Some Facts About Workplace Sexual Harassment In The U. S

Q: A sexual advance towards a coworker is not "sexual harrassment," Do you think the article is arguing that it is, per se? It also says "unwanted sexual advances" not "a sexual advance.

A: Repeated advances in the face of clear discouragement ARE sexual harrassment, although these things are adjucated on a case-by-case basis. Surely any male who attempt to ask a coworker for a date more than once or twice is pretty stupid. Of course, but then the article was reporting "incidents of unwanted sexual advances" without clearly showing that said incidents were actually sexual harrassment. An unwanted sexual advance, taken in and of itself, is not sexual harrassmentt. So until these statistics are clarified, they look like grandstanding to me On-the-job sexual harassment is not a recent problem, although legal liability for it is.11 The American court system did not decide the first sexual harassment case under Title VII until 1976.(12) Moreover, the wider public appears not to have fully appreciated the problem's scope until 1991, when the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on Anita Hill's charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In 1976, the same year that the District Court of the District of Columbia resolved the first Title VII sexual harassment case, a Redbook magazine poll found that nine out of ten women said they had been subjected to unwanted sexual advances at work.(13) In 1980, the federal government surveyed its own employees and found that forty-two percent of women stated they had experienced some form of work-related sexual harassment.(14) (In addition, fifteen percent of men reported such harassment.)(15)When the federal government looked at the same issue seven years later, the numbers had not changed.(16) Surveys done in the private sector revealed similar results.(17) These statistics notwithstanding, most cases of sexual harassment still go unreported: as many as ninety-five percent of all such incidents may not be brought to light

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