About those mandatory sexual harassment training courses that many companies put employees through as a way of minimizing their own legal liability in the event charges are brought (and to justify an easy way to terminate an employee should charges be leveled), Hubris notes in the comments to yesterday’s post:
Mileage varies on sexual harrassment training (I’ve taken it at several different companies). […] As for myself, I think it’s nice to have reminders about certain behaviors; for example, that a boss can’t say that you’ll get the promotion as long as you suck his cock.
…Which example, to me, argues precisely the opposite point;and speaks to the problem many people have with the “harrassment” industry. For instance, imagine the scenario Hubris describes:
Boss: “I was just about to demand my assistant suck my cock if she wanted that raise, then I remembered that workshop with the pink and blue flash cards and the “Do’s and Don’ts of Sexual Harassment” videotape. Turns out you can’t demand anybody suck the cock as a condition of the raise! Who knew?”
Not to be too flip about it, but what are the chances a sexual harassment training course will result in the scenario imagined above vs. the chances an ethos of heightened awareness to the “signs” (which are actually signifiers, but I digress) of sexual harassment will result in scenarios like this? (via Overlawyered):
Two secretaries will share a settlement of around $450,000 from the Atlantic City, N.J. school district and its insurer after filing sexual-harassment charges. Carol Lee and Jennifer Torres sued following
a comment Assistant Superintendent Thomas J. Kirschling made to them and two others in July 2002. At some point mid-month, Kirschling said “I ride them hard and put them away wet.”
The two secretaries sent him a memo saying they were outraged. He later explained and apologized, according to a subsequent memo.
Kirschling was apparently using a rural idiom that means someone is tired or worked hard. The phrase is taken from the need to cool down a horse after strenuous exercise. Only a mistreated horse is stabled while it is still sweating.
After the women complained, the district assigned an outside attorney to investigate, but that probe inadvertently lapsed....
The school board approved the settlement at a meeting last month, although some members considered the amount excessive. “Board member John Devlin said ‘It’s nuts, though, just for that comment.’”
Newly-minted feminist Cathy Young, an outspoken critic of the sexual harassment industry, notes the case and writes:
As with many other things, feminists identified a real problem when they spoke up about sexual harassment. Of course it’s good that women—and men—now have a legal recourse if they face a “sleep with me or you’re fired” situation, or an intolerable atmosphere of sexual insults at work. But in the wake of the Anita Hill episode (a turning point, by the way, in my alienation from “mainstream” feminism), the War on Sexual Harassment turned into a ridiculous hysteria preoccupied with petty or imagined slights and hostile, in strangely neo-Victorian fashion, to any sexual expression—even sexual humor—in the workplace.
The damage is still with us. Damage to human interaction in the workplace, of course, and to companies and institutions that have to field these absurd complaints—but also to women’s equality. Because if you ask me, the image of women promoted by such stories is not a very flattering one.
[my emphasis]
I don’t mean to single out Hubris here, but in a way, these competing scenarios describe what we’ve been discussing the last few days. With legal recourse established for both men and women in the event of harassment, how effective is it to teach harassment awareness in such a way that it could—and I emphasize could—do more harm than good by creating artificial tensions in the work place (among its other potential failings) that would not normally manifest otherwise? I understand the need for companies to try to cover their legal flanks, but is it not fair to ask about both the benefits and ills such a sytem creates, particularly in the context of serving the longterm goals of feminism?
The point being—and as I’ve been arguing the last couple of days—we are dealing moreso with competing strategies for feminism here than we are some enormous divide between “anti-feminists” and “feminists” about the ostensible goals of feminism: equality of the sexes. How we get there, however, is another matter entirely.
Hubris asks:
Are you saying that harrassment training is ineffective because people are going to do what they’re going to do, no matter what? I really don’t understand the
objection to making efforts against harrassment before it happens, by outlining the potential problems it will cause for both the perp and the employer.
Well, the objection is twofold: first, that sexual harassment training tends to stigmatize men and is often singled out among the myriad potential workplace offenses that we “educate” against, giving it special weight; and second, that “harassment” itself, because it is by nature a personal reaction to the actions of others (rather than an easily decided-upon objective category of behavior), is almost by necessity too broadly defined.
And no, I’m not saying harassment training is “ineffective because people are going to do what they’re going to do, no matter what,” but rather I’m suggesting that the negative effects of such “training” could potentially outweigh the theoretical positives and create a climate the further divides the sexes by depicting women as victims in waiting and men as latent predators—the potentially “unisex” nature of harassment to which we give perfunctory lipservice notwithstanding.
Further concerns include how such “harassment” vigilance works within the context of a liberal democracy—particularly when claims of harassment often require the accused to prove innocence (going back to my discussions of intentionalism and interpretation, the accusor controls the “meaning” and forces the utterer to defend against his or her signification); similarly, the charges are often based around such potentially expansive concepts as a “hostile work environment” brought about by “implied threats” or “humiliation.”
Along these lines, here’s Young again, from a 1998 piece in Reason that examined harassment—and the sliding scale of culpability—in light of both the Anita Hill case and the actions of the behavior of then President Clinton:
[…] The concept of sexual harassment was around before Anita Hill. It was coined in the mid-1970s, most likely by feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, and soon gained recognition in the courts. In 1986, the Supreme Court gave its unanimous blessing to sexual harassment law in Meritor v. Vinson, a case in which a bank teller alleged that her supervisor pressured her into a sexual relationship. But the issue remained on the cultural periphery until the “national consciousness raising” of October 1991, when the country was riveted by Hill’s claim that as her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Thomas had occasionally asked her out, talked about X-rated movies, and once joked about a pubic hair on a Coke can. Maybe, as journalist Christopher Hitchens suggested in his review of Hill’s dreary recent memoir, Speaking Truth to Power, “Everyone was slightly out of their skull that week.”
The “teach-in” succeeded: The Thomas-Hill episode established a dominant paradigm of sexual harassment. In this paradigm, any manifestation of sexuality in the workplace, from romantic pursuit to racy humor, is abusive if someone decides—perhaps long after the fact—that it was “unwelcome.” Even if they don’t mean harm, men who “just don’t get it” bear all the blame for sexual conflicts. To question a charge of harassment is grossly insensitive, even if the behavior of the “victim,” such as remaining friendly with the alleged harasser, seems to contradict her claims. (Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter had to work hard to live down his “grilling” of Anita Hill.)
When the dust had settled, the new awareness of sexual harassment remained a part of the landscape. “Every time a man and a woman meet at the water cooler now, Anita Hill [is] right there between them,” Wayne State University anthropologist Andrea Sankar told Newsweek a year after the hearings–and it speaks volumes about the social climate that this was supposed to be a good thing.
On Nexis, references to sexual harassment grew from fewer than 1,500 in 1990 to more than 8,000 in 1992 and nearly 15,000 in 1994. Every week, some new sexual harassment story was in the headlines […].
[…]
The right-wing conversion to the cause may be driven by more than partisanship or Clinton hating. Some social conservatives (Irving Kristol, for one) have always been guardedly sympathetic to the feminist crusade against sexual harassment, viewing it, rather simplistically, as an effort to restore Victorian protections for the weaker sex. In National Review, Wendy Shalit, the newest member of the woman-as-victim school of conservatism, has warm words for Andrea Dworkin—one feminist who has cut Clinton no slack—and argues that feminism thrives by appealing to women’s desire to be sheltered from predatory male sexuality. (That doesn’t explain why, in post-Monica polls, women are more willing than men to dismiss Clinton’s alleged misconduct as his private business.) But conservatives, whatever their intentions, don’t make very convincing activists against sexual harassment, if only because they are latecomers to the campaign. If anything, their posturing sends the message that harassment charges are easily used as a political weapon.
And whatever their intentions, the pro-Clinton feminists are making the culture safe for a backlash against the post-Anita Hill sexual regime—a backlash which has been at least as strong a factor in the forgiving public attitude toward the Clinton scandals as the relatively strong economy, the reason many observers suggest. Judging from what talk show callers say, people may not approve of a middle-aged, married man carrying on with a young subordinate, but they find it at least as outrageous that a sexual harassment complaint should open the way to invasive questions about a consensual affair.
They are also quite willing to recognize that accusers may have ulterior motives and that encounters subsequently labeled as “harassment” may involve complex, reciprocal dynamics: Most people in a poll taken after Willey’s TV interview thought neither Clinton nor Willey had told the complete truth. With no feminist thought police to suppress these heresies, even making fun of a woman who claims sexual harassment is no longer politically incorrect. On MSNBC, Wendy Murphy, a staunch feminist victims’ advocate, caustically observed that it was ridiculous to “ask for $3 million merely because you saw a penis!”
Of course, cultural attitudes are not the only determining factor in how we approach sexual harassment. The follies and excesses of the crusade against sexual harassment are also a product of bad laws and policies. But perhaps it was only in the cultural climate created by the October 1991 teach-in that these laws and policies could have flourished.
Current harassment law is grafted onto Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, under the theory—conceived by Catharine MacKinnon—that sexual advances on the job are a form of sex discrimination, depriving women as a class of equal opportunity. Whatever one thinks of the legitimacy of laws banning discrimination in private employment, these laws were never meant to create protections from sexual overtures on the job, which are not “based on sex” in the same sense as the refusal to hire or promote women and which—as the judges who rejected early civil rights suits for sexual harassment pointed out—could be made by a man to other men.
