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Whitney Sharpe, a Boston-based executive at staffing giant Mindlance, captured a disturbing instance of harassment on a work call, telling Insider she shared the now-viral clip on TikTok to further ongoing conversations about being a woman in the workplace.
On Tuesday, Sharpe – who also happened to have been crowned Miss Massachusetts in 2016 – posted a video of herself on a Zoom call with three salesmen from a prospective vendor looking to sell Mindlance its lead generation software. Sharpe declined to name the company on the record for fear of legal retribution.
It’s rough being a woman in a male dominated field 😬
According to Sharpe, when one of the men shared his screen for a demo, he accidentally broadcasted a group chat in which he and two colleagues were discussing her appearance in objectifying terms. She didn’t screenshot the slip-up, but recalled with certainty that one of the messages read that she was “a fucking bombshell.”
“If we’re going to continue to work together, I want to work with a woman sales representative,” Sharpe said in the TikTok video, which has 7.5 million views. “I don’t want to have to see locker room talk about myself when you’re sharing screens.”
One of the salesmen can be heard acknowledging that the comments were an “inexcusable mistake.”
“We have a couple of really good RSMs [regional sales managers] that you’ll be able to work with,” he’s heard responding to Sharpe’s request.
The comments under her viral video are loudly lauding her for standing up for herself. “You handled this so well! I’m sending [this] to my daughters,” one top commenter wrote. “Shark Tank” star and business mogul Barbara Corcoran even weighed in, exclaiming, “You rock!”
Sharpe told Insider she let the meeting run on for 15 minutes before she decided to call out the comments. Even though the meeting was automatically being recorded, which both parties had consented to, she decided to record it on her phone to make sure she had evidence. Since the Zoom account belonged to the vendor, she worried that “they’re going to try to bury this so fast,” she said. (Massachusetts is a two-party consent state for recording).
Even though TikTok swarmed her with support, subsequent responses from the vendor have been disappointing, she said.
Sharpe said she later received an email apology from the vendor’s VP of sales but felt it was “insincere,” while failing to outline any plans for recourse. Sharpe shared a screenshot of the apology in a follow-up TikTok, which stated that the vendor could not provide a “skilled enough” woman to assist her.
And in a follow-up call on Wednesday with the VP, Sharpe said he had no idea that the TikToks had gone viral. She felt he was simply phoning her to save the sale.
“The only thing he said to me that was concrete is, ‘I have a meeting with HR this afternoon,'” Sharpe told Insider. “And I said, ‘Well, it’s clearly not that high up on your priority list considering this happened yesterday at 11:30 in the morning.'”
This isn’t Sharpe’s first brush with workplace harassment. She told Insider she left a former employer after two HR cases regarding bullying and harassing comments about her appearance went ignored.
But now that she’s grown a substantial TikTok following – from less than 100 before the incident to 35,000 today – Sharpe wants to harness her newfound “gift” to speak up. In addition to chronicling the ongoing situation, she plans to furnish career advice about obstacles she’s faced in the corporate world more broadly.
“I’d be lying if I said that I’m fearless in this whole pursuit,” she said. “I am very lucky that I work for a very supportive company, but I get nervous because the STEM industry is such a boys’ club, and men at the top don’t like being called out.”
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