These indecencies are not happening because television workers are in an industry with blurred lines. These indecencies are happening because there has always been a blurred line between predators and women. Those predators, those men, have little hesitation in crossing that line, no matter where and until now, with few repercussions.

Try working in your local bakery where a customer paws the girl behind the counter (for girl she is, in Year 10 in her first job, and she's being told she has luscious lips). Or a customer waits to rape the woman locking up the shop at night. Try stacking shelves while some arsehole rubs his unzipped pants across your buttocks. Or dealing with a customer whose only request of you is to have "quick sexual intercourse", or with a customer who is buying a Bluetooth speaker for the shower and suggests you have a shower with him. Or the young retail worker approached by two twenty-something guys who said they were doing a bet.

"They needed me to give them a kiss. I felt very awkward and confused as my training instructs me to be polite and acquiesce to customers, but I felt violated. After a few minutes of awkwardness a colleague saw I was distressed and when they spoke to her she awkwardly told them I had other work to do, so they left."

We have so much other work to do.

NSW branch president of the SDA, the retail workers union, Bernie Smith, says one in eight of his members experiences this level of sexual harassment from customers and these stories are his members' stories. I've just picked a few. It's no wonder the SDA is constantly updating its sexual harassment policies and procedures and will launch a campaign to stop customer abuse of retail workers in time for the shopping season.

Welcome to the industry that tops the sexual harassment claims in the Human Rights Commissions. Yep, that's retail, followed by healthcare, public administration, hospitality and financial services. These are industries with a concentration of women but Sara Charlesworth at RMIT, who has spent her life researching sexual harassment, tells me we must not be fooled. Sexual harassment happens in all industries, female- or male-dominated. In sectors such as the police and the military, women won't complain. They don't want to rock the boat, afraid of being poorly treated if they do complain; frightened they can't find another job in an industry they love; and sometimes they just quit.

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins is brutal about this. "Discrimination and harassment in those industries is normalised – it's so much part of the job, you don't even make the call."

When Michelle Marquardt tells me figures reveal one in two women has been sexually harassed over the course of her lifetime, I'm horrified. Marquardt is a statistician, not an advocate; and as program manager of household surveys branch of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, she oversees the personal safety survey. She says not only is it one-in-two women – but you must wait until you are 65 to get much relief from sexual harassment. Women's victimisation by men ignores barriers of class or income – Marquardt says the top four quintiles are evenly represented here, from those whose weekly household incomes are $700 a week to those earning four times that and more.

So let me get that right. Men don't harass the old or the poor and that might just be because people in that group are at home.

Charlesworth has one important piece of advice for all of us. Don't ever get stuck on the powerful man.

"The sexual harasser becomes this monster figure and within organisations, it is the bad apple," she says.

But it's not the bad apple, it's the culture; and it's widespread. She notes that just this week, ANZ Bank dismissed three employees; and that perhaps we could do more about sexual harassment and assault if we recognised it as an occupational health and safety issue.

As Australian Institute of Company Directors chairwoman Elizabeth Proust said this week, we need to encourage whistleblowing. No surprise that on the ANZ internal website, there's a giant whistle, just waiting to be blown. By the way, your female colleague doesn't care what you think of her clothes, her tits or her arse. She really doesn't.

Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.

Twitter: @JennaPrice

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