Loading...
Sexual Harassment by Any Other Name
Schultz, Vicki
Schultz, Vicki
Abstract
Last year, the New York Times won a Pulitzer for its reporting on sexual harassment.1 Yet the Times does not seem to understand what "sexual harassment" actually means. In both the definition it employs and its choices of what stories to cover, the nation's newspaper of record continues to spread an overtly sexualized conception of sexual harassment that, from a legal and social sciences perspective, is twenty years out of date.
This Essay's goal is, first, to call attention to this misdirection and its harms. By defining away and often failing to report on the endless ways employees are undermined, excluded, sabotaged, ridiculed, or assaulted because of their sex-even if not through words or actions that are "sexual" in nature-the Times neglects the forms of sexual harassment at work that researchers repeatedly find most pervasive.
In this, the New York Times is hardly alone. However legally outdated it may be, the sexualized conception of sexual harassment-the view that equates sexual harassment with unwanted sexualized advances, remarks, and misconduct-is so widespread that even agencies charged with protecting against sexual harassment sometimes fail to define it clearly in their public pronouncements.
Indeed, the sexualized conception is so tenacious that scholars and legislators sometimes feel the need to coin a different name for harassment that lacks sexualized content. Phrases like "gender harassment" get used to distinguish sexist comments and actions from the sexualized come-ons and assaults that many, like the Times, still exclusively associate with the term "sexual
harassment."
Readers might wonder, what difference does it make? This Essay's second aim is to show how much is at stake in what might otherwise seem like an academic debate over words. The news media may have its own reasons for clinging to the sexualized view of harassment, but reporters who are serious about exposing sexual harassment (and reformers who are serious about eliminating it) cannot afford to cling to a narrow sexualized definition. Rather, overcoming harassment and related injustices at work requires a reconceptualized account of sexual harassment-something Vicki Schultz first offered fully two decades ago. In the current #MeToo era, more than ever, we must rethink and reinvigorate the term "sexual harassment," not some new term put in place of, or alongside, the one that is finally getting the public attention it has long deserved. To do otherwise risks disaggregating sexual and
non-sexual forms of harassment, thus obscuring the larger patterns of hostility and exclusion that include both forms.
Instead of trying to change the subject, this Essay aims to guide the contemporary conversation unleashed by activists and media to bring it in line with insights gained in the law, in social science, and in the everyday experience of workers. Amidst all the attention the #MeToo movement has generated, too many women and men are facing forms of sexual harassment that the media still ignores.