Oncale v. Sundowner, the case in which the Supreme Court affirmed earlier this year that Title VII covers “hostile environment” behavior between heterosexuals of the same sex, highlights the absurdity of the discrimination model—so much so that The Washington Post urged Congress to uncouple sexual harassment from sex discrimination. The mistreatment Joseph Oncale allegedly suffered at the hands of his co-workers on an all-male oil rig—including an assault in the shower in which a soap bar was shoved between his buttocks—is horrible. But whatever the reason he was singled out for such abuse, it surely couldn’t have been his gender.
Meanwhile, in male-on-female “hostile environment” cases, the charge of discrimination often rests not on differential treatment of women and men but on the premise that vulgar talk and crude behavior are uniquely harmful or offensive to women. This, University of Michigan law professor Kingsley Browne has noted, “seems like just the sort of stereotype that Title VII was intended to erase.”
Indeed, the brand of feminist ideology that underlies the crusade against sexual harassment is focused not on equality but on sexual dominance. The standard response to concerns about the anti-sexual animus of this crusade—“Sexual harassment is not about sex, it’s about power”—is disingenuous: To these ideologues, sex is not about sex but about power. MacKinnon, who played a key role in crafting harassment law and who has asserted that feminist theory “treats sexuality as a social construct of male power,” is hardly an isolated voice. “Because of the inequality and coercion with which it is so frequently associated in the minds of women, the appearance of sexuality in an unexpected context or a setting of ostensible equality can be an anguishing experience,” writes Boston University law professor Kathryn Abrams. “Treatment that sexualizes women workers”—any sort of sexual dynamic between men and women—“prevents them from feeling, and prevents others from perceiving them, as equals in the workplace.” Sex is presumed, as it were, to equal sexism.
Many courts have endorsed this radical view; indeed, Abrams’s ruminations on the perils of sexuality for women have been cited in several prominent cases, including Robinson v. Jacksonville Shipyards (1991), in which a federal judge in Florida issued an injunction banning not just the display but the possession of pictures or literature with sexual themes in the workplace. Two years later in a less prominent Florida case, Cardin v. VIA Tropical Fruits, another federal court upheld a claim of a sexually hostile environment based primarily on “pervasive” racy cartoons and written jokes at work. Some of this material was posted or circulated by women, and much of it made fun of male anatomy: One cartoon showed a woman peering under the sheets at her mate, with the caption, “Where’s the beef?” The court conceded that the humor “depicted both men and women” but went on to explain, in pure MacKinnonite terms: “[V]erbal and visual sexual humor–particularly vulgar and degrading jokes and cartoons repeatedly disseminated in the workplace–may tend to demean women. This is because such joking defines women as women by their sexuality, and consequently may create practical obstacles…in the workplace.”
The problems with the discrimination model of harassment law are compounded by the notorious subjectivity of “hostile environment” sexual harassment—defined by the EEOC and by the Supreme Court as “verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature” that has “the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.” Official proclamations haven’t done much to clear things up.
For instance, according to a U.S. Department of Labor pamphlet, if someone at work “made sexual jokes or said sexual things that you didn’t like,” or displayed a picture you consider offensive, it’s illegal—at least if it’s “making it hard for you to work.” But does this mean that you dread going to work every day or that you’re occasionally distracted? Does it mean that you’re the sort of person who has a fit over a copy of Esquire with a cover photo of an actress, coyly looking over her shoulder with her back to the viewer, buttoning up her bra? (This really happened, prompting a full investigation and eventually costing the culprit his job at a wastewater treatment plant in Olympia, Washington.)
“If I run a stop sign, I have broken the law even if I did not intend to,” a male EEOC official said during the Hill-Thomas teach-in, defending the emphasis on the victim’s response rather than the offender’s intent. But while one may fail to see a stop sign, its reality is hardly “in the eye of the beholder.” If traffic laws were modeled on harassment policies, there would be no stop signs–you could just be fined for failing to stop when someone thought you should have.
Nor does harassment law require any actual damage to the plaintiff, economic or psychological. All that’s needed, the Supreme Court held in 1993 in Harris v. Forklift, is a “discriminatorily abusive work environment.” While the ruling stressed “a middle path between making actionable any conduct that is merely offensive and requiring…tangible psychological injury,” it gave few clues as to where the line should be drawn. In a concurring opinion that sounded more like a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned that the court’s decision “lets virtually unguided juries decide whether sex-related conduct…is egregious enough to warrant an award of damages.” (He added that given the “inherently vague statutory language,” he saw no alternative.) Indeed, Harris was an example of the extent to which harassment litigation had descended into triviality: While the charges in Meritor involved repeated sexual assaults, Teresa Harris, a rental manager at a forklift company in Tennessee, was accusing her boss, Charles Hardy, of nothing more than crude humor–to which she did not object for two years, until Hardy stopped buying supplies from Harris’s husband. Indeed, by Harris’s own account, when she finally told him she was offended by his antics, Hardy apologized profusely and told her he had no idea she had been upset.
By distinguishing between “threatening or humiliating” conduct and mere offensiveness, Harris did enable some courts to roll back harassment litigation. In 1995, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit reversed an award to a woman whose boss had acted crudely on a few occasions (grunting to express his appreciation of her skirt, making a remark about masturbation as a cure for his loneliness) and stressed that Title VII was not meant to “purge the workplace of vulgarity.” More recently, in Oncale, Scalia pointed out that the law is not a “civility code”; he further stressed that normal “male-on-male horseplay or intersexual flirtation” should not be confused with harassment and urged “careful consideration of the social context in which particular behavior occurs.”
But these admonitions are no substitute for actual standards, which remain vague and inconsistent—as evidenced by the confusion over the dismissal of Paula Jones’s suit on summary judgment. The decision was well within the law, yet it easily could have gone the other way. Furthermore, as REASON Contributing Editor Walter Olson, author of The Excuse Factory: How Employment Law Is Paralyzing the American Workplace, pointed out in a commentary on the ruling, victories for defendants “are hard to turn into reliable precedent,” since current legal doctrine “encourages lower courts to look at the `totality of the circumstances’ in each case anew, rather than developing definite rules that clearly assign or reject liability given a particular pattern.”
Not all “hostile environment” claims are merely about bad manners. A number involve egregious conduct, sometimes intended to chase female intruders off male turf. In one such case in the 1980s, three women quit their jobs with a road construction crew after a three-month reign of terror in which male co-workers forcibly groped them and urinated in their lunch boxes and water bottles.
Yet some petty claims go a long way. Debra Black, a former manager for the Cincinnati developer Zaring Homes, won a $250,000 judgment in 1995 over a few incidents of juvenile humor by her co-workers, such as suggestions of names like “Hooterville” and “Twin Peaks” for a lot next to a Hooter’s restaurant; snickers at the mention of a property owner named Dr. Busam; and a comment by a manager who picked up a pastry at a breakfast meeting and said suggestively, “Nothing I like more in the morning than sticky buns.” Black never complained until she was fired for attaching a sheet with the president’s signature to a document he hadn’t seen.
The same year, former Wal-Mart clerk Peggy Kimzey was awarded $50 million, later reduced by the judge to $5 million. Kimzey had quit her job when her boss wasn’t disciplined despite her complaint about his yelling and name calling—non-sexual and directed at both sexes. (Kimzey had refused an offer of a position with a different supervisor.) The sexual harassment claim was based mainly on the fact that five years earlier, the same supervisor had made a couple of vulgar jokes about her body. Kimzey conceded that she wasn’t particularly upset at the time; indeed, she had indicated in employee questionnaires that she liked the informal atmosphere on the job and had asked to come back to the same department after leaving for family reasons.
Nor is it clear that a single incident does not create a hostile environment unless it rises to the level of assault—the conclusion many have made from Wright’s ruling against Paula Jones. After Harris v. Forklift was remanded to the lower courts, a judge ruled that, while the company owner’s vulgar joking did not constitute sexual harassment before Harris told him she found it offensive, the plaintiff was entitled to a damage award of $130,000 on the basis of single crude remark her boss made about a month after she asked him to stop.
The award to Debra Black was later thrown out, and Wal-Mart may yet win on appeal. Still, even a victory is costly for the defendant. Most sexual harassment claims are settled—including some that would be very unlikely to hold up in court, such as a suit filed in 1993 by two female nurses at a hospital in Santa Rosa, California, charging that their female supervisor’s penchant for ribald jokes and bawdy birthday cards created “an environment tainted with sexual harassment.” Most companies prefer not to be sued in the first place. Since businesses can avoid liability by showing that they don’t tolerate harassment, the incentive is to err on the side of proscribing any behavior that might be actionable. Business magazines have long advised that “sexual bantering” and “suggestive remarks” should be stamped out, with no reference to severity, pervasiveness, or even unwelcomeness.
Thus, while relatively few sexual harassment claims may end up in court, measures taken by employers as a direct result of harassment laws—the zero-tolerance policies on “sexual humor and innuendo,” the rules at some companies requiring employees who start dating to sign a paper attesting that the relationship is “welcome” and nonharassing, the sexual harassment prevention workshops—affect tens of millions of people.
The “Sexual Harassment Prevention Game,” designed by Seattle-based human resources consultant Chuck Hatten for such workshops and purchased by, among others, U.S. West, Boeing, McDonald’s, and AT&T, is a striking but representative example of the mentality behind such programs. The board game, in which players move ahead or back depending on the answers they give to questions about hypothetical situations, includes a scenario in which a female janitor complains about locker-room pictures of scantily clad female bodybuilders, put up by another woman as inspiration for her fitness goals. The solution: The pictures must go. In another vignette, male employees who meet for weekly lunches where they trade raunchy jokes must be told that they have to invite women and cut out the humor (that women might contribute some jokes of their own is not even an option). An example of what is not harassment is revealing as well: A man brings flowers to a woman who earlier turned him down for a date, and she accepts but tells him she wants to keep their relationship professional. He’s in the clear–but only as long as he never again shows any sign of romantic interest in her.
