An Asian has been awarded €8,000 after a senior colleague asked her if she liked eating cats and dogs.
As reported by the Independent, an Asian woman who was asked by a colleague if she liked eating cats and dogs has been awarded €8,000.
The incident occurred on 27 July 2017 when a senior colleague at an accountancy firm in Ireland asked her, “I heard cats and dogs are the main meat sources of Asians, so do you like eating them?”
On 28 July 2017, a reporting manager found the woman crying.
A series of incidents of harassment were documented by the woman who began working for the firm in May 2017. She resigned in November 2017. In one incident, the same colleague showed the woman a response from one of his friends who captioned a Snapchat response as “cute chink”.
The woman asked the colleague to stop but the colleague continued his abuse. She told the Work Place Relations Commission (WRC) that she felt disgusted and offended by her colleague’s words.
After finding that the woman was both sexually harassed and harassed by the senior work colleague, the WRC ordered the unnamed accountancy company to pay the woman €8,000.
WRC adjudication officer Jim Dolan found the woman’s complaint “to be well-founded”. He recommended that the company should develop a code of practice regarding harassment and discrimination.
