Hostile work environment

In United States labor law, a hostile work environment exists when one's behavior within a workplace creates an environment that is difficult or uncomfortable for another person to work in, due to illegal discrimination.[1] However, a working environment that is unpleasant and frightening for the victim due to sexual advances that have been denied by the victim, is what constitutes hostile work environment sexual harassment.[2] Common complaints in sexual harassment lawsuits include fondling, suggestive remarks, sexually-suggestive photos displayed in the workplace, use of sexual language, or off-color jokes.[3] Small matters, annoyances, and isolated incidents are usually not considered to be statutory violations of the discrimination laws. For a violation to impose liability, the conduct must create a work environment that would be intimidating, hostile, or offensive to a reasonable person. An employer can be held liable for failing to prevent these workplace conditions, unless it can prove that it attempted to prevent the harassment and that the employee failed to take advantage of existing harassment counter-measures or tools provided by the employer.[4]

A hostile work environment may also be created when management acts in a manner designed to make an employee quit in retaliation for some action. For example, if an employee reported safety violations at work, was injured, attempted to join a union, or reported regulatory violations by management, and management's response was to harass and pressure the employee to quit. Employers have tried to force employees to quit by imposing unwarranted discipline, reducing hours, cutting wages, or transferring the complaining employee to a distant work location.

The United States Supreme Court stated in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc.[5] that Title VII is "not a general civility code". Thus, federal law does not prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not extremely serious. Rather, the conduct must be so objectively offensive as to alter the conditions of the individual's employment. The conditions of employment are altered only if the harassment culminates in a tangible employment action or is sufficiently severe or pervasive.

Workplace Harassment Precedent for the Reasonable Woman

The intricacy of workplace sexual harassment is not well represented by the reasonable woman criterion. It falls under the impression that a ‘reasonable woman’ does not get sexually harassed and work thus creating a hostile workplace but the article goes against the fact that that definition of a ‘reasonable woman’ is not entirely true to reality. The truth is that many women are dealing with hostile workplace environments.There are court cases that adopted the idea that sexual harassment creates a hostile workplace environment. The court case that shifted us from ‘reasonable person’ to ‘reasonable woman’ was Ellison v. Brady, 1991. This case is extremely important because it gave new meaning to the word. The new standard was behavior a reasonable woman would think was extreme enough to change the terms of employment and establish a hostile work environment.[6]

Burdens of proof

Where a hostile environment is alleged, the legality of behaviors must be determined on a case by case basis. In the workplace, such a claim focuses on the working conditions that must be experienced by the victim as a condition of employment, rather than on tangible job changes. To establish whether the situation is actionable the "totality of circumstances" must be weighed with an eye to determining "that the harassment affected a term, condition, or privilege of employment in that it was sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the condition of the victim's employment and create an abusive working environment".[7]

Relation to other laws

In many United States jurisdictions, a hostile work environment is not an independent legal claim. That is, an employee could not file a lawsuit on the basis of a hostile work environment alone. Instead, an employee must prove they have been treated in a hostile manner because of their membership in a protected class, such as gender, age, race, national origin, disability status, and similar protected traits.[4] Importantly, the hostile work environment is gender neutral, that is, men can sexually harass men or women and women can sexually harass men or women.

Likewise, a hostile work environment can be considered the "adverse employment action" that is an element of a whistleblower claim or a reprisal (retaliation) claim under a civil rights statute. When an employee claims that a hostile work environment is an adverse employment action, the legal analysis is similar to the burdens of proof described above. However, to recover damages, the employee must also establish all other elements of the claim, such as that the employee engaged in protected conduct such as making a report of discrimination or reporting an employer's violation of law, and also establish that the employer created the hostile work environment, at least in part, because the employee engaged in the protected activity.

See also
  • Abusive supervision
    • Women's leadership has been weakened by men's shared abuse of their masculinity, and a chauvinist and sexist workplace environment, which are fundamental processes that aid in gendered harassment and women's poor performances at their job.[8] Sexual harassment in the work place is sex based and it paints a very clear picture that men who harass women in workplace environments do it to assert positions of power and make the women feel uncomfortable and as though they do not deserve the position they have in the workplace. These actions of harassment in the workplace towards women allows men to feel as though they are powerful and dominant. Men harass both women in power and women without power in work environments, one being because they want to overcompensate for their masculinity and two because they feel threatened by them and want to make them feel lesser than they are.[9] It characterizes the demographics of a workplace that usually create a hostile environment. The social isolations created by men to leave women and men who are more feminine out of office business, jokes, and continue to say really obscene things to them, are all forms of hostile workplace play and abusive supervision especially by men with positions of power working with women without positions of power.
    • Abusive supervision can include gaslighting, in which a supervisor seeks to confuse, disorientate, and cast doubt in the mind of a victim.[10]
  • Workplace bullying