Thus, some of the worst abuses of the crusade against harassment happen “in the shadow of the law,” in actions taken by private companies but traceable to the effects of sexual harassment litigation. Probably the best-known case of this kind was that of Miller Brewing Co. executive Jerold McKenzie, who won $26 million in damages for wrongful termination last year after he was fired for discussing a racy episode of Seinfeld with a female office worker. (While such lawsuits may deter overreaction to harassment complaints, they place employers in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t predicament.) At Commonwealth Life Insurance a few years ago, a male manager was demoted with a pay cut and transferred to another office for a reciprocal exchange of off-color greeting cards with a female colleague who later cried harassment. Women who engage in office ribaldry usually benefit from a double standard, but the ax can fall on them too. In 1994 at a branch of United Jersey Bank, a few female tellers and managers shared some giggles over male nudes from Playgirl (with no customers in the bank at the time). A male teller decided to take offense, and the women were punished with unpaid suspensions and demotions.
Employers, of course, should have every right to restrict speech, forbid the display of pictures (sexual or not), or limit dating on the job. They should certainly have the right to require that employees treat each other with courtesy and respect, though different workplaces can be expected to have different cultures. But when the state and the courts impose these rules, which businesses adopt “voluntarily” to avert legal action, that’s a different matter. The current interpretation of Title VII has empowered federal judges, juries, and regulators to act as sex and speech police. Apart from the constitutional concerns this situation should raise, it leads to the usual consequences that follow when the state seeks to control private behavior: People are discouraged from resolving personal conflicts on their own and encouraged to snitch on others and to use laws and regulations to settle personal scores.
In the mainstream media, the response to the Blob-like spread of the sexual harassment concept has been ambivalent. There has been some ridicule directed at cases of harassment overkill, such as an esteemed theology professor ordered into counseling for a classroom discussion of a classic story from the Talmud that includes a sexual reference; an employee who was forced to take down from his desk a small photo of his wife in a bikini; and a 6-year-old boy who was punished for “sexual harassment” after giving a girl a peck on the cheek. But the basic assumption that sex-related conduct in the workplace which is unwanted but is neither coercive nor assaultive is a proper area for litigation and regulation has gone largely unchallenged.
Surveys showing an “epidemic” of harassment—based on sweeping definitions that include jokes and unwelcome requests for dates—have received mostly uncritical media coverage. Articles in the popular press have advised men not to say or do anything to a female co-worker that they wouldn’t say or do to another man (“Would you tell another guy you like the way he does his hair?”) or “to Mom”; both tips imply that women at work must be treated as asexual. Harassment “experts” are still taken seriously when they assert that “what is sexual harassment to one person is not sexual harassment to another,” or that “people should be able to arrive at work, do their job and go home without having to hear jokes, stories or comments of a sexual nature.” Recently, guidelines to appropriate workplace behavior proposed by the advocacy group 9to5—among them, “Would I want to be seen on the national news saying or doing this?”—were cited by the Associated Press without a trace of irony; nor did the reporter notice the contradiction between this Orwellian precept and the assertion by 9to5 director Ellen Bravo that feminists are not seeking to create “an uptight work environment.”
What do ordinary Americans make of all this? Most people with no ideological agenda surely recognize that women contribute a great deal to “sexualizing” the workplace. They probably are ambivalent about making it illegal for a man to pursue a female co-worker after she has told him she isn’t interested: Too many marriages started that way. Nevertheless, the message that sexual harassment is A Very Serious Issue has sunk in. The confusion is evident in opinion polls. In a Time/CNN poll earlier this year, more than half of men and women agreed that “[w]e have gone too far in making common interactions between employees into cases of sexual harassment.” In a Washington Post poll conducted around the same time, two-thirds of women and 42 percent of men agreed that “[t]he federal government should enact tougher laws against sexual harassment in the workplace.” Nearly 80 percent of men and women, however, also thought that false complaints were common, and many reported policing themselves because of the new rules—even avoiding social contact with co-workers of the opposite sex, as about one in four men said they did often or sometimes.
But perhaps the ho-hum reaction to the sexual charges against Clinton speaks louder than polls. Indeed, one indication of how oppressed many people have felt by what one journalist called “the pressure-cooker politesse” of the post-Anita Hill era is the widely acknowledged sigh of relief when “Zippergate” suddenly made it OK to talk about sex and tell salacious jokes at the office—another way in which the Clinton sex scandals may help end the war on sexual harassment.
Is there a better way to handle real sexual coercion and abuse on the job without polarizing the sexes, rolling out the heavy artillery against trivial misbehavior, or empowering the state to act as a manners police?
In a recently published article in the Yale Law Journal, Yale law professor Vicki Schultz assails the emphasis on sex rather than discrimination in current sexual harassment doctrine. As a result of this focus, she argues, nonsexual discrimination and gender-based hostile acts—men denigrating a female co-worker’s competence or sabotaging her work—go unnoticed, while the persecution of innocuous sexual jokes gives feminists a bad name. Schultz’s ideas seem to be in vogue with the feminist left: An abridgement of her article was prominently featured in The Nation, and an interview with her appeared in an issue of Ms. devoted to sex in the office.
Schultz makes some good points in criticizing the MacKinnonite equation of sex with sexism. But her suggestion that discrimination without sexual elements is slighted in current litigation is just plain wrong. In fact, many sexual harassment claims—such as the previously mentioned lawsuit against Zaring Co. by former manager Debra Black—are hitched to sex discrimination charges found worthless even by the court which upholds the harassment charge. Moreover, Schultz’s approach would likely create more problems that it would solve. Her definition of harassment would require employers to proscribe politically incorrect comments about gender—for instance, that mothers with small children should stay home—and perhaps even comments questioning an individual woman’s competence in a “masculine” job.
Other scholars and attorneys would get rid of the discrimination model altogether and deal with sexual misconduct in the workplace as a civil tort. Many acts alleged in serious harassment claims, from sexual battery to indecent exposure, are grounds not only for criminal charges but for civil action—including liability suits against a company which was negligent in failing to protect workers from being victimized on the job. In the mid-1970s, there were also a few successful damage suits under tort and contract law for sexual impositions by superiors involving no force but the abuse of workplace authority.
In a 1990 law review article, Ellen Frankel Paul, a classical liberal political scientist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, argued for going back to the tort approach. Her proposed tort would cover quid pro quo propositions and sexual conduct that a reasonable person would find “outrageous and extreme”; it would require intentional or reckless wrongdoing by the harasser and “economic detriment and/or extreme emotional distress” to the victim; and the employer would be liable only if it knew of the misconduct but failed to act (or failed to provide a complaint mechanism). Interestingly, many elements of Paul’s approach, if not its legal underpinning, are reflected in the emerging new cultural consensus about what constitutes actionable sexual harassment–such as the idea that a legal claim should require either tangible job detriment or severe and demonstrable psychological harm.
That’s heartening, since whatever the advantages of a tort approach, such a legal revolution is unlikely in the near future. The harassment-as-discrimination model has become entrenched; the Supreme Court is unlikely to reconsider its unanimous rulings in Meritor and Harris. Even without such radical reform, a great deal would be achieved by changing hostile environment law so as to require actual hostile intent—that is, to change the current wording, which refers to conduct that has “the purpose or effect” of impeding work performance or creating an offensive or hostile environment, to “purpose and effect.”
Is it likely that Congress will take any steps that could be perceived as weakening protections against sexual harassment? Few politicians are eager to rise to the defense of people who tell dirty jokes at the office, even if they are victimized by draconian punishments. A few years ago, an attempt by the EEOC to draft “religious harassment” guidelines which would have imposed sexual harassment-style rules on religious expression in the workplace was abandoned after protests from Christian and Jewish groups and from members of Congress; it’s hard to imagine legislators taking such a stand in defense of less respectable kinds of expression.
But political and legal practicality is affected by the cultural climate. Right now, there seems to be a great deal of public support for the view that an individual’s noncoercive sexual behavior is no one else’s business and that a lawsuit based on sexual misconduct should involve actual damage to the plaintiff. Right now is a good time for critics of “sexual correctness” to go on the offensive, hold a consciousness raising of their own, and push for legislative change.
If the Clinton scandals end up negating the effects of the Hill-Thomas drama, it will be the ultimate irony: Clinton’s 1992 campaign rode the momentum of the “Year of the Woman,” which had its roots in the upheaval over Anita Hill. But maybe that’s not bad for a Clinton legacy.
[all emphasis mine]
As this rather comprehensive article makes clear, there are plenty of legitimate objections to seemingly innocuous “harassment training”—from the hurt they do to female empowerment to the strain that put on interpersonal relationships to the implied (and now legally-inscribed, in some cases) refiguration of sex as a construct masking power relationships.
The point of all this being, that it is CERTAINLY within the purview of feminism to question both the wisdom and efficacy of the “harassment” training ethos—that (to keep with the discussion of the last few days) doing so is a way of critiquing the strategies and tactics of the feminist movement (will there be a backlash? what do these laws say about women? how to they impact the equity relationship between the sexes we claim is our goal, etc), not a way of “bashing” feminism. Unless, of course, you really do believe that there is an establishment feminism —and that to attack its tactics is to bash feminism itself.
