Sexual Harassment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa M. Beiner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Sex Discrimination ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Court System ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Sexual Harassment Law ◽  
Discrimination In Employment ◽  
Sexual Harassment Policies ◽  
Feminist Organizing

This chapter explores the origins, development, and current status of workplace sexual harassment law. Sexual harassment law owes its genesis to a combination of grass-roots feminist organizing and legal feminist theorizing. After initial losses in the courts, feminist lawyers and their clients scored significant victories in the court system. Employers and those accused of discrimination soon fought back, including by participating in the development of an extensive system of training and anti-sexual harassment policies that have not proven helpful to targets of sexual harassment. Feminist legal scholars have offered critiques of the courts’ decisions, taking a variety of approaches to increasing the law’s efficacy and extending its reach to encompass the experiences of men, women of color, and sexual minorities. Yet, plaintiffs using Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the main federal antidiscrimination statute applicable to sex discrimination in employment, continue to find themselves thrust out of court due to formalistic rules developed in the court system. This has led other scholars to suggest different legal approaches to address this persistent and disturbing form of workplace discrimination. Whether current grass-roots campaigns like the #MeToo movement will prove more effective than prior legal efforts remains to be seen.

Sexual harassment of critical care nurses: a costly workplace issue

1994 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 409-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Kaye ◽  
CG Donald ◽  
S Merker
Keyword(s):  
Critical Care ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Sex Discrimination ◽  
Critical Care Nurses ◽  
Physical Contact ◽  
Policies And Procedures ◽  
Discrimination In Employment ◽  
The Media ◽  
Sexual Harassment Policies ◽  
Definition Of

BACKGROUND. Sexual harassment in the workplace is a prevalent form of impermissible sex discrimination in employment. The high profile of this issue in the media, together with laws prohibiting sexual harassment, have not prevented this problem for working nurses. OBJECTIVES. To describe and determine the extent of sexual harassment incidents experienced by nurses working in critical care areas, and to determine attitudes about, and presence of policies regarding, sexual harassment in hospitals. METHODS. For this descriptive study the federal government's definition of sexual harassment and a list of sexually harassing behaviors was mailed with a survey to 188 critical care nurses. RESULTS. Findings indicated that 46% of the respondents had been harassed. Offensive sexual remarks (56%), unwanted physical contact (53%), unwanted nonverbal attention (27%), requests for dates (16%), and sexual propositions (9%) were types of sexual harassment experienced. Sexual assault was experienced by one woman. Harassers were physicians (82%), coworkers (20%), or immediate supervisors (7%). A majority of the incidents (69%) were not reported. Most nurses (80%) had not received training, nor were there policies and procedures to follow in most cases for reporting harassment. CONCLUSIONS. These results suggest that many critical care nurses are harassed and that relatively few hospitals have sexual harassment policies known to employees. They also indicate that sexual harassment training, policies, and procedures are needed to provide a safe, healthy work environment for critical care nurses.

scholarly journals Recent Developments in Sexual Harassment Law: Towards a New Model

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Mackay
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Sex Discrimination ◽  
Power Imbalance ◽  
Persistent Problem ◽  
New Model ◽  
Senate Committee ◽  
Sexual Harassment Law ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Positive Duties ◽  
Males And Females

<p>Despite more than 20 years of sexual harassment being unlawful, it is still a persistent problem in Australian workplaces and one which is grossly under-reported. The law is this area should seek both to redress the harm<br />suffered by the victim and to reduce the power imbalance between males and females. The effectiveness of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 in achieving these objectives was reviewed by a Senate Committee in 2008.<br />One of its recommendations was for positive duties to be imposed on employers to eliminate sexual harassment. This article outlines how this recommendation might be implemented, and taken further, by shifting the<br />onus away from the victim and onto the more powerful players in any sexual harassment scenario – the harasser, the employer and the community in the relevant workplace.</p>

Privacy, Efficiency, and the Equality of Men and Women: A Revisionist View of Sex Discrimination in Employment

1981 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-636
Author(s):  
Mayer G. Freed ◽  
Daniel D. Polsby
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Sex Discrimination ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Maintenance Of Sex ◽  
Considerable Debate ◽  
Discrimination In Employment ◽  
Per Se

The Supreme Court's decision inCity of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power v. Manharthas engendered a considerable debate, much of which has appeared in the pages of thisJournal. Defenders of theManhartdecision take its critics to task for failure to appreciate the place of that decision in the overall jurisprudence of employment discrimination. In this article, the authors challenge the underlying conception of the law of sex discrimination that is said to dictate the result inManhart. Far from erecting a per se rule against all sex classifications, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is shown to recognize both the relevance of prevalent social norms about sex differences and the legitimacy of certain interests of employers as limited justifications for the maintenance of sex-conscious lines in some circumstances, a recognition that contrasts sharply with the statute's categorical prohibition on racial classifications. It follows from this discussion thatManhart'soutcome was not ordained by the ethos of the laws against sex discrimination.

