down a beloved leader.

Is there an ideal approach for handling out-of-line bosses? Probably not. In an ideal world, bosses like Ailes would keep their grubby mitts and pervy propositions to themselves.

This is not to say that women are the only ones to find themselves in awkward to-tell-or-not-to-tell positions. All whistle-blowing entails risks—chief among them that the company will trash the whistle-blower as a disgruntled employee. In many cases, this may be 100 percent true. But disgruntled doesn’t necessarily mean dishonest, nor do an employee’s motivations change the wrongness of the behavior they are reporting.

Anyone remember The Insider, the 1999 film about Jeffrey Wigand, the guy who blew the whistle on Big Tobacco? It’s unlikely Wigand would have turned out to be such the heroic figure if he hadn’t first gotten fired from Brown & Williamson. Why? Because tattling on the boss tends to throw people’s lives into complete chaos. Which means lots of folks, regardless of gender, won’t do it without a really compelling reason, like, say, having had their careers blown to smithereens already.

In 2012, The New York Times ran a piece warning people of the catastrophic fallout that often comes with reporting an employer for financial shenanigans. A couple of the more ominous bits:

“It’s a life-changing experience,” said John R. Phillips, founder of the law firm Phillips & Cohen and the man credited with devising the amendments that strengthened the government antifraud law, the False Claims Act, in 1986. “If you look at the field of whistle-blowers, you see a high degree of bankruptcies. You may find yourself unemployable. Home foreclosures, divorce, suicide and depression all go with this territory.” … “There is a 100 percent chance that you will be unemployed—the question is, Will you be forever unemployable?” said Patrick Burns, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud. “The other 100 percent factor is the person who fired you, the person who designed and implemented the fraud, won’t be fired. He’ll probably be promoted again.”

Oof. And if anything, a harassment claim is more nebulous and arguably even more fraught than fraud. Think about all the sexual politics involved, not to mention the sniggering, raised eyebrows, and even whispers that, maybe, the woman herself was up for the game—until it stopped working to her advantage, of course. Then she decided to get even, because, well, hell hath no fury.