*****
More here
So I’m a production manager at the Countess’s chocolate penis factory and I yell to the line workers, “C’mon ladies, the penis goes in the box and then move along!”
The next thing I know I’m knicked for half a mil and I’m running the fryolateur at the Steubenville White Castle.
Well and good.
But what’s really motivating this, Jeff?
You’re afraid of the vagina, aren’t you?
In a sense, the Harassment Training does create division in the workplace. For instance, a disgruntled worker not happy with his or her positiion with no advancement in sight, can easily manufacture a Sexual Harrassment situation, based on the knowledge that was acquired from the above mentioned training. Such people do look for situations to gain monetarely without working hard for advancement…
<objection is twofold: first, that sexual harassment training tends to stigmatize men and is often singled out among the myriad potential workplace offenses that we “educate†against, giving it special weight;</blockquote>
This is a pretty strong claim. Is there any solid empirical evidence that this is the case?
<objective category of behavior), is almost by necessity too broadly defined.</blockquote>
Not legally. The case-law under Title VII is rather well-developed on this topic.
Solid empirical evidence? How would one gather that?
And yes, it is too broadly defined legally. Did you read through the Young piece? We’re in an area here like we are with “torture.” “Humiliation” and “threatening behavior” are too a large extent subjective.
Reread Young’s piece if you want examples of the problems with case law.
I love working at a commodity trading company. There is zero room for this sort of bullshit. Anecdote time:
Someone once got the idea to force employees to go to sensitivity training (not specifically gender-sensitivity, just general sensitivity).
The seminar opened with a general discussion of the impact of profanity. A couple minutes in, the Director of Trading announced, “It’s a fucking trading floor. If someone doesn’t like it, they can fucking leave. The door’s right over there,” and he left the room.
The guy leading the seminar packed it up and left. End of sensitivity training.
I’m torn on this. Why? because I’ve witnessed both unfair accusations of harrassment that rely on the accuser’s wildly hypersensitive or plainly inaccurate derivations of meaning from innocuous statements made by the accused, as well as seen some pretty ridiculous examples of overt sexual harrassment in the workplace.
So whether training programs designed to strike the fear of HR into employees do more harm than good, or do more good than harm, is a tricky balancing act. Mostly because people are – to a surprising degree – friggin’ animals. And women aren’t overtly singled out in most training videos I’ve had to sit through, though all instances of ridiculous accusations have come from women that avoid actual confrontation with the source of their angst. When guys get harrassed (and it’s happened to me), they typically just tell whoever is doing it to stop, forcefully.
As I noted in the previous thread, harassment training is motivated largely by capitalism: the desire to hang on to the money one’s company has raked in, as opposed to letting litigable (?) offenses occur in the workplace and get sued for them. It’s only political correctness in the sense that lack of at least lip service to the current legal paradigm can result in millions of dollars flying out of the company coffers.
So these teachers actually get paid because they’re ignorant. How do you get through life having never heard that expression before?
The school district certainly wasn’t niggardly… Oops sure hope I don’t get sued now
Bill, the company cares not if some accusations of sexual harassment cause strife in the workplace, career damage, etc. What they care about is cutting back on their liability in the matter.
Well, that and in the sense that companies managed to remain solvent for years before sexual harassment traning seminars were made mandatory…
The point being that PC has forced businesses to act in their legal interests at the expense of our dignity. Is this a net gain for the feminist movement? That’s one of the questions we need to explore here.
Can it truly be a function of capitalism when the driving force is a legal threat?
If they were holding these seminars – which largely are flowery depictions of common sense and decency – as a way to gain competitive advantage, I’d see it as a function of capitalism, as opposed to coercion.
Give me just about any law, and I can find a handful of examples that demonstrate how it has been misused and ill-applied. That doesn’t make the law worthless.
I think that a lot of the value in sexual harassment training is that it lays out exactly what’s legally acceptable and what’s not. I really don’t think it creates any division between the sexes—it just takes away the chance for a harasser to argue, “Well I didn’t know…”
Most of the examples that Young draws on are extremes. They don’t represent the majority of sexual harassment cases. And even a few of the points that she seems to think are ridiculous, I find quite reasonable—like the idea that a person shouldn’t continue to demonstrate outward displays of romantic interest in a co-worker, after the co-worker has made it clear that they aren’t interested. Workplace romance is one thing—trying to do my job while some guy who I’ve repeatedly turned down keeps hitting on me is another. Harassment training lets both women and men know that such behavior—even if it is just an overzealous display of misguided affection—isn’t appropriate. It protects the company, and it gives the power to the potential harasser to stop her/his behavior before it crosses the line.
In my experience, much of this comes packaged in the heavily PC-centric “sensitivity training” which includes mouthfuls of “diversity” and “multi-culti” jargon passed off as a guide to business behavior.
Aside from the fact that this “training” is a joke–albeit supporting huge incomes for those involved in this type of consulting work–it raises the concept of diplomatic speech-making to an art form. It also makes communication of any sort that might be considered confrontational, abrupt, forward, direct, out of bounds because it validates the recipients belief that their feelings count as regards what is said to them. “Thin skin” is rewarded, while “thick skin” is penalized in realm of business interpersonal communications.
Bad apples will always exist because there will always be impolite people with bad manners, but they should be sent to Emily Post. Yet we’ve so lowered the bar on acceptable behavior, vis-a-vis, the post-modern concept that there is no such thing as right and wrong behavior, the result being that we’ve deleted this knowledge from the culture, and transfered it to “gatekeepers” such that most don’t “know” the rules until arbitrarily brought down upon them.
But the left is consistent, for just as they would celebrate a muslim school girl wearing a hajib, while denying a Christian school girl a moment of silent prayer, so would they champion a woman employee’s ability to tell a sexually suggestive joke, just as they would demand that a male employee similarly acting to be fired.
Sure, if one accepts the notion that large corporations are nimble, policy-wise. Me, I go with the theory that the attention of giants can be obtained with enough ant-bites, over time.
I find the corporate ethics course far more injurious to the dignity, mostly because they presume a much lower general capacity to figure things out properly. All of these courses ought to be more firmly directed to where they’ll do the most good, IMO: to the people with the power to make decisions that matter. Me, my capability to engage in things like insider trading is, well, miniscule.
And, while I’m here:
Of course, just as any corporate policy implementation is (along with the nearly inevitable training). This is not to say that I agree with the direction things are going in, but I also see that women don’t tend to get treated the way they were a couple of decades ago, at least not in THIS industry. What’d be swell is if when we all achieve Enlightenment, the training goes away.
You and I are obviously attending different seminars. Mine are pretty matter-of-fact: this is acceptable behavior; this other thing is unacceptable, with examples, playacting, mocks, etc. Not what I call fun and interesting, but not even in the same hemisphere as “flowery”.
Another experience of sexual harassment training that differs widely from my own. Mine doesn’t go QUITE so far as to say that being nicer to women because they’re female is a no-no, but it comes close. Based on the scale of feedback I’ve seen here, I may very well have the best training available to American business.
Amen.
I think that’s an overly sweeping dismissal.
As women have been integrated into the workforce over the past couple of generations (as well as other paradigms, like acceptance of gays), there are some genuine social frictions going on, that if unchecked, could really screw up a workplace (and of course run afoul of discrimination laws).
In the past, there were no overt corporate policies to deal with these frictions. Now there are. And seeing as there are, what is the best way to communicate these policies?
Yeah, legal protection is a prime motivating factor, to be sure, but again, it’s not the only factor. As for sexual harrassment programs potentially causing oversensitivity, as Goldstein argues, well that doesn’t gel with the idea that these programs are simply a legal defense. Why? because if it’s a defense, what did these sexual harrassment policies arise in response to? Problems in the courts didn’t just spring from corporate sexual harrassment programs that didn’t exist yet. So if anything is to blame, it’s litigation AND legitimate responses to new cultural frictions, whereas the programs themselves just codify it.
But again,I’m not totally down on sexual harrassment policies – as again, people are effin’ animals. In suits.
On what grounds does an ifem, or libertarian fem, object to the oral contract (sorry), “if you suck my cock, you’ll get a promotion.”? Oughtn’t we all be free to enter in to any contract we choose?
Slart: I’m talking about training that goes beyond sexual harrassment, and into hostile workplace definitions, that obtains cultural and ethnic diversity sensitivities.
Let me put it plainly, good manners do not require “the best training available to American business.”
What value is there in taking away that chance, given that “Well I didn’t know” isn’t any sort of legal defense?
TW: “anti”. Caught me at last!
BTW, clarification to a previous comment:
Meant to very specifically caveat, in my experience in the workplace – I’ve never witnessed a man make a frivolous accusation about sexual harassment to HR that have been thrown out because they have no merit, though I’ve seen (or heard about) this numerous times with women employees. Is this because of the training programs? Dunno.
Agreed. By that same logic, do a handful of legitimate cases of harassment mean mandatory training is worthwhile?
Again, agreed up to a point. I have already noted that it’s perfectly understandable (though distasteful) that companies wish to cover themselves against legal liability. But again, we’re dealing with a calculus here. As somebody pointed out previously, how can we be sure what these seminars aren’t really doing is describing the boundaries within which harassers feel comfortable working? And then there are the secondary impacts that are laid out in the post. And the question for feminism is, are the secondary consequences worth the primary “remedy”?
