Stuck in a Bad Job in Hawaiʻi? Youʻre not Alone.

PART I: HOW EMPLOYERS DRIVE WOMEN AWAY

The “problem employee” label has followed Claire from office to office, year after year.

She got that reputation when she threw away an old collection of adult videos from a public space at her agency. The material was clearly inappropriate for a professional workplace, but no one had ever objected before, she says. And her colleagues, all men, were angry about it.

Friendly rapport turned to icy silence. Claire says she had navigated the rough-and-tumble of the workplace with a quick laugh and an occasional well-placed verbal jab, but this situation was new.

“I became public enemy number one. This was the start of me speaking out, and then getting just absolutely crushed for it,” Claire says. She asked that her real name not be used for fear of further retaliation.

“My hairstylist said my hair had started falling out,” she recalls. “It’s like one of those things where you see stuff and maybe it’s not a big deal early on, but over time, whether it’s people not taking you seriously, or not listening to you, or getting dismissed, it’s like death by a thousand paper cuts.”

Just as the stress of being ostracized began taking a toll, she was promoted into a new position and arrived at the job in the exurbs of Honolulu, hoping for a fresh start.

But news of what she’d done had traveled throughout the organization, and the response was mostly harsh: she wasn’t a team player, she wasn’t like them, she didn’t belong. And they’d keep making her feel it.

Claire eventually hit her breaking point and transferred into a completely new role with the agency.

“Quiet Firing”

Claire is now a mother navigating solo parenting. Recently, out of the blue, the agency’s leadership team informed her that she needed to take on extra shifts, including in the dead of night.

“They’re well aware of my situation. They know there’s no one at home to watch my child,” says Claire. “It’s unreasonable. It’s almost like quiet firing.”

She pushed back. “I said, you guys talk about family first, but what do you act like? What you’re asking of me is cruel.” While friends have volunteered to stay at her house when she’s called out at night, the arrangement is unsustainable, she says.

Claire sees a therapist and a naturopath to deal with the years of chronic stress, and she’s trying to get another position that doesn’t demand overnight work. She regularly contemplates leaving the agency, but giving up the generous retirement benefits feels like a bad financial move, particularly with years of parenting ahead.

“People have asked me if I’m going to stay, because it’s been so toxic for so long. But as a single mom, you’re not really free to leave because you’re walking away from your financial security.” She says she may leave anyway.

Unequal, and Often Unfair

Claire’s work life has become an endurance test of impossible demands and a profound lack of care and respect from her colleagues. As one of just a handful of women in a large department, her treatment feels targeted and linked to her gender.

“There’s no doubt we have systemic sex discrimination in Hawaiʻi,” says Elizabeth Jubin Fujiwara, a senior partner at the Honolulu law firm Fujiwara and Rosenbaum. “It’s a matter of degree and how dangerous your job is as far as physical safety, and just emotional safety too. How much can you take before you quit, or before you get fired, because you can’t function anymore?”

Her description of gender-based discrimination matches what Claire has experienced: “Say you stay on the job and start suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. You’re not sleeping. You’re suffering every time something reminds you of what happened. And then you go home to your family and function there when you’ve been treated like hell all day. It’s a nightmare.”

In her decades litigating civil rights and discrimination cases, Fujiwara has seen clients dealing with bias, lower pay, inadequate maternity leaves, sexual harassment, rigid work schedules and a lack of affordable childcare. Some of the issues are grounds for lawsuits, and others just everyday hassles and heartaches.

Employment conditions, in fact, are driving women out of the workplace. From January to June 2025, the national labor participation rate among women ages 25 to 44 with a child under 5 dropped from 69.7% to 66.9%, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released on Aug. 1 and reported in a Time magazine article.

Much of that drop was attributed to return-to-office policies and the loss of flexibility that the Covid era gave to many workers. The loss hit mothers particularly hard.