Stereotype Threat and its Role in Workplace Bullying

Being exposed to dangerous workplace situations may lead to the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. The threatening workplace environment especially for male dominated fields can lead to lots of women not wanting to pursue that field anymore. Stereotype threat is a major form of workplace bullying that hinders women from performing their best at their jobs because of their identity as women (Steele et. al., 2002b).[11]

Despite earning the top percentages of bachelors degrees each year, women are still the most underrepresented in STEM fields and careers because they are being driven away by factors of a hostile work environment. Now the model explained in the article described that because women are aware of the disparity between them and men in these workplace environments, they go into vigilant mode and are hyper aware of their environments especially when seeing the underrepresentation in the field of STEM they are studying, thus creating an identity threat for them. Because they are aware that they are not welcome in those spaces or that it looks like they are not welcome, they begin to think they aren’t welcome and don’t pursue those paths anymore. Some of the factors of a work environment that make it hostile are because of the use of stereotype threat. The hostile comments about women going into STEM as well carry on into the workplace and it fuels the men in those fields to continue to charge the negative remarks about women and bully them about not being able to handle STEM jobs, thus making for some pretty hostile workplace environments. [12]

Hostile Work Environment Cases

Numerous cases of women who have experience hostile work environments that have caused them to quit or just made them feel uncomfortable that took to court. It is very important to include these cases because it provides evidence and records of the women that have been made invisible in history or that have been erased from the narrative. Hostile work environments exist and many women have been brave enough to stand up against these men in the hostile environments and they deserved to be highlighted for the change they created. One of the cases that stuck out to me when reading this was the Henson v City of Dundee case that found that an employer might be held accountable for creating a hostile work environment if they were aware of sexual harassment occurring at work but did nothing about it or even merely had knowledge of it (Hoffspiegel, 2002). Hostile environment is the most common form of harassment and it is crucial to understand that it happens more than one might think and there are women that have made big waves in changing sexual harassment in the workplace and creating safer workplace environments and culture.[13]

Cases

[16]

References
  1. Berry, John, Establishing a Hostile Work Environment (EEO Law Blog 2017)"
  2. Cortina, Lilia M.; Wasti, S. Arzu (2005). "Profiles in Coping: Responses to Sexual Harassment Across Persons, Organizations, and Cultures". Journal of Applied Psychology. 90 (1): 182–192. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.90.1.182. ISSN 1939-1854. PMID 15641899.
  3. Fundamentals of Human Resource Management (4th ed.). McGraw-Hill/Irwin. October 4, 2010. pp. 78. ISBN 978-0073530468.
  4. "Harassment". Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Retrieved August 15, 2017.
  5. , Oncale v. Sundowner, Case Text
  6. Hoffmann, Elizabeth A. (2004-04-01). "Women treated differently: why the "reasonable woman" standard might not be reasonable". Equal Opportunities International. 23 (3/4/5): 67–79. doi:10.1108/02610150410787738. ISSN 0261-0159.
  7. Pellicciotti, Joseph M. Title VII Iiability for sexual harassment in the workplace. Alexandria, Va. International Personnel Management Association, 1988.
  8. McLaughlin, Heather; Uggen, Christopher; Blackstone, Amy (2012-08-01). "Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power". American Sociological Review. 77 (4): 625–647. doi:10.1177/0003122412451728. ISSN 0003-1224. PMC 3544188. PMID 23329855.
  9. McLaughlin, Heather; Uggen, Christopher; Blackstone, Amy (2012-08-01). "Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power". American Sociological Review. 77 (4): 625–647. doi:10.1177/0003122412451728. ISSN 0003-1224. PMC 3544188. PMID 23329855.
  10. "Experiments cast doubt on long-sought sterile neutrinos". AccessScience. Retrieved 2023-09-29.
  11. Steele, Claude M.; Spencer, Steven J.; Aronson, Joshua (2002), "Contending with group image: The psychology of stereotype and social identity threat", Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 34, pp. 379–440, doi:10.1016/s0065-2601(02)80009-0, ISBN 978-0-12-015234-6, retrieved 2023-04-17
  12. Casad, Bettina J.; Petzel, Zachary W.; Ingalls, Emily A. (2018-07-14). "A Model of Threatening Academic Environments Predicts Women STEM Majors' Self-Esteem and Engagement in STEM". Sex Roles. 80 (7–8): 469–488. doi:10.1007/s11199-018-0942-4. ISSN 0360-0025. S2CID 255008659.
  13. Hoffspiegel, Lloyd (2011-01-07). "Abuse of Power: Sexual Misconduct in the Legal Workplace". Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity. 9 (2–3): 113–126. doi:10.1080/10720160290062266. ISSN 1072-0162. S2CID 143507531.
  14. "MMNA and EEOC reach voluntary agreement to settle harassment suit", EEOC press release, June 11, 1998
  15. Baker, Carrie N. (2007-12-03). The Women's Movement against Sexual Harassment. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9780511840067. ISBN 978-0-521-87935-4.
  16. "Covid-19 Lawsuits Spiking in U.S." Retrieved September 29, 2020
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