https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-sexual-harassment-epidemic-has-been-diagnosed-whats-the-cure/2017/11/17/150b34d8-c8a8-11e7-b0cf-7689a9f2d84e_story.html?utm_term=.4e99ba6a8202

A man walks into a conference room, where two women are planning the company’s booth at an upcoming trade show. (Sit tight, this is eventually going to turn into a story about gender, despair and whether our society is completely busted.) “Hey girls, we need to prep for this show,” the man says. “So unless the plan is to stop traffic with thigh-high boots and halter tops, we’re going to need strong messaging and branding.”

The above scene is from one of those workplace sexual harassment training videos you have probably seen if you’ve had a job. Specifically, it’s from a California-based firm called Emtrain, which specializes in such trainings and which, to facilitate open discussion, encourages clients to code inappropriate behaviors as yellow (problematic), orange (moderate), or red (toxic). The thinking being, it’s easier to say, “Oof, Jerry, that joke was a little orange,” than it is to say, “Jerry, that’s harassment.”

Anyway. The video above is coded by Emtrain as orange. But in recent weeks, Emtrain’s founder, Janine Yancey, has noticed something. When viewers watch the video — which goes on to show the male boss ranking the hotness of female workers — they can submit questions and comments. “Women are writing in saying, that’s red, that’s red!” Yancey says. “And men are saying, is that really orange? It looks yellow to me.”

Yancey once practiced employment law; she thinks in terms of legalities. She knows juries in the past wouldn’t have thought of that incident, in singularity, as toxic. “But we don’t really have a mechanism to figure out how the current news cycle might impact juries,” she says. In other words, we can’t figure out how behaviors that once were considered yellow — or even green, a healthy work environment — can transition to red.