Men earn significantly more than women in Hawai‘i, at every level of education. The average lifetime earnings of a woman with a master’s degree still fall below a man with some college experience but no degree. Listed amounts are average lifetime earnings.

The Motherhood Penalty

In Hawaiʻi, data about working women, including mothers, is similarly concerning. From 2015 to 2022, the average male in Hawaiʻi out-earned the average female by 50%, according to American Community Survey data reported in a UH Economic Research Organization blog post in March 2024. Nationally, the gap is even larger, at 69%.

That same UHERO post showed that women in Hawaiʻi needed at least a master’s degree to match the lifetime earnings of a man with some college experience but no degree. The largest gap in pay happens at the highest levels, with women working as chief executives, financial managers and pharmacists earning significantly less than men.

And getting to those top roles remains difficult. While women make up 47% of the state’s workforce, only 63 women occupied the top-most executive position in Hawaii Business Magazine’s latest Top 250 list of the state’s largest organizations. That’s about 25% of all chief executives on the list. When looking at the list’s 100 largest companies – those reporting gross annual revenue of $81.6 million and up – just 9 women occupied the most senior position. That, of course, is just 9% of those elite chief executives.

According to the UHERO post, the wage gap between Hawaiʻi men and women starts in their mid-to-late 20s, at which point men’s income grows much more quickly than women’s and continues over the course of their careers. The divergence happens at the same time that women begin having children – 27 is the average age of a first birth in Hawaiʻi – and accumulates as a lifelong hit to their financial well-being, nicknamed the motherhood penalty.

In Hawaiʻi, the median annual earnings for working mothers with full-time jobs is about $56,000 a year. For fathers with full-time jobs, that number is $72,000, according to a May 2025 report from the national Institute for Women’s Policy Research. About 66% of mothers with children under 18 worked full time, year-round, in Hawaiʻi, as opposed to 82% of men, according to that same report.

The motherhood penalty can start as soon as a baby is born, given that only 32% of working people in Hawaiʻi said their employer offers paid family and medical leave, according to a 2024 survey commissioned by the Hawaiʻi Children’s Action Network. In the 2025 legislative session, a bill to enact a statewide paid family-leave program died, as have similar bills repeatedly over the past decade.

HCAN’s survey also found that 63% of Hawaiʻi residents have taken time off to care for a newborn or sick family member, or because of a serious illness or injury. Of those, 30% took unpaid leave, or quit their jobs altogether.

Beyond pay and policies, sexual harassment remains a problem in Hawaiʻi workplaces. According to an article on Fujiwara and Rosenbaum’s website, more than 60 sexual harassment complaints are investigated each year by the state Civil Rights Commission and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but that number is considered just a small fraction of actual cases, most of which go unreported.

A Culture of Silence

Soon after she stepped down as director of the state Department of Human Services in 2016, Rachael Wong filed a sexual harassment complaint against then-Hawaiʻi House Speaker Joseph Souki. The Hawaiʻi State Ethics Commission, after hearing complaints from Wong and other women, called for his resignation.

While Wong went public about her experience, none of the others who filed complaints did. And they still haven’t.

“I thought my job was to keep the door open, to pave the way so that others could come forward. And nobody has,” Wong said in a recent interview. “It really, really surprised me. I’m fifth generation here, and I hadn’t realized the extent and depth of the culture of silence. Don’t stick your head out. No make waves.”

She co-founded the organization Safe Places & Workplaces to shine a light on the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and to advocate for safer, more respectful workplaces.

A survey about sexual harassment in Hawaiʻi that her organization conducted in 2019 found that 52.2% of women and 42.4% of men said they experienced sexual harassment at work. But only 18% told an HR representative, and just 9% filed an official complaint.

In addition to cultural norms about sticking out, attorney Fujiwara attributes some of the fear to Hawaiʻi’s anemic labor market. The high cost of living means nearly everyone needs to work, yet there’s not an abundance of jobs. Many women, worried about losing their jobs, will say nothing.

