A shocking workplace incident has sparked widespread support online after a vice president bravely spoke up about inappropriate comments made about her during a business video call. Whitney Sharpe, 28, who works for a recruiting and staffing company in Boston, found herself facing a deeply uncomfortable situation when male colleagues accidentally displayed their group chat, revealing inappropriate remarks about her appearance.
“When a vendor accidentally shares his group Teams chat, it’s all nasty things about me. It’s 2023, can this stop,” Sharpe captioned her TikTok video, which quickly went viral, gaining over 2 million views.
Sharpe shared further details of the incident with TODAY, explaining that it occurred during a video meeting on January 24, 2024, with three male employees from a potential client company. Her role involves assessing vendors to strengthen business teams. Sharpe chose not to disclose the company involved. The meeting participants had been informed the call was being recorded.
“I was on a call about to do a demo, and that software vendor accidentally shared their group chat with me instead of sharing the demo that they were supposed to share,” Sharpe explained. “The group chat said some pretty unkind things about me and it just kind of went on from there.” She mentioned only one specific comment from the chat, referring to her as an "effing bombshell," and declined to reveal further details.
“They realized (what happened), I would say, maybe 30 seconds to a minute into the conversation,” she added. “Certainly enough time for me to be able to see it go back and forth.” Sharpe acknowledged feeling nervous as she calmly addressed the situation, emphasizing the importance of controlling her emotions to avoid being labeled as "too emotional."
“My mind was going, ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, just get the words out,’” she recalled. “I just was focusing on breathing in, getting the words out clearly and calmly. I think as a woman in the workplace, we’re often labeled emotional. I really didn’t want them to be able to say that I was emotional in my response. I definitely could have gone a lot harder on them. But if I did that, they would have been able to say that I was ‘too emotional’ and I was going to play into that, and I didn’t want that to be an excuse.”
After giving herself 15 minutes to process, Sharpe confronted the men directly on the call: “Okay, well, first of all, if we’re going to continue working together, I want to work with a woman sales representative because I don’t want to have to see locker room talk about myself when you’re sharing screens,” she asserted.
In response, one of the men described the behavior as “inexcusable” and apologized during the call. Sharpe later shared an apology letter sent by the company's VP, and noted that the CEO reached out formally after 24 hours with an apology, although she felt it lacked sincerity. “I felt that was a big issue and the CEO was on the line with an attorney and his head of HR,” Sharpe explained, saying the apology “didn’t feel genuine whatsoever.” She has yet to receive personal apologies from the three men involved.
TikTok | @whitneyrose617
Tiktok | @whitneyrose617
Sharpe now hopes to collaborate with advocacy groups like RAINN and the EEOC to better understand and educate others about workplace harassment. “I’m really hoping to partner with some of these organizations like RAINN,” she noted, emphasizing, “I really am hoping to speak with someone from RAINN and then the EEOC, which protects employees in the United States, so I can continue educating myself and then use my platform to make sure I’m saying the right things I don’t want to ever be giving the wrong advice.”
Representative depiction of Matusadona National Park
Representative depiction of Matusadona National Park
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