Sexual Harassment. The campaign to criminalize sexual harassment in the workplace began in the late 1970s. In cases brought to the federal courts, the lawyer Catharine MacKinnon sought to classify sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination in violation of
civil rights legislation. In 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) adopted three tests for determining whether “unwelcome verbal or physical conduct” in the workplace violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans sex discrimination in employment. Under EEOC guidelines, the unwelcome conduct had to be: (1) “quid pro quo” behavior that made submission to sex an explicit or implicit condition of advancement, (2) behavior that “unreasonably interferes with an individual's job performance,” or (3) behavior that creates an “intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment.”
The
Supreme Court endorsed both the concept of sexual harassment as sex discrimination and the hostile‐environment test in
Meritor Savings Bank v.
Vinson (1986), a case brought by a bank employee against a supervisor. Defining a hostile environment, however, proved difficult. In
Ellison v.
Brady (1991), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that issues of sexual harassment and the climate of the working environment should be evaluated from the perspective of a “reasonable woman.” In
Harris v.
Forklift Systems (1993), the Supreme Court defined a hostile environment as one that a “reasonable person” would find hostile, abusive, or detrimental to job performance. A series of Supreme Court decisions in 1998 and 1999 extended employer liability for workplace harassment and further clarified the scope of sexual harassment law.
In
Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), MacKinnon defined sexual harassment as “an unwanted imposition of sexual requirements in the context of a relationship of unequal power.” Researchers in the 1980s agreed that sexual harassment was an abuse of power and a way to control or intimidate employees. Some studies found the greatest sexual harassment in occupations where women were new or in a minority, such as blue‐collar jobs. Other studies held that women in white‐collar work, such as office employees, were the most common targets. Surveys in the 1980s found that 42 percent of women employed in federal agencies had experienced harassment, as had 14 percent of the men. However, under 20 percent of workers who felt they had been harassed complained to their superiors, and even fewer left their jobs or pressed charges.
The issue gained national visibility in 1991, when the law‐school professor Anita Hill, a former aide to the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, accused him of offensive conduct a decade earlier when he had been her superior at the Department of Education and as head of the EEOC. Hill's testimony before the all‐male Senate Judiciary Committee during the Thomas hearings spurred an increase in harassment complaints and impelled several women to run for Congress in 1992. A few weeks after the Thomas hearings, Congress passed a civil rights law that for the first time awarded damages to victims of discrimination, including sexual harassment. The later 1990s brought an upsurge of highly publicized sexual‐harassment charges, particularly in the
military, as well as an accusation against President Bill
Clinton by a former Arkansas state employee involving an alleged incident while he was governor of that state. The charge led indirectly to
impeachment of the president, though not to conviction.
See also
Civil Rights;
Feminism;
Gender;
Women in the Labor Force;
Women's Rights Movements.
Bibliography
Laura W. Stein, ed., Sexual Harassment in America: A Documentary History, 1999.
Nancy Woloch
