Tuesday, July 14, 1998

Sisterhood hasn't helped on this one

By Betsy Hart

With the recent court decisions on sexual harassment, I wonder what would be their implications for one case in particular:

She was a young woman when she worked for him as his temporary secretary. He was a salesman several years older. After a few weeks she moved on to work for another salesman in the same company, and about that time her first boss asked her out. Was it coercive? Perhaps she felt he might impair her future job prospects if she didn't say yes. Perhaps the situation was becoming a "hostile work environment" for her.

Whew! I'm just thankful this particular instance is from 1950, not 1998. Because the two people involved in this case were my parents. They were married for 43 years (until Mom died) and had five children and a wonderful life together.

But today there is little chance of such welcome liaisons happening. That's thanks to roving corporate human-resources directors who keep tabs on employees' private lives, sensitivity-training classes and, now, new legal threats delivered by Supreme Court decisions in the last few weeks subjecting companies to greater liability on harassment - even when management had no knowledge of an employee's supposedly offending actions and the plaintiff was not adversely impacted.

How unfortunate that, as law professor Marianne Jennings recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "my employer trusts me with budgeting, lobbying, fund-raising and shaping the minds of the next generation, but is forced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the courts to conclude that I can't handle the advances of knuckleheads."

Really, haven't women over the ages successfully handled much worse?

My experience in this area is limited because I worked in an office environment for 10 years without a male superior making a pass, an inappropriate suggestion or so much as patting my shoulder. But I did once have a co-worker make a lewd comment to me in passing. I simply smiled and asked him if his wife liked such remarks, and should I give her a call and try that particular one out on her? It was not repeated.

But what about the women who feel they "have" to accept such advances?

Jennings considers the stories of the women who said they were harassed at a Ford Motor plant in Chicago in an account told to "Dateline NBC." They tearfully described sleeping with supervisors to keep their jobs and being hospitalized for stress.

Jennings looks at this in a new light. They were saying, she writes, that "the supervisors' brutish behavior was awful, but for $22 an hour they were willing to sacrifice their virtue and put up with it."

In an article titled "Don't Even Think About it" in The New York Times magazine, Philip Weiss investigates what many corporate human-resources directors are contending with these days. That is, monitoring and investigating personal lives and relationships of company employees at all levels.

Sexual-harassment law has empowered, even forced, human-resources directors to ask: "Jim, what were you doing with Sally at 11:00 last Saturday night? Someone saw you two together and complained, so I need to know the nature of the relationship."

These folks, Weiss notes, are now often in the position of deciding who is really in love, who is using someone, which relationships are likely to sour, whether there is a "power" differential between the two people - and then issuing orders regarding their private lives to the persons involved. Orders that must be obeyed, or one or both may lose their jobs.

Now that sounds like harassment to me!

I'm not sure what is stranger: that advocates of these new Byzantine rules believe women should be heading corporate boards and yet can't, or shouldn't, be able to handle the office cad and the way workplaces where once people made decisions for themselves and lived with the consequences good and bad, have now been turned into kindergartens complete with hall monitors; or that often activists on these issues demand a level of intrusion into personal decisions and lives in the workplace and on college campuses while at the same time they rail against any kind of "constricting" social mores anywhere else in the culture.

I just know that given all this, and the grave and destructive mistrust sexual-harassment law has helped foster between men and women in the workplace and elsewhere, it's clear the sisterhood has not helped the sisters on this one.

Betsy Hart, a frequent commentator on CNN and the Fox News Channel, can be reached by e-mail at mailtohart@aol.com.

Scripps Howard News Service