Even heavily protected state workers are afraid to speak up, she says. “You can’t get more protection than the state Constitution, and union and civil service protection, but they are still afraid. They need the job.”

Strong Laws, Troubling Realities

Fujiwara grew up in New Orleans, at a time when it resembled “an apartheid state” for Black people and women had few opportunities. She rebelled and left for Hawaiʻi, where she earned a master’s degree in social work from UH Mānoa and a law degree from the William S. Richardson School of Law.

In 1986, she founded her own practice focused on civil rights and employment law and has since helped push forward some of the nation’s strongest laws protecting women, and workers in general.

For example, jurors in Hawaiʻi are asked to use a “reasonable woman” standard, rather than a “reasonable person” or “reasonable man” standard, when evaluating sex discrimination, sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination cases. That shift in focus means that deciding whether or not touching is harassment depends on a woman’s perspective, she explains.

Legal language around equal pay was recently strengthened to better ensure Hawaiʻi women are fairly compensated, says Fujiwara, and a law preventing employers from asking about salary histories was passed to prevent lowballing women and other job-seekers.

In June, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruled in favor of a city worker who had asked for a new boss because her current one was discriminating against her based on gender and disability. She claimed her employer then retaliated against her with a demotion. The court found her request for a new boss was a reasonable accommodation that should have been honored.

But what the law says and what a person experiences can be very different things. Fujiwara sees rampant problems, particularly in lower-paid service and hospitality roles.

Hawaiʻi’s tourism economy, for instance, “is based on the sexualization of women,” she says, with the expectation that “they’re supposed to be smiling all the time at the customers, even if they’re sexually harassing them.”

Employers routinely fail to protect employees from hotel guests, she says, despite a legal requirement to address this kind of “third-party harassment.” Additionally, Fujiwara says that in cases where the harasser is a male coworker, the unions often protect the men.

But most women never get anywhere near a courthouse. They’re often afraid to even speak with a supervisor or file an internal complaint for fear of retaliation, which can take frightening dimensions.

Fujiwara has seen women working in commercial kitchens who were threatened with knives. In an extreme example from decades ago, one of her clients, an apprentice in a union job, was almost thrown off a rooftop by male coworkers who didn’t want her working there.

Other clients couldn’t find another job. “They have literally had to move to the mainland because they feel like they’ve been blackballed,” she says.

More often, retaliation plays out in slights, taunts and the slow poisoning of a person’s work and life. “Even if she isn’t fired,” says Fujiwara, “her employer and her co-workers know how to make her life miserable.”

“Pure Punishment”

When Naomi looks back on the difficult year of 2022, she says she wishes she had never filed a sexual harassment complaint. The blowback in her small office at the state Department of Defense left her isolated for months, growing increasingly depressed, with only “menial tasks” assigned to her.

“I definitely got to the point where I just was so miserable every day. I hated everything about being alive and having to go into work,” says Naomi, who asked that her real name be withheld for privacy reasons.

“You can’t escape thinking about how you got there, with you being alone in an office all this time,” she says. “It truly felt like pure punishment.”

She started the job in 2021 and wasn’t concerned about working with the all-male team, who she expected “will always have my back,” she says. On her first day at work, her boss quickly disabused her of that idea by making references to the male anatomy and sex with his wife.

“That set the tone for how things were in the office,” Naomi explains.

One of her coworkers, meanwhile, needed constant attention, she says. He liked to troll people on Reddit and make her read his comments. He insisted she taste the food he brought for lunch. He once asked over and over if she would play ball games with him and, when she declined, he demanded that she clean up the office instead.

His lack of boundaries made her deeply uncomfortable. But this co-worker was best friends with the boss, who instructed the team to deal with his idiosyncrasies, help keep him organized and never make him mad.

