WILLIAMS AND LEBSOCK
sixties after he grabbed her and forcibly kissed her. Fifty years later, TV host
Gretchen Carlson says, Ailes demoted and ultimately fi red her for refusing to
have sex with him. Fox settled Carlson’s harassment case for $20 million. But
it extended Bill O’Reilly’s contract after O’Reilly settled a sexual harassment
case against him for $32 million. Cases do not settle for that kind of money
unless something has gone seriously wrong.
For men worried about quid pro quo harassment, the simplest approach is
not to date someone you supervise. If you do, make sure it’s consensual and
remember that whether you stay together or break up, with respect to work-
place issues you need to behave exactly as you would have if you’d never
dated her. If you can’t do that, don’t date people you supervise. All this
applies, of course, not only to men but also to women.
A Hostile Work Environment
Here again the legal test is quite protective of those accused of sexual
harassment. To meet the legal defi nition the conduct must be unwelcome,
the environment must be one that a reasonable person would consider
hostile, the plaintiff herself must feel it to be hostile, and the behavior that
makes the environment hostile must be severe or pervasive.
Moreover, plaintiff s very rarely win hostile environment cases that are based
on a single “severe” incident. Almost invariably, they need to prove the
behavior was “pervasive.” How pervasive?
Very. In a 1993 Supreme Court case, a woman’s boss made such comments as
“You’re a woman, what do you know?,” “We need a man as the rental man-
ager,” and “ Dumb- ass woman,” and asked her in front of coworkers if she
wanted to “go to the Holiday Inn” to negotiate a raise. He asked women to
retrieve coins from the front pockets of his pants and threw objects on ground
and asked women to pick them up. When the plaintiff complained to the boss
about his conduct, he said he was joking and promised to stop, but he didn’t.
She quit, sued, and won: She had made it clear the behavior was unwelcome
and that it personally off ended her. The court found that a reasonable per-
son would have felt the environment was hostile and that the hostility was
pervasive.
This is so far beyond what most men would ever imagine is appropriate that
they have little to fear. Still, the requirement that the plaintiff prove that she
herself felt an environment to be hostile adds another layer of protection. So
women need to speak up to demonstrate that they’re personally experiencing
that feeling, not just to show that an advance is unwelcome. “That makes me
uncomfortable. We are at work” is enough.