PERSPECTIVE ON SEX HARASSMENT : Forging a True Equal Standard : With Ruth Bader Ginsburg on board, the Supreme Court has offered a definition that really protects women from abuse.
The Supreme Court ruled this week that a boss who called his female manager a “dumb-ass woman,” asked her to fish in his pants pocket for coins and suggested that she negotiate her raise by going with him to a nearby motel violated the Civil Rights Act. In an opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the court ruled unanimously that such behavior does not have to cause the employee severe psychological injury to be ruled harassment. It’s enough if “the environment would reasonably be perceived, and is perceived, as hostile or abusive.” This ruling, in itself, should not seem very radical. But in the current climate of hostility to establishing rules of basic sexual conduct, it is a big move.
Harris vs. Forklift Systems was only the second case of sexual harassment to come before the court, and the first with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on board. When lawyers defending the employer’s conduct made their arguments last month, Ginsburg asked the question on the minds of many working women: “Why isn’t there a simple standard that makes illegal conduct that, on the basis of sex, makes it more difficult for one employee than another to do a job? Is it really more complex?”
If men don’t have to put up with sexual comments and put-downs as part of their ordinary job responsibilities, why should women employees be forced to? When “taking it” becomes part of coming to work every day, a woman is being asked to work harder than a man for the same wage--and that’s not fair.
But in the eight years since sexual harassment was even considered the basis for a lawsuit, the conservative federal courts avoided anything like this standard of simple equality. This record of judicial hostility culminated in the lower court decision overturned this week, which said that Teresa Harris didn’t “suffer enough” from the employer’s admittedly offensive and discriminatory conduct. In case after case during the 1980s, federal judges ruled that way, commenting in one case that “the Civil Rights Act wasn’t meant to change the American workplace” and that “female clerical employees are accustomed to derogatory remarks.”
Meanwhile, Americans heard about Justice Clarence Thomas’s alleged remarks to his former aide, Anita Faye Hill, and about Sen. Bob Packwood’s lunges at women in his office. Just as many American women were asking whether it takes a brain surgeon to figure out that it’s wrong to abuse female workers, we heard reports of a quarter-century of torment inflicted by real brain surgeons at Stanford on their only female colleague.
With the stirring of a female electorate in several 1992 races, the battle shifted to the pages of the media. A flood of articles appeared using terms like sexual correctness or puritanism or whining to describe efforts to reduce the amount of sexual aggression directed at women and girls in schools, in the workplace and on the streets. Women who sued and wrote and marched were ridiculed for turning themselves into “victims.”
“The Morning After,” a schoolgirl’s celebration of her drunken sexual exploits and groundless speculation on the incidence (or lack of incidence) of date rape has made its author a media darling. Editorial writers seriously debate whether double-digit date rape figures are “bad enough” to risk interfering with “romance.”
After the court’s decision Tuesday, the price tag for sexual harassment could be quite high--not only in back pay but also in the possibility of punitive damages. When repeated sexual remarks become so pervasive and offensive as to permeate the workplace, the guarantee of equal jobs for men and women is violated. And if a reasonable person would find the environment hostile and abusive, said the court, that’s enough.
Teresa Harris’ boss gave her the message that she was nothing but her sex organs and that only her sex organs earned her a living. By suing, Harris refused to accept that role and insisted she was something much more important: a salesperson for Forklift Systems and a woman entitled to decent treatment at her job. She may also become a woman with a respectable nest egg if she wins the retrial. If that makes her a victim, we bet she will be crying all the way to the bank.