I agree that advances can be “harassing” after a spell. And Young herself points out that many the most cited cases to ridiculed are “extreme”. But whether they are extreme or not is of less import to whether such extreme cases are legally actionable based upon the way we’ve defined harassment—particularly, the ideology that underlies much of the law.
Have we turned sex into power? Have we suggested women need special protections? Etc. These questions redound on feminism itself. Which is why the point is not so much is harassment training necessary (for some it might be, for others not), but rather, from a pragmatic perspective—and within the goals of feminism—is the way we go about “combatting” “it” worth the potential fallout from the insistance we do so?
Yanno, I’ve got all of those going on, too, and I manage not to be as much offended by them as I am by corporate ethics training.
But few people these days have decent manners. Surely you must have observed this, hanging around comments. It’s a little more mannered in real life, but not what I’d call “mannered”. And manners isn’t all of it; I’ve seen my boss asked to get the guys in the meeting coffee, and she was asked politely. I’ve seen a co-worker (who had the same education and just about the same training I did) asked to take notes at meetings, just because she had a level of clearance the secretaries didn’t have. Politely, too!
Anecdote, sure, but polite treatment of women as inferiors is not a step all the way up to them being equal participants.
I grant you I’ve only done a year or so of Title VII work but in my experience, its easy to make sexual harassment claims, its much harder to make those claims stick. My take on those cases is, I grab a co-workers ass, the co-worker must report me to her supervisor (or someone up the line), the supervisor has a talk with me and tells me its “inappropriate”. In the event I do it again, its sexual harassment. If there is not that warning, then its not.
Common sense in my mind. The ones who told me “This guy harassed me”, I’d always ask “did you report him”? 8 out of 10 times, the answer is no.
I appreciated the way Jeff slipped “lipservice” into the discussion.
The vague overreach of sexual harrassment law is what gives it its cool Darwinian side-effects.
The Phillip Seymour Hoffman characters of the white-collar world know that their every workplace interaction is constantly monitored for actionable evidence of their repugnant, defective sexuality; so they don’t get uppity with the fine Bettys in H.R.
The Chris Kleins of cubicleville don’t placate, because little short of “You will suck my cock for money, hosebag!” would be considered “unwelcome” from men of evident genetic prowess.
Over water coolers across the nation, right now, existing selective hierarchies are being strengthened. Millions more Betty Kleins are being born, and untold trillions of degenerate Hoffman-sperm are getting deflected to the barren landfills of Kleenex where they belong.
The only question we have today is whether the coming Title VII master race will venerate the totems of Thomasâ€â€the Long Dong Silver Tape, the Coke, the Pubeâ€â€the way the ancient Egyptians adulated the mighty dung beetle.
I, for one, believe it will be so.
Bullshit, Jill. I asked my (now) wife out for 5 months before she said yes. We’ve been married for 10 years now. We were both adults about it. We didn’t need any ‘sexual harrassment’ training to define our boundaries. In fact, if the policy at the place where we were both working had forced us through training, I’d more than likely have backed off waaaay before she finally relented, out of some misplaced fear that I was harrassing her on some way.
This is utter crap. It removes the obligations of people to be adults about it, and lets the nanny-state take one more intrusive step into our lives. You don’t like someone coming on to you? Tell them to fuck off. Stop telling me how I can and can’t interact with people around me. They’ll tell me themselves.
Also anecdotally, my (now) wife and I first met over the fax machine and had our first kiss at a happy hour that she organized for fellow employees. No legal exposure occurred for the company because our respective interests were reciprocal and neither of us reported in any way to the other. If it was one-sided and/or one of us was in the chain of command of the other, it would have been a no-no. And not because of any rules, either: it would have been asking for trouble. It was way too close to trouble for the comfort of either of us, at first.
As my first boss once said: Slart, don’t dip your pen in company ink. Of course, that particular warning was when I wanted to ask out my director’s secretary, who inconveniently happened also to be his daughter.
Science and Nukem—Great, great comments.
Slart: I think you’re making my point for me.
And that is manners–because they were previously characterized as good or bad–have been “outlawed” from usage due to their judgementalism.
When your female boss was asked to get coffee, did you volunteer to get the coffee, instead? Did anyone make fun of the person making said request? (No, because we no longer shame people into good manners.)
Why don’t people today have decent manners?
Perhaps you could explain the paradigm of post-modernism as it regards value judgements, in light of the drive to legally sanction interpersonal behavior.
Finally, politeness is not just about being deferential to women, and only women, and acting rudely does not accord women equality. And if I need to go beyond that brief explanation, it proves that etiquette has been deleted from our culture.
Given the cases on the fringes discussed by Ms. Young (and there have been 3 or so very important Supreme Court cases since 1998, alluded to by Matt, Esq., that make most of the jurisprudence cited moot), it would be extremely irresponsible for a risk-averse employer not to have sexual harrassment training. My experience has been like Slart’s; sure, a lot of intelligences will insulted for that hour or two per year, but clarifying misconceptions about the state of the law, or alerting them to internal grievance procedures, far outweighs that inconvenience.
The liberal lawsuits are turning this country into a humorless, joyless nation. As if it wasn’t bad enough that people are constantly afraid of sexual harrassments suits when they make innocent quips, now people are afraid to say “Merry Christmas” to one another. I hope the Congress passes that rumored Christmas Protection Act soon.
The law vis a vis “sexual harassment” should only concern itself with quid pro quo situations where there is unequal power positions (including teachers/student relationships).
Outside of that parameter, obnoxious behavior is the province of company policy or people, as adults, taking care of it themselves.
You know, that nasty phrase that makes Leftists break out in hives? Individual responsibility.
This is yet another instance of the consequences of substituting LAW for morality. As people have become ever more timid about making clear statements about what is right or wrong, so the list of statutes controlling even the most minute portion of private life increased.
And so has Estblishment Feminism infantilized women in the name of “empowering” them.
Oh, Slart? Regardless if some numbnutz asked your boss to get coffee, if at that point she didn’t look at the requester and politely refuse, then she is as guilty of helping perpetuate a stereotype as the requester.
Why don’t people today have decent manners?
Because, man, back in the 60’s we were about telling it like it is. “Politeness” is phoney, plastic stuff.
Keep it real, man!
When your female boss was asked to get coffee, did you volunteer to get the coffee, instead?
Nope, I wasn’t there at the time. Knowing me, though, I probably would have been too clueless to jump in that quickly.
Oh, God no. Please. Haven’t I mentioned that I hate this stuff?
Strike deferential; insert courteous, and I’m with you.
“telling like it is, man, after a big toke of weed” is more like it!
My experience has been like Slart’s; sure, a lot of intelligences will insulted for that hour or two per year, but clarifying misconceptions about the state of the law, or alerting them to internal grievance procedures, far outweighs that inconvenience.
If somebody wants to know about grievance procedures, all they have to do is crack open the company handbook. If you don’t read it, that’s your problem. No whiny handholding seminar needed.
TW: hand. I shit you not.
Um, Darleen? The year was 1983, the place was Texas, and the person asking was her boss’s boss, and the industry was one in which there was perhaps one or two women at her level in the company. One in which she was normally the only woman at any meeting. So, easy for you to say, maybe easy for you to do, but probably not quite so easy for someone not-you.
Slart
Sorry. I assumed your anecdote was more recent. Especially within the last 5-10 years I doubt anyone but the most card-carrying sexist would look at the only woman in conference room and tell her to go get coffee for “the boys.”
sure, a lot of intelligences will insulted for that hour or two per year, but clarifying misconceptions about the state of the law, or alerting them to internal grievance procedures, far outweighs that inconvenience.
But if I’m not mistaken, this is exactly what Jeff is arguing is the problem: companies have to be so concerned about any potential liability they may have in some unforeseen case of harrassment that the training sessions are necessitated by default. The argument is not that companies shouldn’t give the training sessions per se, but rather that the legal culture needs to be changed such that those training sessions become less necessary, or at least are not conducted out of fear of massive damage claims. Quite honestly, I couldn’t agree more.
Anecdote time part II.
I recently had to sit through a sexual harrassment training session myself, and two items from the session stuck out for me as particularly ridiculous and/or infantilizing (and just for context, I work in the financial industry, so it’s not as if this were Rainbow Coalition land):
1. It was noted to us that the company’s policy covers interactions between co-workers even outside of the workplace. This simply stunned me at the time, for what I imagine are fairly obvious reasons.
2. One of the “suggestions” for avoiding unintentional sexual harrassment was – and I promise, I shit you not here – “don’t stare”… because, you see, staring, even the unfocused absorbed-in-your-thoughts kind, can be construed as leering. Seriously. I felt bad for the dude who was giving the presentation, because it was clear that having to actually speak those words outside of a kindergarten class was more or less physically painful to him.
At this point, my only reason for being optimistic is that I think PC in general, and “sexual harrassment” culture specifically, is probably a self-defeating proposition: as the definition of what constitutes harrassment continues to broaden to ridiculous extremes, making targets of more and more guys who haven’t done a thing wrong, it’s bound to gradually build up a critical mass of injustice among the self-emasculated Oprah-metrosexual 90s guys who believe themselves immune from false charges and are therefore often as guilty of supporting this nonsense out of short-term self-interest and/or laziness as hyper-feminist women for their own reasons, which should make the culture slowly start to shift toward a more reasonable middle ground between Dolly Parton’s manager in “9 to 5” and whatever it is we have today.
