Men Can Be Harassed, Too
Yet another dirty little secret of the workplace is revealing itself: Men are being sexually harassed on the job, too.
A few years after sexual harassment against women came out of workplace closets across America, a new whisper emerged: "I've been harassed, too. And I'm a man." At first, many people -- particularly women -- took a dim view of this development. Sexual harassment on the job, after all, had been diagnosed as a social ill stemming from an abuse of power, and men had long dominated the powerful positions in most workplaces. It was harder to sympathize with The Harassed Man than to see him as the poor lunk who failed to duck as the pendulum was swinging.
The popular press and the silver screen seemed titillated by the thought of the role reversal. Michael Crichton was inspired to pen yet another novel on the theme, Disclosure. Still, when the book surfaced inevitably in a film version, even the threat of a besuited Demi Moore pinning a hapless male underling against her mahogany desk seemed less scary than, say, being passed over for a promotion.
The reality is, of course, that abusive behavior in the workplace is not limited by stereotypes of Bad Boys and Good Girls. Sexual harassment on the job is not about sex; it's about unwanted, abusive behavior -- usually repeated and often in the face of requests to cut it out. Women as well as men dish out the discriminatory behavior that is sexual harassment, and they'll do it to harass men they want to intimidate or humiliate or drive out of their workplaces. What's more, men sexually harass other men at work -- by subjecting them to constant sexual banter or challenging their masculinity, for example -- and this behavior is illegal too.
Some believe it's worse than we fear, that nearly as many men as women are harassed on the job, but few of them are willing or able to speak up about it -- as if that extra chromosome reared up and got caught in their collective throats.
The most recent statistics available show a steady increase in the percent of claims that men have filed with the EEOC -- up from 7.5% in 1991 to about 12% in 1999. Many expect a greater increase given the U.S. Supreme Court's recent recognition of same sex harassment.
The exciting development is that gender may not matter in the eyes of the law. Many judges who have considered sexual harassment issues recently -- including the U.S. Supreme Court justices, who took on a blockbusting number of four such cases during in the 1997-98 term -- have edged toward making it gender-neutral. For example, most have stopped taking up space in their decisions over whether incidents of alleged harassment should best be viewed from the eyes of a reasonable woman or a reasonable man.
For a growing number of courts these days, the vantage point is common sense, the guiding premise that most workers, men and women, simply want to come to work and do their jobs.
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