Turning into a whistleblower is a fraught decision. Once it happens, you can expect some form of retaliation. Many would say doing the right thing is not necessarily the right thing to do in terms of your career. Some good advice from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: exhaust all possibilities of any reasonable way to work within the system; get a legal opinion from an attorney specifically trained in this new subspecialty of employment law and talk to your family and close friends about the issue (without revealing details).

To add to that, we have a new study which finds that women are subject to greater levels of retaliation than men.

According to the researchers, female whistleblowers reporting incidents of stealing, waste mismanagement, safety breaches, sexual harassment, illegal discrimination and law violations were more likely to experience poor performance appraisal (15 per cent), tighter scrutiny of daily activities by management (14 per cent) and verbal harassment or intimidation (12 per cent).

They were also more likely to have co-workers not socializing with them (11 per cent), or be denied information that they need to perform their job successfully (10 per cent).