Uh… my point was that, at work, after I’ve told them to fuck off a dozen times, it’s really inappropriate when they don’t fuck off. I was clear that I don’t think inter-office romances are necessarily problematic, but when I go to work every day and the same man/woman is approaching me repeatedly, asking me out or making sexualized comments after I’ve made it clear that such behavior is unwanted… well, I’m sorry, that’s just not justifiable.
Oh give me a fucking break. Who’s afraid to say “Merry Christmas”? Take a look around—Christmas is everywhere. There is no war. There are retailers making business decisions to say “Happy Holidays” so that their customs will be inclined to buy more shit—it’s not a great big liberal plot. Please, find me a private citizen who has had a lawsuit filed against him for wishing someone a merry christmas. Talk about a victim complex…
This is pretty much what’s already happening. Most companies have sexual harassment policies specifically to avoid litigation. They deal with it within the company, in the province of company policy. The vast majority of sexual harassment complaints are never dealt with in the legal system, they’re solved at the company level.
Anecdotal example: When I worked as a lifeguard in college, my boss, who also coached the men’s swim team, constantly asked me and the other female guards to go get him diet coke from the vending machines during swim practice—usually in front of the entire men’s swim team (he was standing on the deck, and could have done it just as easily himself). If a female guard was in the break room, he’d have her do it. But if only male guards were in the break room, he’d ask a female guard on deck to leave her post to go buy him a soda. In three years working for him, I never once saw a male guard on soda duty. So yeah, he’s certainly a card-carrying sexist, but they definitely still exist.
I hoped that was the case, Darleen. Still, some are ahead of their times, and can carry it off. This woman had grown up in the culture, so it took her more aback than angered her. She was angry, afterward, and in later iterations I believe took what I like to think of as the “clumsiness initiative”, which probably ruined a few pairs of trousers.
Smart, smart woman, but unfortunately was (at least at first) considered more for her cuteness value. I’m no sociologist, but at the time it was my impression that Texas was trailing the rest of the nation in the realization that women were at least as smart as men, and certainly as inclined to (when the urge took them) make something more of their life than what their childhood had prepared for them. The divorce rate in Texas at the time was just about the highest in the US, so I thought that was a decent explanation. Could be complete bullshit, but we didn’t have Snopes back then.
Just what I’ve been saying, Jill: it’s less a paradigm shift at the corporate level than it is a realization that they’ve got to take certain additional measures to avoid litigation. Much of corporate policy is litigation avoidance, which doesn’t make the policy a bad thing in and of itself.
There are retailers making business decisions to say “Happy Holidays†so that their customs will be inclined to buy more shitâ€â€it’s not a great big liberal plot.
If that were the case, I’d be more accepting. But I believe that’s not the reason, since most shoppers do celebrate Christmas. I think it is (a) because of fear of ACLU lawsuits and (b) the fact that many elites in this country are atheist, or at least non-Christians.
<objection is twofold: first, that sexual harassment training tends to stigmatize men and is often singled out among the myriad potential workplace offenses that we “educate†against, giving it special weight; and second, that “harassment†itself, because it is by nature a personal reaction to the actions of others (rather than an easily decided-upon objective category of behavior), is almost by necessity too broadly defined.</blockquote>
As you indicated above in the comment thread, there’s not going to be easily obtained empirical evidence to back up the first point (or to counter it). Since we’re both speaking anecdotally, then: How does sexual harrassment training stigmatize men? As I indicated, I’ve attended a mulitude of different sexual harrassment/diversity training sessions, and they’ve all been very careful to be neutral in this regard. I don’t intend to make the mistake of a hasty generalization, so I won’t claim my experience proves an overall trend. Are my experiences unique? Do others have experience with sexual harrassment training that specifically targets/stigmatizes men?
As for an the devleopment of an objective category of objectionable behavior, I honestly don’t see how you could ever define it ahead of time to address all the possible scenarios. I guess you can debate the standard that’s going to be applied (an issue addressed in the article you cited), but you’ll still end up with a subjective application of whatever standard you choose.
You highlighted this segment:
My question here is: Does anyone actually see this as a harm to the “tens of millions of people”? Is it a hardship to keep sexual humor out of the workplace, or for a company to implement the safeguard of ensuring that relationships in the workplace are welcome?
As for the argument some are making in the comment thread that there should only be protections against quid pro quo harrassment, and the other stuff (i.e. hostile work environments) should be resolved as a matter of personal responsibility, I want to make sure I understand the argument. Is it a libertarian argument, that if you don’t like it you can work somewhere else? Because telling someone to stop isn’t necessarily going to make the behavior stop, no matter how much of a hard-core rugged individualist you are. For example: It wouldn’t be quid pro quo harrassment if there’s one female employee in a group of ten, and the guys continuously call her names and ask her if she wants to screw all day, all with the employer’s knowledge and consent. Are you saying the government has no role in that type of stuff, or am I misunderstanding the argument? I honestly don’t mean to put up a strawman.
As a follow-up, I agree that taken as a whole, these seminars are useless. As pointed out above by Norbiz, you’d be surprised how many people are clueless about what the sexual harassment laws are. You CAN be sued for asking out a co-worker, if he or she says no but it is highly unlikely said co-worker would win. What it comes down to is having a pretty clear sexual harassment policy in place- the company I dealt with had a hotline that its employees could call, eliminating any problem with having to report a supervisor’s behavior. You want your employees to know their rights as well as their remedies.
The seminars are generally pretty mind numbing but there’s usually a nugget or two of information contained within thats worth hearing.
Most companies have sexual harassment policies specifically to avoid litigation.
The problem is that the policies are in response to LAWS that are far, far beyond quid pro quo.
And a lot of very weird POWER struggles take place due to those “it’s all in the perception of the ‘victim’ no matter WHAT” policies.
Since we are trading anecdotes (and this took place about 10 years ago). My sister was at the time working for a major defense contractor and among a lot of engineers (mostly male). Another woman on the floor used to deliberately hover just outside of office doors or cubicles to eavesdrop on male co-workers and would then complain to the bosses about them if they were telling ribald jokes. She also had an engineer written up for sexual harassment because he had displayed on his desk one of those kitschy souvenir Hawaiian hula doll his kids had gotten him (“world’s best dad”).
About 15 years ago my (now ex) husband worked for a major financial institution. He and a male coworker were having lunch in the company lunchroom. A woman co-worker, a peer of theirs, was one table over leafing through a magazine and then offered it to them to read when she was done. The men (just a couple of months after one of the HR run “sexual harassment” seminars) held up their hands and said “No! No we can’t be seen reading that in here.” She shrugged her shoulders and took the magazine back to her office. Said magazine? The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.
My question here is: Does anyone actually see this as a harm to the “tens of millions of people�
The harm I see, IMHO of course, is the wide potential of abuse because of the unequal power being wielded when one accepts perception divorced from reality.
Heck, it doesn’t even have to be sexual harassment. I have a co-worker that has the bosses cowed because, despite the fact of her demonstrated incompetence, sloth and rudeness she has threatened them with lawsuits over racial discrimination if she is ever fired (consequently they just keep moving her from desk to desk and let other co-workers clean up her mess… yes, she’s a government union worker… the stereotype that gives the rest of us a bad name).
Of course they appear neutral. But that doesn’t cancel out our knowledge of why we are having them, who lodges the majority of complaints, and who the perceived predators are.
Unscientific, but look at the assumptions of which sex plays which role in the harassment dynamic in the comments to this thread. Doesn’t that suggest the very kind of ingrained gender stereotyping we’re looking to overcome?
Now we’re back to language and intent. Having been labeled a “sexist” for a bit of irony—one that was playing on established stereotypes, the different reactions people have to those stereotypes being invoked, context, etc.—I say YES, indeed it is a hardship to keep said humor out of the workplace, particularly when sex is refigured as power, and what some people find funny others may find offensive. If you can’t be sure what’s going to trigger offense, you should simply keep your mouth shut altogether.
Is that where we want to be? Not me. If I offend you, fine, tell me. But does that me you should have recourse against me because you are offended? Depends on the severity of the incident, I suppose, but because companies wish to err on the side of caution, we’re into dangerous free speech grounds here. And again, the question is: do such programs provide a net benefit for the idea of gender equality?
Jill: You are in need of a humor gene. You told someone to eff-off and after a dozen times they still persisted. The whole workplace should’ve been making jokes about him by the 3rd or 4th try–because everybody would know that it was impolite of him to pester someone after the second strike. I’d be laughing at such a soul, making fun of him, and why not–he is a joke. Why would you allow such a small-minded person to have such an intimidating effect on your emotions?
And your lifeguard story, please. Your responsibility is for swimming safety, and you didn’t have the determination to resist infantile behavior. Why do you think he never asked any of the male lifeguards to get him a Coke? Because they’d tell him to eff-off in your terminology. If you had done that, he probably would’ve shown you the respect shown to the male lifeguards, but you let him push you around–and he did, because he could.
You may not like it, it might not be fair, but it’s not necessarily sexist. Life has lots of rough and tumble to it, but if you see every bit of unfairness towards a woman as sexist, you’re no different than a hammer that sees every problem in life as a nail…
Jill, you carry on about how women are persecuted, but it really is others who are persecuted by the tyranny of frivolous lawsuits. My friend can’t put up a Christmas display in the the park by his house because the town is afraid of getting sued by the ACLU. That is persecution based on beliefs.
THAT’S NOT FUNNY!
Um, why doesn’t he put it in his yard?
Um, why doesn’t he put it in his yard?
His lot is too small. It’s really just a driveway in front. He asked all of his neighbors (not all of whom are Christian) and they said it was fine. They even offered to pitch in. But the town won’t allow it because they’re afraid of being sued. This is another example of why we need a Christmas protection act.
