On her very first day as a Cadet in the United States Army, Roxanne Petraeus remembers being told by her sergeant that as a woman, she should try her best not to do anything else to stand out — that women don't meet the military standard and that really, they shouldn't even be in the armed forces.
"Then he went right back to logistics," Petraeus recalls. "And it was bizarre, but I didn't think anything else of it."
But the next day, she was called in to the office and asked to confirm the experience, which had been reported by an onlooking female Officer. Petraeus hesitated but ultimately agreed to corroborate the story — "I'm so grateful to this woman for flagging the concern, but there was always the question: Am I going to get in trouble?" — and it would stand as the first and last time she ever
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Petraeus went on to spend seven successful and happy years, from 2009-2016, serving in the Army, eventually retiring as a Captain. Today, she is the co-founder and CEO of Ethena, a workplace training company launched in 2019 to improve office culture and make it easier to identify and
"You see statistics about how 50% of women in the workplace have experienced harassment, with some reports saying up to 90%," she says. "Even anecdotally, just talking to friends throughout the years, regardless of what profession they're in, it's an incredibly common experience and it isn't even specific to women — there are all sorts of slights to members of the LGBTQ community and so many issues surrounding race in the workplace."
According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, between 2018 and 2021, the EEOC received a total of 98,411 charges alleging
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According to Petraeus, the lack of reporting often comes down to clunky, difficult-to-navigate protocols that don't put employees first. Ethena partners with companies to offer
During her time in the military, Petraeus remembers short, dated and often parodied training sessions on harassment and bullying that weren't
"Without that knowledge, there's literally nothing an employer can do," she says, stressing that most leaders want to know, in her experience, what's happening within their workforce. "In terms of the military, there are studies that show that units where the local commander was perceived to have cared about creating an inclusive culture saw less harassment than the units in which the commander was perceived to not care. Now just swap out 'commander' for 'CEO.'"
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These issues will only
"Employees are very impacted by their environment," Petraeus says. "So if you roll out effective training, if you put out comprehensive tools, and commit to doing annual ethics surveys that really shows employees that doing the right thing really does matter and you will absolutely see different outcomes."