Finally, the coworker asked Naomi if he could give her herpes, and annoying behavior turned into harassment. She told her boss that she needed him to do something to stop the behavior. Soon afterwards, her boss referred to her as a “bitch.”

Naomi filed an official discrimination complaint with the HR department, and her boss and coworker were moved into another building during the investigation.

Nearly all of her allegations were confirmed, including sexual harassment on the part of both men, as well as racist comments directed to a Black coworker, ethics violations for asking Naomi to do work for her boss’s daughter, and a breach of confidentiality during the investigation on the part of a female HR employee.

One of the “corrective actions” required, she says, was that the entire team had to retake sexual harassment training, herself included. “I used the system as they asked me to and now, as a result of that, I needed to prove that I have learned, once again, how to use the system that is not going to work for me.”

After mediation and training sessions, her boss and co-worker returned to the office, while Naomi landed another job with another agency. She says she’s happy to work with a professional team where no one calls her the “little gal who works on social media.”

But she would be very hesitant to file a complaint again. “If I were ever in that situation again, I would probably think really hard before saying something, because I am a woman who went through that situation and got no help.”

PART II: WHAT SUPPORTIVE EMPLOYERS DO DIFFERENTLY

When she was in her 20s, “I couldn’t imagine the life I have now, with the company I have now,” says Nicole Velasco, who works in business development in the Hawaiʻi office of NORESCO, a national energy company. She’s worked there for nearly a decade.

At the moment, she’s at home with a new baby, and with a toddler in tow. After the births of both her sons, she was given three months of paid time off from the company, and she’s currently negotiating to extend her leave beyond that.

But back then, before she switched to the corporate world, Velasco was a stressed-out city employee, trying to extract herself from a bad relationship and trapped in a workplace grind that seemed to never let up.

The pace ended abruptly in 2017 when she was fired from her job as executive director of the Honolulu Office of Economic Development. Looking back, she believes the official reasons were spurious, including being on her phone too much, despite handling the office’s social media. She thinks the unspoken reason was that she failed to conform.

“It came down to not fitting a particular expectation that had been established before I walked through the door. … They saw me as a young local girl, and it was a ‘She should just know to bring donuts and coffee’ thing,” Velasco says.

“Then I arrived, and I proved to be ‘difficult’ because I said I’m not going to be a ‘yes man,’ I will push for innovation and question things, and I want to know why I have to clean up your messes. … I really cared about my team as people, but I operated a little differently.”

The rupture from her job was “heartbreaking,” she says, but also a “blessing in disguise.”

“Had they not fired me, I probably would still be there because I believe in our people and in our community and that we want things to be better,” she says. “But it was actually killing me, and I don’t say that facetiously. I had been whittled away from a health perspective. I was developing cancer and just turning 30.”

Her medical treatments were successful, and she soon landed a job that supported her in ways she never expected. “This is a different environment – it took me by surprise,” she says of the Massachusetts-based company. “It’s people forward and team forward.”

In her first meeting with her boss, Velasco says he asked her what she wanted from the job. “I told him to be able to take care of family, to take care of my health, to live a life and not feel guilty about it. He looked at me like that’s pretty basic.”

She says her employer has assisted her at every critical juncture in her life since that talk. When she was being stalked and felt threatened, the company immediately changed the office locks. When her grandmother was dying, she was given time off to care for her. When her children were born, she got company-sponsored paid leave.

And when she returned to work, she could do it from home, and with no pressure to return to the office. “I’ve never once been made to feel guilty,” Velasco says.

The difference in workplace cultures continues to amaze her and makes her question why often-touted local values can be absent in the workplace.

“How did I get trained to believe my needs were too much?” she asked. “By the same culture that prioritizes ʻohana. Let’s reevaluate our collective contract with each other and ask ourselves if we’re satisfied with certain infrastructures and systems. And the answer is probably no.”

