Hostile Environment

Hostile environment is a concept describing a workplace environment that has become intolerable to an employee, due to treatment based on that employee's race, ethnicity, sex, religion, or ability. The idea that some employees suffer discrimination in the form of a “hostile environment” developed in the context of struggles for workplace equality. These struggles led to legislation that protects employees from discrimination. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides protection from discrimination to ensure equal employment opportunities. The Civil Rights Act provided for the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which aimed to protect citizens from race and sex discrimination through prevention and response to complaints.

The existence of a hostile environment, then, is considered an aspect of employment discrimination because of its association with exclusionary practices that interfere with the normal functioning of employees complaining of abuse. Hostile environment may also describe a generally abusive workplace culture. The existence of a hostile environment often correlates with occupational segregation and the efforts of more privileged workers to keep women or racial minorities from entering the “neighborhood” of their job.

Scholars of occupational segregation by race and gender pinpoint barriers to workplace integration that include harassment by some employees to exclude others. However, harassment can also be less intentional, as behavior that is offensive to some group members is not necessarily understood as offensive by its perpetrator, such as publicly displaying nude “calendar girls” in a mixed-gender work environment.

Hostile environment most often relates to charges of sexual harassment. Related behaviors may be verbal or nonverbal, physical or nonphysical, but have in common their consequence: making the complaining employee uncomfortable. However, a hostile environment for women need not include sexual harassment. As with racial minorities, a broad spectrum of verbal and nonverbal behavior can constitute harassment in the workplace. The significant aspect of the hostile environment is that it be understood as a set of practices by some employees that block members of protected groups from equal opportunities in the workplace. Thus, the creation of a “hostile environment” links to other modes of segregation and exclusion that contribute to overall patterns of stratification.

One challenge to confronting hostile work environments lies in creating new workplace cultures where employers take responsibility for providing anti-harassment policies, employees familiarize themselves with forms of harassment, and victims of harassment feel comfortable using the established complaint process. When charges are levied, problems in enforcement of the law may occur. This is due both to the problem of interpreting the law and to fluctuations in the burden of proof that reflect the variability of society's commitment to race and gender justice. However, cases of harassment may also be difficult to resolve because of significant variations in judgment of how a “reasonable person” would interpret these social interactions.