The Title IX Movement Against Campus Sexual Harassment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Chi Cantalupo
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Title Ix ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Campus Sexual Assault ◽  
Feminist Organizing ◽  
Feminist Movements ◽  
Remarkable Progress

Beginning in 2009, hundreds of thousands of students and their allies began to mobilize against campus sexual assault, organizing around the groundbreaking civil rights statute, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and achieving remarkable progress in advancing gender equality in only about a decade. Moving from the Title IX movement’s genesis during the Obama administration to the movement’s direct-action protests and litigation challenging regulations issued in May 2020 by then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, this chapter tells the story of how Title IX and the student movement interacted from 2009 to 2020. During these years, the movement not only weathered backlash but also influenced later feminist movements such as #MeToo and nonfeminists’ understanding of sexual harassment, demonstrating the continued power and promise of both feminist law and feminist organizing.

scholarly journals Equality

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-221
Author(s):  
Catharine A. MacKinnon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Sex Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
Substantive Equality ◽  
Sexual Harassment Law

The distinction between formal and substantive equality is theorized then illustrated by sexual harassment law in the United States and in international legal developments. The convergence of sexual harassment concepts with prostitution, hence of sex discrimination law with the Nordic/Equality Model, is explained and explored.

scholarly journals One Is a Claim, Two Is a Defense: Bringing an End to the Equal Opportunity Harasser Defense

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark J. McCullough
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Sex Discrimination ◽  
Reasonable Time ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Immediate Supervisor ◽  
Almost Continuous

Consider the following three workplace scenarios. Alice, a female employee at ABC corporation, has been subjected to almost continuous harassment by her immediate supervisor, Bob, for the past two months. Several times each week, Bob makes crude and sexually suggestive comments and, on numerous occasions, Bob has touched Alice inappropriately in the workplace. Assuming Alice attempts to remedy this situation in a reasonable time period and her employer has unreasonably failed “to prevent and correct promptly any sexually harassing behavior,” Alice will most likely be able to bring a hostile workplace sex discrimination claim against her employer for Bob’s sexual harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.3

Workplace romance and sexual favoritism in the #MeToo workplace: legal and practical considerations for management

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Joseph Cavico ◽  
Bahaudin Ghulam Mujtaba
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Human Resources ◽  
Organizational Behavior ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Sex Discrimination ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Workplace Romance ◽  
The Us

PurposeThe advent of the #MeToo movement has brought forth increased national and global attention to sexual assault, abuse, misconduct, discrimination and harassment in the workplace, especially by prominent executives against subordinate female employees. Accordingly, in this article, we are thoroughly analyzing one aspect of office romance and sexual conduct in the workplace, mainly sexual favoritism in the era of the #MeToo movement.Design/methodology/approachThis is a legal and case-based human resource policies paper. It reviews actual workplace romance cases, policies and court-based decisions to create practical recommendations that can be used by managers, entrepreneurs and corporations for their organizations. One delimitation of this paper is the fact that it focuses on the US context. Another is that, while organizational behavior researchers have empirically studied various workplace romance policies and practices, the paper is a case-by-case analysis of sexual favoritism. “Specifically, the legal research for this article was conducted on the law database, Nexis Uni Legal, in the Cases (both federal and state) and Law Reviews and Journals sub-databases, using the direct key words in quotations “workplace romance,” “office romance,” “sexual favoritism,” and/or “paramour preference,” as well as the indirect key words “appearance discrimination, “preferring the pretty,” and/or “lookism.” As the authors' intent was to examine the legal and practical consequences emanating from the #MeToo Movement, the authors concentrated their search on cases and law reviews from 2012 to February 2021.FindingsResearch shows that about 35–42% of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment or sex discrimination at work. Many of the high-profile sexual cases that generated the #MeToo movement involved powerful executives asserting that their romantic relationships with subordinates in the workplace were “merely” consensual office romance or sexual favoritism. As a result of the #MeToo movement, employers have been compelled to reconsider how they should respond to sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, office romance and sexual favoritism in the workplace. This article offers best practices for policymakers and human resources professionals.Research limitations/implicationsThis article's recommendations are limited to workplaces in the US and may not be relevant in other countries as the local laws might vary.Practical implicationsThere are policy and behavioral implications for companies, managers and employees regarding workplace romance and sexual favoritism. As such, we provide policy recommendations to human resources department and management on how to provide a healthy work environment for all employees and avoid liability for sexual harassment cases pursuant to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.Social implicationsThe awareness of policies and laws regulating office romance can help educate managers and employees in local communities as to their rights regarding relationships with coworkers and those who report to them. When people are able to date whomever they desire outside of the workplace, employers can regulate some aspects of sexual relationships in the workplace.Originality/valueThis is an original paper by the authors.

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