Can a Woman Face a POSH Complaint Filed by Another Woman?
An Internal Committee that turns away a sexual harassment complaint simply because both the complainant and the respondent are women isn’t being cautious — it is getting the law fundamentally wrong.
For years, corporate POSH policies, training decks, and awareness modules have overwhelmingly treated workplace harassment as a gender-binary issue. The standard corporate imagery is deeply entrenched: a male aggressor in a position of authority, and a female employee compelled to invoke the statute against him. While this remains the most common reality, treating it as the only reality creates a massive, expensive compliance trap for employers — one that rarely announces itself until a complaint arrives that doesn’t fit the template.
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Here are the crucial distinction convention misses: the POSH Act is strictly narrow about who it protects — only an “aggrieved woman” can file a complaint. However, the law places absolutely no gender restriction on who the respondent can be. When an Internal Committee summarily dismisses a same-gender complaint at the intake stage, it isn’t saving the company from administrative paperwork. Instead, it is handing the complainant a textbook ground to challenge the decision in court, exposing the organization to severe legal liability and public embarrassment.
This blind spot is no longer a hypothetical risk. The legal reality was tested decisively before the Calcutta High Court in Dr. Malabika Bhattacharjee v. Internal Complaints Committee, Vivekananda College & Others (WPA 9141 of 2020, Calcutta High Court, 27 November 2020). In this case, a college professor faced a POSH inquiry triggered by a complaint from a female colleague. The professor moved the High Court to quash the proceedings on a singular, confident assumption: because the POSH Act was designed as protective legislation to shield women from men, an all-female dispute fell entirely outside the Committee’s jurisdiction.
Justice Sabyasachi Bhattacharyya rejected this argument with a textual breakdown that every corporate legal counsel should know by heart. The Court held that while Section 2(a) of the Act restricts the complainant to an “aggrieved woman,” Section 2(m) — which defines the “respondent” — carries no such restriction at all; it simply describes a person against whom the aggrieved woman has made a complaint. Reading a male-only requirement into the respondent’s identity, the Court held, means inserting words into the statute that Parliament deliberately chose to omit.
The Court did not stop at the jurisdictional question. Having rejected it, it also directed that the professor be given a fresh opportunity to cross-examine the complainant — an opportunity she had lost while the writ petition was pending in court. The signal for ICs is easy to miss in the relief of winning a jurisdictional argument: dismissing a same-gender objection is not licenced to relax procedural fairness afterward. Both parties remain entitled to a full and fair inquiry, on the same footing, whatever their gender — the ruling does not trade one procedural shortcut for another.
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To be clear, this landmark ruling does not mean that every workplace disagreement between female colleagues qualifies as sexual harassment. Nor does it strip a respondent of the right to argue that a dispute is actually a case of professional vilification or personal defamation rather than sexual misconduct — the Court left that question entirely open for the Committee to decide on the facts. What the ruling changes is the gatekeeping mechanism: an IC cannot use gender as a shortcut to dismiss a case before an inquiry even begins. The merits of the conduct must be evaluated through the statutory lens of Sections 2(n) and 3, regardless of the gender of the parties involved.
For corporate India, Bhattacharjee demands immediate operational adjustments, not just policy updates on paper.
First, ICs must stop screening complaints by the respondent’s gender at intake. A threshold dismissal based on the respondent being female is legally indefensible and will not survive a challenge now that Bhattacharjee has already rejected it. Second, legal and HR teams must actively audit their compliance training modules and complaint forms. If your corporate scenarios and illustrative slide decks exclusively depict male harassers, you are misinterpreting the law to your workforce and improperly training your committee members. Third, build the cross-examination point into standard procedure rather than treating it as something that only matters once a case reaches a High Court: every party to an inquiry — complainant and respondent alike — gets a genuine, documented opportunity to test the other side’s account, at every stage, not only after a court has intervened to restore it.
The POSH Act was built to protect women from hostile workplace conduct, not to shield specific categories of respondents from being investigated. If your organization’s intake framework hasn’t evolved past the binary assumption, your compliance isn’t safe. It is exposed.
Author: Aarti Jain, Company Secretary, Sagus Legal
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