She still remembers a city employee who needed to leave early to pick up her son from elementary school. The father had forgotten the boy, and it was getting late. Shortly afterward, an HR director chastised Velasco for letting the employee go, thus squandering the “public asset” of required work time.

“We need to have a long, overdue conversation to think about how we got here. Why are we more concerned about recouping one-and-a-half hours of wages and not about a small child left on the roadside?”

Evolving Workplaces

For all the social changes of the past decades, workplaces can often seem stuck in the past. Schedules are fixed, with office hours often conflicting with school hours. Remote options from the pandemic have been clawed back by many employers. Family leave remains one of the stingiest in the world.

Some of the problems spring from lack of awareness, says Wong from Safe Places & Workplaces and the executive director of the professional development organization One Shared Future. Many leaders simply don’t know much about their employees’ lives.

“There’s one of your reliable team members, who’s making choices for their livelihood and not able to be there for their child or their aging parents,” she says. “And it’s never dawned on you that a policy could totally change productivity, culture, the bottom line, everything because you’re an old-school guy and have a really supportive family structure, and you don’t think about those things.”

Other impediments to changing workplace cultures reflect how society is structured.

“We’re still in a patriarchal culture of male leadership looking a certain way and then female leadership trying to look that way as well, versus what does female leadership uniquely look like?” says Kerrie Urosevich, the executive director of the Early Childhood Action Strategy and a founder of the ʻOhana Workplace Alliance.

The alliance looks at disparities between men’s and women’s experiences in the workplace, and ways to close the gaps. One trouble spot is women’s lower pay, which Urosevich attributes partly to men’s more assertive negotiating skills.

She shares a revealing example from her own experience on the hiring committee for a head of school. The committee’s male pick asked for $30,000 more, which they offered. When he ended up declining the position, the group selected a female candidate the following year and offered her the original salary. She accepted.

“We all started celebrating,” says Urosevich. “Then one of the women on the committee says, ‘Absolutely not. We need to offer her $30,000 over because she’s more qualified than the guy we interviewed last year.’ And I felt so ashamed. The funny part was that when we offered the candidate $30,000 more, she was really taken aback.”

Evaluating Companies

Urosevich and her team advocate for policies such as pay parity audits, remote work options, mental health programs and childcare subsidies, or even having companies develop their own childcare workforces and pay living wages.

The group is in the early stages of devising a grading system that evaluates an employer’s family-friendly policies, which they could use to attract new hires. What a family-friendly workplace looks like will vary from employer to employer, and even employee to employee.

Urosevich, the mother of three, now in their late teens and early 20s, says that many workplace policies are based on models from the 1950s and ’60s, and they’re hopelessly outdated. She particularly dislikes the idea that people in roles like hers need to be at specific workstations, at set times.

“The context is just so dramatically different now. With technology, we can be much more flexible and actually retain staff because of that,” she says. “You’re not making employees choose between their own health and their work, or their family and their work. They can take care of it all more holistically and meet deadlines and be an awesome employee.”

For Ben Treviño, the father of a young daughter and an alliance member, and the network coordinator of the Omidyar Fellows Program, work-from-home options are invaluable, but the physical workplace can be equally so.

“It’s an important space,” he says. “In the same way that we invest in our homes as a place we want to live in, how do we make workplaces a place we want to be, to be a shelter when home can’t be that?”

Another scoring system is now being developed by Llasmin Chaine, executive director of the Hawaiʻi State Commission on the Status of Women, and Aleeka Kay Morgan, executive director of the Nurturing Wāhine Fund.

Their planned gender-equity scorecard will measure organizations in areas such as compensation, hiring practices, women in leadership roles and flexible work arrangements. The scorecard is being developed based on models used elsewhere.

The goal is to recognize organizations doing good work, spotlight best practices and provide support so everyone can improve, says Chaine. “If we’re not giving folks the tools to implement policy and shift things in a positive direction, then we’re missing half of what’s needed. Ultimately, we want everyone to thrive.”

