In employment law, hostile environment sexual harassment refers to a situation where employees in a workplace are subject to a pattern of exposure to unwanted sexual behavior from persons other than an employee's direct supervisor where supervisors or managers take no steps to discourage or discontinue such behavior. It is distinguished from quid pro quo sexual harassment, where a direct supervisor seeks sexual favors in return for something within the supervisor's powers, such as threatening to fire someone, or offering them a raise. Quid pro quo has been recognized as actionable for decades, but courts have only recognized hostile environment as an actionable behavior since the late 1980s as they made findings that the loss of employment or constructive dismissal has been caused by such behavior. Some situations that have been ruled to constitute such a hostile environment are:
- Posting pictures of pornography in employee's cubicles
- Consistently telling "dirty" jokes or stories where all employees in the work area can hear them
- Tolerating employees who make sexually suggestive remarks about other employees within earshot of others
- Allowing peer employees, clients, suppliers, delivery persons, or even customers (Lockard v. Pizza Hut, 162 F.3d 1062, 1073) to persist in unwanted attention, such as asking for dates
- Allowing the use of derogatory terms with a sexual connotation (e.g., "pussy," "girlie-man," "player") to be used to describe co-workers
- Allowing frequent physical contact, even when not sexual
Read more about Hostile Environment Sexual Harassment: Burdens of Proof, Difficulties and Criticism
Famous quotes containing the words hostile and/or environment:
“...that absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent—the State, family life, secular art and science—was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)