Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment is now understood as a social problem embedded in notions of intimidation and power between individuals in the workplace. These defining characteristics properly frame sexual harassment outside of any discussion of innocent misunderstanding, misplaced expressions of attraction, or simple gender differences.

In the earliest articulations of sexual harassment, before a definitive legal standard was set in the mid-1980s, incidents of sexual harassment were most often described in terms of the power differences attributed to males and females in the public sphere of the labor market as well as the domestic sphere of home and hearth. Within this theoretical frame, sexual harassment most often becomes an issue whenever a woman's work is adversely impacted by employers, co-workers, or even subordinates who inappropriately regard her as an object of sexual attention rather than a colleague in the workplace.

The study of sexual harassment from a social science or humanities standpoint tends to differ from the legal standpoint because of these particular details. The issues of accountability and personal agency differ across these fields, and the consequences under the law are much more concrete in application, certainly, than the more philosophical-oriented discourses often found in purely academic literature and research. Nonetheless, sexual harassment continues to be largely defined and understood as an issue of discrimination of men toward women, and under the law, it is, more often than not, interpreted using male experience as a reference.

Over the years, however, sexual harassment has come to be more properly understood as a twisted implementation of power directed against an individual regardless of gender or sexuality, thus making it clear that sexual harassment occurs whenever inappropriately sexual conduct complained of is sufficiently “severe, pervasive, and unwelcome” in nature as it occurs in the workplace or under the auspices of a relationship governed by workplace dynamics, as was articulated in the landmark case Meritor v. Vinson in 1986.