YES IT IS!
Are you saying the government has no role in that type of stuff, or am I misunderstanding the argument?
Being obnoxious (to a peer) is morally suspect, certainly indecent, but is it illegal?
If it rises to the point of threat, of course it is. Otherwise…
Can an overweight person in a office of thins expect to have legal standing if the thins are calling him/her names and asking “hey, want some Twinkies?” all day?
Such behavior is loathesome and a decent employer will not tolerate obnoxious behavior, regardless of context.
But I question the reaction to LITIGATE every instance of obnoxious behavir.
We’re talking about the workplace, though. Do you think it’s the best place to use irony to play on, say, gender and racial stereotypes for the benefit of humor? And if one claims benign intent (“I was just kidding, dude, subverting the stereotype!”) is it a shield against any accusation? I don’t feel cheated by leaving those topics and questions for the non-work environment.
And while I’m sure we could all find case outcomes with which we disagree, someone finding something offensive is not a guarantee that their employer would take disciplinary action, or that they would have a successful court case.
Well, I guess it’s a matter of opinion, and my response would be yes. I’d prefer what some might consider an overly sterile workplace to the alternative of insufficient safeguards, which was the previous environment. Perhaps there’s a better happy medium that could be charted, but I’m addressing the net benefit question you’ve posed.
There is so much in the post and comments worthy of more elaboration that it’s
harddifficult to make a comment on just one or two points.One thing that really stands out is this label:
It pretty much summarizes the “bleeding edge” of modern feminism. Earlier feminism called attention to the power vested in a human because she was female. Now, the tendency is to see all humankind as sexless. Not too far a stretch from the unsexual tones of Victorian-era morality.
The real irony is introduced when some in the feminist camp champion the cause of helping teens and preteens “embrace their sexuality” and see themselves as “sexual beings.”
I thought you asked me. And I would feel cheated if I had to significantly alter my personality.
There are many different kinds of workplaces. It is easier to button your lip in some than others, I suspect.
Of course not. But it can still be used as a weapon, because it comes with a taint. And that’s the thing. It doesn’t take much anymore to level accusations—be it of racism, sexism, etc., on the flimsiest of pretenses. Why? Because we’ve created an environment that wants to guard against offense and take great care not to dishonor the “victim.” Is it really a surprise that people would learn to game that system?
You’re right that it’s a matter of opinion as to how effective the “harassment” era has been. I tend to think it further stifles speech, creates irrational fears, thwarts natural candid interaction, and takes away a great deal of agency while granting too much power to the aggrieved.
And the net benefit question had do with feminism on whole, not the workplace on whole.
Smithy, just out of curiosity, where do you live? Because where I live, there are lots of people who don’t celebrate Christmas, but who are still buying lots of stuff this seaon.
Ah, sorry I wasn’t very clear in that explanation—I used the first-person as a way of illustrating a situation which, in my opinion, is harassing, not a personal anecdote. I was working from Cathy Young’s suggestion that repeated advances aren’t harassment. It didn’t actually happen to me. I was trying to address a general policy.
You’ve got to be kidding. First of all, he was my boss, and was probably 50 years old—I was 18, and didn’t really want to lose my job by telling my boss to fuck off. I don’t think the male lifeguards would have told him to fuck off, either—he just never thought to ask them. And, sorry, but systematically asking the female lifeguards to do him demeaning little favors that aren’t in the job description that he never asked the male guards to do is sexism. It’s not rocket science to figure that one out.
And I can’t put up my “Islam is the One True Religion, Praise Allah” sign in City Hall! I’m being persecuted for my beliefs! Waaah!
Plus, what Lauren said. Do it on your own private property and you won’t get sued. Christ.
Darleen,
Thanks for the response. I think reasonable people can differ on where the behavioral line is drawn (the standard is subjective), but would you agree that it is appropriate to have a legal remedy for hostile environment issues of any kind? Or do you think that the government has no business in it at all?
Jeff,
Okay, I understand your position. I disagree on that matter of opinion, because for me the harm of any restrictions on my personality are outweighed by the benefits of the increased fairness in the workplace.
Well, the alleged victim still has to prove it. And if the company responds incorrectly with respect to their investigation, maintenance of confidentiality, or ultimate decision, I suspect the accused would have their own avenue to pursue.
Feminism on the whole? Yep, I see a clear net benefit on multiple fronts.
Humor? Ah… yes. One of your earth emotions I believe. Highly illogical, especially in a work environment. This sense of humor sounds most inconvenient—have you considered having it removed?
Matt, Esq. – What you cite as vindication for the current sexual harassment regime is actually an indictment. Every “easy to make, hard to make stick” case costs time and money (probably including attorney’s fees).
This reminds me of the EEOC’s statement a couple of years ago that employer complaints about employment discrimination law were unjustified because 95% of jury trials ended in a defense verdict. In saying this, the EEOC got it exactly backward. The fact that, in nineteen of twenty cases, the employer spent $75,000-100,000 defending itself from claims the jury found to be without merit shows not that there is widespread discrimination in need of correction but that there is a widespread willingness of employees to bring meritless claims.
Luckily, that isn’t the reaction. Most instances of obnoxious behavior, including sexually harassing behavior, aren’t litigated.
Wow. This would be funny, if you weren’t serious. A Christmas Protection Act? Because no one can celebrate Christmas at all anymore, with all these (Jewish? Atheist?) grinches having the audacity to wish you Happy Holidays, right? It’s just wrong that we recognize that a number of other holidays (including New Years) happen this time of year; we must recognize Christmas as the only one, and institute Christian displays on all public and government property. Otherwise, Christmas might die! Christians are being persecuted! The government must respond with a law that will inevitably be struck down as unconstitutional, because that’s what Jesus wants!
Please tell me I’m not the only one on this thread who thinks that Smithy is a little off.
What are the net benefits for feminism?
Do it on your own private property and you won’t get sued
Hmmmm… maybe I should keep that in mind the next time I see
anti-war, peaceAnti-Western protestors in the local public park. Wonder who I can get to threaten the city officials about suing because I’m offended, offended I tell you.I would argue mixed consequences of discrimatory policies on feminism. If anything I would argue that sexual harassment policies have done a number on the public perception of feminism.
Running out of the house but will check in later tonight.
^discriminatory
Most instances of obnoxious behavior, including sexually harassing behavior, aren’t litigated.
I guess we are at the chicken/egg crossroads. I suspect a lot are not litigated because HR summarily punishes the “offender” to placate the accuser, regardless of merit.
Not exactly the morale builder in the workplace one would want.
Kinda like the very expensive, defensive medicine practiced by doctors afraid of malpractice lawsuits.
I’m with Lauren. I’ll argue it in more detail later if needs be, but right now I need to run out and buy Death Race 2000.
“After the women complained, the district assigned an outside attorney to investigate, but that probe inadvertently lapsed….”
He said “probe!” Harrassment!
RE Net benefits for feminism (sorry, I was reading that as “of” before): Despite the PR issue cited by Lauren, sexual harrassment policies have expanded opportunities for women that were previously restricted by discriminatory practices. Seems like a good deal to me.
I think smithy was a little bizarre, but it’s always possible that DougJ has chosen a new handle.
AHA!
Hmmmm… maybe I should keep that in mind the next time I see anti-war, peace Anti-Western protestors in the local public park. Wonder who I can get to threaten the city officials about suing because I’m offended, offended I tell you.
That’s a very good point, Darleen, and one I hadn’t thought of. Explain to me, Jill, why Christmas revelers shouldn’t be given the same rights as anti-war protesters?
Hubris
I think reasonable people can differ on where the behavioral line is drawn (the standard is subjective), but would you agree that it is appropriate to have a legal remedy for hostile environment issues of any kind?
IMHO the line for <objective as possible. And company policy vis a vis employees should not be dictated solely by <i>legal liability</i> considerations. It’s just good business practice to have the rights, responsibilities and obligations clearly spelled out in the employee handbook. It shouldn’t have to rely upon some professional harassment shaman to come in and interpret the HR holy tome to the unwashed employee minions.
They don’t? Tell me more.
The Constitution does grant a right of assembly, but it doesn’t say anything about assembling displays and then leaving them there. At least, the copy I have doesn’t.
oh gawd… flubbed the tags… should be
“IMHO the line for legal remedies need be as strict and objective as possible.”
Slart
I guess then when the local Peace&Justice (sic) group sets up their Bu$hitler/annihilate Israel displays for a 3 day period in the local park, I’ll just attempt a SLAPP manuever on the city officials.
Hey it worked to get the dreaded Instrument of Torture off the Los Angeles County Seal!
Yeah, I can just see a bunch of Christmas protestors:
HO HO HO
WE WON’T GO!
NOEL NOEL
OR GO TO HELL!
Anti-protesters don’t wear funny hats.
And they don’t wave their genitalia about, as far as I’ve seen. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
I’m not really bothering to read the entirety of this thread–or even the initial post, because it was too long and I’m just scanning through things–so forgive me if I’m just coming in and disrupting the flow of argumentation, but I’m still not getting why this guy needed someone else to get him drinks? I mean, you’re pretty young, right? When you were 18 that was how many years ago? When I was around that age and someone I worked for asked me to do some demeaning thing, I, like most kids my age, let my overwhelming sense of entitlement boil up to the surface pretty quickly. At 18 though I had already been a retail-level manager who had the run of a Kinko’s-style graphic design center, so I came into future jobs with a misplaced sense of responsibility/authority. Still, I find it hard to believe that a strong/outspoken blogger/commenter like yourself would suddenly be paralyzed by fear that you may lose what sounds like some crappy summer job, all for speaking truth to power about some sexist asshole. I don’t know what your financial/home situation was back then (FWIW I hope they were both solid, and if they were not I don’t mean any disrespect), but I’d like to think you would be doing everyone there a big favor by telling this guy to go fuck himself, or bringing up the matter to his superiors, etc. What about the girls/women working there the next year, or the year after that, etc?