Examples of Sexual Harassment

• Using sexist slurs such as “bitch” and “slut”

• Talking about body parts inappropriately

• Making sexually explicit comments

• Demanding a date in exchange for a job or promotion

• Repeatedly texting or calling in a harassing way

• Sharing sexual content without permission

• Following someone in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable

• Purposely touching in an unwelcome way

• Offering inappropriate gifts

• Forcing a sexual act without permission

DESIGNING BETTER WORKPLACES: FOUR APPROACHES

Med-Quest: Rare Telework Options in the Public Sector

Hawaiʻi Medicaid Director Judy Mohr Peterson takes a refreshingly simple and direct approach to the job of leading about 250 employees and serving more than 400,000 Hawaiʻi residents in the Med-Quest program.

“We focus on getting the work done, and we try to be as flexible as possible while recognizing that people are trying to be good parents and raising a family and living their lives,” she says.

Some employees need flexibility to deal with family obligations. Some can do their work mostly or completely at home. Others need or want to work in the office.

To meet those divergent needs, Peterson has kept the telework model from the pandemic days, despite pressure from legislators and other state officials who want to see “butts in the chairs,” she says.

Currently, about half the team works remotely at least part of the week – more than any other division in the state, she says. And their productivity has risen because of the arrangement, she says, and continues to: “People have actually gotten more productive over time.”

“Telework really aligns with our mission and vision,” says Peterson. “We’re about promoting health and wellness, and having healthy families and healthy communities. You can’t have that if you’re not treating people with respect.”

As the mother of two adult daughters, Peterson is empathetic to her team’s struggles, especially the female managers with young kids who feel guilty about falling short in their jobs and at home. She reminds them that “this idea that women can do everything is false.”

She also tells them that fathers are rarely in similar positions, “because whether we like it or not, and whether we acknowledge it or not, women bear the brunt of the caregiving … and nothing else gets moved off their schedules,” she says.

Flexibility about where and when the work gets done helps employees stay in their jobs. “Our division has a reputation for, one, being mission driven, but also we’ve been able to retain people.”

Since she arrived in Honolulu from the Oregon Medicaid office a decade ago, Peterson has introduced innovations such as medically tailored meals for diabetic patients and programs that link health care and housing.

She’s now preparing for the challenges ahead, as new Medicaid work requirements threaten to strip away people’s health insurance. Her division is looking at how to get clients into jobs, job training and volunteer opportunities so they can keep their coverage.

“Our team believes in what they’re doing. They know that they’re making a difference for hundreds of thousands of people,” says Peterson. “We try to create an environment that is supportive of the team, that values them, no matter where they are in the organization.”

Hawai‘i Foodbank: When Focusing on Pay Really Matters

The Hawaiʻi Foodbank distributed more than 21 million pounds of food and served 154,000 people a month in fiscal year 2024 – the same number of people as at the height of the pandemic and twice as many as in 2019.

The enormity of the task keeps the organization’s president and CEO, Amy Miller, focused on practical matters. For her team of 70, that means meeting their immediate need for better pay.

When she arrived in 2021, many weren’t earning a living wage, she says. Employee surveys showed overall favorability scores were 59%, compared to an average score of 71% among food banks nationwide.

“It was pretty awful,” Miller says. “There were people who work here that needed food assistance. It wasn’t right for us to be contributing to the problem. People shouldn’t have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet.”

She immediately lifted the lowest pay from $14 to $17, and now $19, which she says is still too low given escalating living costs. The rest of the team got a wage bump as well.

Next, she conducted a compensation survey to benchmark the nonprofit against similar ones across the country, and to map specific roles against similar roles in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere. Data came from local organizations and the national Feeding America network.

While she didn’t find discrepancies based on gender or ethnicity, she says she did find that some positions needed “equity adjustments,” which they got. The organization also launched a $50 monthly “wellness stipend” and distributes fresh produce to the team each month.