Hmmmm… maybe I should keep that in mind the next time I see anti-war, peace Anti-Western protestors in the local public park. Wonder who I can get to threaten the city officials about suing because I’m offended, offended I tell you.
Christmas revelers are given the exact same rights as anti-war protesters. But just as anti-war protesters can’t erect a massive religious display on public property and leave it there, neither can Christmas revelers.
If the Christmas revelers wanted to go the route of anti-war protesters and get a permit for their affair, they could rally away. And I’d imagine that, even without a permit, a group of Christmas revelers wouldn’t be kicked out of a public park.
No one is suing simply because they’re “offended.” They’re bringing actions because it’s a church/state religious establishment issue when a governmental entity places a religious symbol on public/goverment grounds (and, by the way, Christmas trees aren’t really disputed; the problems tend to come with more overtly religious symbols, like nativity scenes or crosses/crucifixes). Can’t say the same thing for a protest, which is a right to assembly issue. See here.
I’d also just like to throw it out there that in my public park (Washington Square), in the middle of Greenwich Village in New York City, the home to just about every Liberal Communist ACLU Jew Feminist Atheist Christmas-hater in the country, there’s a giant Christmas tree. Just sayin’.
Darleen-
How is this a religious display that comprises the separation of church and state?
” I don’t think the male lifeguards would have told him to fuck off, eitherâ€â€he just never thought to ask them.”
Two assumptions, not facts, in evidence.
“And, sorry, but systematically asking the female lifeguards to do him demeaning little favors that aren’t in the job description that he never asked the male guards to do is sexism.”
I’m sorry, but your boss asks you to get him a Coke, and it’s a demeaning little favor? Because it’s not in your job description? Oh, and the phrase, “other duties as may be required…” wasn’t part of the job description…for a lifeguard! That’s right, I forgot…you’re a rocket scientist, and doing favors is demeaning to your heralded status!
Let’s try the saying, “Go along, to get along.” Does it ring any bells with you? The Golden Rule. “What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander.”
(Oh, and aren’t you one of the law school student bloggers at Feministe? How will you be responding to your 50 year old bosses, your first year out of law school? Or when you’re clerking for a judge? Who do you think is getting the Cokes, then?)
You do need a humor transplant. (And for that, you’ll accuse me of being sexist, I’m sure.)
Yup, a boss requesting a favor [to get a Coke] is sexism, and there’s no other explanation? But you just stated that “he just never thought to ask [the male lifeguards].”
So to recap, you’re 18, it’s a summer job, and in your vast array of work experience, a request to get a Coke is sexism. But, but, but, I couldn’t resist the request because I don’t think the male lifeguards would tell the boss to eff-off, either!
You need to grow up too! That’s a recommendation, not an insult, ‘cuz, ya know, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out!
hmmm…..
whoa,now…
(not safe for work, or the overly sensitive)
Darleen and smithy:
I think the argument works better if you reference Atheists, etc protesting.
Other than Smoke Van Thorne, there has been no mention of the elephant in the room. Employers face a minimum of $40,000.00 just to defend themselves against various EPLI lawsuits <b>when they win!<i>. This is not even considering “disperate impact” suits. The employee, remember, does not pay for the initial court cases. He brings his complaint to the state, and the state bleeds the employer first. Then the employee gets to take whack at him, using a lawyer who will take the case for a cut.
Can anyone blame an (often) small business employer who wishes to build as much of a wall around him as possible? I don’t have $40 G’s to be throwing around, so I have EPLI insurance. Well, that’s about $3,500.00, IIRC. And it covers only up to a certain dollar amount.
Also, as an employer, I am irked that I have to consider claims as virtual proof, forcing the defending employee to prove innocence. I can see where the reverse places a huge burden on the accuser in a potentially unsupportive environment, but still, why is eliminating this great assumption of innocence we have in this country any better?
None of this debate exists in a vacuum. The damage has a lot of victims. Politics has done this.
Jill, just to make it clear, the SH training guide I mentioned said that any romantic overtures after a SINGLE rejection constituted sexual harassment.
It wasn’t talking about “a dozen times.”
That’s not what I said. First, not to nitpick, but it wasn’t a summer job, it was my school-year job for three and a half years of college. And he didn’t just ask me to get a Coke once—my point was that it was a systematic sex-based request. He asked almost all of the female lifeguards to get him a coke, at one point or another. He never asked the male lifeguards. Was it a dumb job and a stupid situation? Sure. But I was just using it to illustrate a point, as a response to another commenter.
Sorry, I must have missed the part where you were actually funny.
Employers face a minimum of $40,000.00 just to defend themselves against various EPLI lawsuits
That’s a lot to have to pay just for having held a Christmas party. We really do need legislation to deal with this.
Why did you feel your university/whatever would be unsympathetic to your claims of sexist treatment by your boss? This isn’t … I dono, the 50s or something. People take these things seriously, even if you don’t. But you do take it seriously, so I’m confused all the more. Again, when I’ve been in similar situations, I’ve asserted myself–even as a “kid”–because a) fuck ‘em, and b) I knew that if I didn’t stand-up I’d be walked over, and I didn’t want to work in that sort of environment in the first place. Why didn’t you challenge your boss? Go over his head? I mean, isn’t he just going to be demeaning the other women who work for him? Couldn’t you have spoken up and done something about the situation, once and for all?
OK – now that’s funny:
I suppose I should read Cathy Young’s examples before I launch into this, because maybe she covers it.
Sexual harassment of the type ‘do this or you’ll lose your job’ is easy to spot and can’t be tolerated. Most of the rest are attempts to govern human behavior in the workplace when personal relationships and interpersonnel relationships are almost too difficult and too varied to cover.
The most uncomfortable work environment I encountered wasn’t the one where co-workers told dirty jokes or asked each other out or talked about which co-workers were hot.
It was the one where the boss and his co-worker buddies would go every Friday night to the local strip club and get lap dances, and on occasion leave their wives behind and go on golf outings for which they’d hired hookers. All non-company related, so the company had little say.
I’d rather have some dude asking me out every Friday night than have to give a presentation to my boss on Friday afternoon knowing he’s just counting the minutes til he can hit the Champagne Room.
And as far as the asking out thing goes- would it be less comfortable for some guy that is being asked to join the guy’s poker night every Friday if he doesn’t want to? It isn’t sexual harassment, but it’s just as annoying. What about in my office mentioned above, if he were asked every Friday if he wanted to go see the strippers? Uncomfortable? Sexual harrassment?
I’ve had bosses sleeping with co-workers that were more fair to me than bosses that had a best friend in the department. Should non-sexual relationships be governed?
I think very rarely does sexual harrassment need to be singled out from other types of behavior, and often misses the most egregious workplace transgressions. Yet it has its own class.
I’ve written this pretty sloppily, but its early so forgive me.
Why didn’t she report it? Well, probably because, as silly as the whole Get Me a Coke Thou Harlot story sounds here, it would sound twice as silly in real life. Also, the incredible burden of the shame spiral she was in for succumbing to the will of that oppressive patriarchical overlord was probably too overwhelming, and I hope she gets help for that someday, I do, before it devours her very soul.
I’m lucky that any woman I employ in my industry would be more likely to knock your teeth down your throat than file some jumped up complaint; Amazon feminists all. Somebody must have forgotten to inform them what victims they are.
What’s amazing to me how easy it is for one bad actor to embroil a small business in back-breakingly expensive litigation on a mere accusation… Makes me wonder what the cost benefit analysis of hiring a woman looks like these days.
Could establishment feminism be hurting women’s interests here? Noooo..
I don’t know, probably because, to me, it was just an on-the-job annoyance. I didn’t particularly like it, but it wasn’t to the extent that it made me uncomfortable or unhappy to be at my job. I bring it up here not because it was a defining life moment for me, but because it directly related to the topic at hand (bosses asking female employees to fetch them coffe/soda/etc). Should I have said something? Sure. But I didn’t. Don’t we all have those moments when we look back and wish we had acted differently? I suppose this is one of those. I’m not a perfect feminist. I don’t always stand up for myself or others when I should. Sorry.
Actually, that would be rather interesting. Multiply the percentage of failed harrassment lawsuits are brought about by women times the total number of such suits times the average cost of defense in such a suit: divide that total by the total number of women in the workforce, and that gives an indicator of what the nominal penalty of hiring a woman is.
Here’s a question – should women be paid less to cover that added average expense?
When it’s car insurance rates, people get jacked all the time for group identity. Women tend to have lower insurance rates because they get in to fewer accidents. But if women are more likely to cost an employer money through spurious litigation, then should they be paid less.
Or, to put it another way, if companies have to take out EPLI insurance to protect them against such suits, should companies that will, statistically have fewer lawsuits, be charged less?
What if there is a strong correlation between the likelyhood of a lawsuit and the presence of women in that workplace?
TW: So what, exactly is the moral of this story?
Let me rephrase:
spurious rather than failed lawsuits.
Apologies for the slip and its implication.
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