Favorability metrics rose to 73% in 2024 – a 14% jump from 2021. Retention rates have also risen, from 67% in fiscal year 2023 to 77% in fiscal year 2024, and to 85% now.

At the moment, there’s a “baby boom” at the food bank, she says, with several women and one man at home on leave. The organization works with them to take paid time off, and to ease back to the job with part-time hours or work-from-home days.

“You can’t be a stickler who says, ‘You have to be back in the office five days a week on day 91 after you gave birth,’ and then that person ends up leaving,” Miller explains. “You’re hurting yourself if you’re creating a situation where good people leave.”

Because of the nature of their work, many warehouse workers and drivers have set hours. But she encourages flexibility for those who can take it and creates paths for people who want more flexible jobs, in part by removing “weeding mechanisms.”

“Every single one of our positions will ask for a bachelor’s or equivalent experience,” she says. “We have directors who don’t have college degrees and they’re fabulous in their roles.”

MacNaughton: Diverse Viewpoints Lead to Better Decisions

At this small real-estate development company, decisions are made after open discussions and listening to everyone’s ideas. “Sometimes it takes a little more time, but the positive results are quite enduring,” says COO Emily Porter.

“Sometimes I’ll say something in a meeting that’s a bit off the wall, out of the box, and probably not the right answer,” she says. “I do it because I want to make sure the room is large enough that people feel like they can share their opinion fully.”

In her varied career that included working as a litigator and in operations for a Bay Area tech company, Porter says she’s “experienced feelings of not belonging as a woman.” She’s sensitive about letting others know their voices count, and says the payoff is better, more innovative ideas.

As an example, MacNaughton bought and manages several boutique hotels in Waikīkī. The question of whether to keep or disband the valet and bell service at one of the hotels elicited a lot of emotions and conflicting opinions.

“Financially, it didn’t make sense anymore, but that team was a big part of the operation and interfaced well with other members of the front desk,” she says. After much back and forth, they cancelled the service, but employees were offered jobs at other hotels, and in some cases at other companies that MacNaughton works with.

By talking and learning about the feelings involved, “we made a good business decision in a very human-centric way that cared about the people,” she says.

Another example is working on hotel bathroom renovations. In those cases, Porter says the leadership team taps the perspectives of men and women, young and old, who have different ideas about the need for privacy or how comfortable they are sharing hot tubs and saunas. The feedback helps clarify when to provide separate or unisex facilities.

Because the tone from the top matters, the company has added two more women to the leadership team and two as general managers of hotels. It regularly reviews compensation to make sure it’s equitable, promotes people based on merit and offers flexibility in where employees work.

For Porter personally, she appreciates being able to serve on boards and work on community projects, such as a K-12 healthy relationships curriculum that she’s now developing. “I love that MacNaughton supports me to volunteer with community organizations, even during work hours,” she says.

American Savings Bank: Improvements Started with Hard Conversations

When Beth Whitehead joined American Savings Bank in 2008, she found a “great, solid, profitable company” with abysmal employee engagement scores, below 50%. As the “self-appointed guardian of the culture,” she took it as a personal challenge.

Today, engagement scores have shot up to the high 80% to 90% levels. She attributes the transformation to “the democratization of the employee experience” as the company sought answers from the entire staff about what a great company would look like to them, and where ASB fell short.

The responses led to dramatic changes, she says. The bank immediately revamped its family-leave policies to offer three months of paid leave, with the option to work part-time with full-time wages in the first month back on the job.

It runs annual, mandatory training on respect in the workplace, with lots of role-playing. “We’re trying to make sure that we are empathetic toward each other. … If we want to be collaborative and work together, we have to understand and respect each other,” says Whitehead.

She says the bank’s leaders undergo extensive cohort-based training in how to seek out feedback and accept the responses, which can be uncomfortable. In the end, she says, “I think we all have work to do on getting outside our definition of ourselves and our perceptions of greatness, as in our company is great, so how can you say something bad about us?”

And they act on feedback to fix problems. In one instructive example, Whitehead says surveys identified serious discontent with the way the operations staff communicated with the tellers and other frontline staff. She spearheaded efforts to improve the internal website and email communications, only to receive another low score on employee surveys.

“We spent a year fixing the wrong problem because we didn’t dig in deeply enough and listen enough,” she says.

The core problem was people wanted conversations, not memos. “Once we started bringing them together to talk about issues that needed to be solved, the communication score went up by 20 points.”

Four of the nine bank executives are women, including Whitehead, who is an executive VP and chief administrative officer. The bank develops talent and mostly promotes from within, including CEO Ann Teranishi and Executive VP Dani Aiu, who started as a teller 30 years ago.

“We do a really great job of nurturing talent and making opportunities available,” Whitehead says. “The culture here is one of being inclusive and welcoming and trying to make sure everyone feels valued.”

UNDERSTANDING HAWAI‘I’S EMPLOYMENT LAWS

Protection from Discrimination

It is against the law for employers to refuse to hire, bar or discharge, or discriminate against any individual because of race, sex including gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion, color, ancestry, disability, marital status, arrest and court record, reproductive health decision, and domestic or sexual violence victim status. The law applies to employers with at least one employee. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2

Sexual Harassment

State law prohibits sexual harassment in the workplace, which is defined as unwanted sexual advances and other forms of verbal, physical and visual harassment that affects a person’s ability to get or keep a job, or that creates a hostile workplace. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-1 and Hawaiʻi Administrative Rule 12-46-109

Nondisclosure Agreements

Employers are not allowed to use NDAs to prevent employees from discussing sexual harassment occurring at the workplace, or to retaliate against them for talking about it. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.2

Equal Pay

Employers are prohibited from paying lower wages to employees in protected categories, compared to what others are paid, if they are doing similar work, requiring equal skill, effort and responsibility. In addition, employers cannot stop their employees from discussing their wages. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.3

Salary History

When inquiries are made about hiring and when negotiating employment contracts, employers are not allowed to ask about an applicant’s salary history, or to rely on that information to determine wages, benefits or other compensation. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.4

Pay Transparency

Employers with 50 or more employees are required to disclose an hourly rate or salary range in job postings. Exceptions include internal transfers or promotions and public-sector positions where pay is determined through collective bargaining. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-2.8

Victims of Domestic or Sexual Violence

Employers are required to allow employees who are victims of domestic or sexual violence, or parents of children who are victims, to take unpaid leave to seek medical attention or counseling, relocate residences and related activities. Employers must also make reasonable accommodations, such as changing locks, modifying work schedules or screening calls. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-81 and 378-72

Pregnancy Discrimination

Hawaiʻi administrative rules prohibit employers from excluding a job applicant or firing an employee because of pregnancy. In addition, they cannot terminate an employee for taking “disability” leave due to pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions. The leave must be for a reasonable period of time, as determined by the employee’s physician. Hawaiʻi Administrative Rules 12-46-107 and 12-46-108

Family Leave

The Hawaiʻi Family Leave Law says employees “may be eligible” for 4 weeks of unpaid family leave for the birth or adoption of a child. The law applies to employers with 100 or more employees, and employees must have worked at least 6 consecutive months.

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for parents. The law applies to employers with 50 or more employees, and employees must have worked 1,250 hours with the employer during the 12 months before they start leave.

Breastfeeding on the Job

Employers must provide reasonable break times for employees to express milk for one year after the child’s birth. In addition, they need to provide a location, other than a restroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes 378-92

Note: The summaries above describe some of the Hawaiʻi employment laws that are most relevant to women and caretakers. For the full wording of laws in the Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes, go to bit.ly/3UJSTh4.
Be advised: These summaries should not be substituted for the advice of an attorney or HR expert.