Sexual harassment primarily refers to harassment involving unwanted sexual behavior, though it may occasionally refer to harassment with a sexist targeting pattern. Although some types of sexual harassment seem to be motivated by sexual desire, they are more often committed to hurt women or punish people for violating gender norms. Popular understanding of sexual harassment primarily focuses on sexual coercion and unwanted sexual advances, which are less common than other types of harassment. All types of sexual harassment can harm a victim's physical and mental health and affect their personal and professional lives. Sexual harassment may involve harassers or victims of any gender, occur between friends or strangers, involve equal or subordinate relationships, and consist of verbal, physical, or indirect actions. Examples may involve insulting sexual or sexist remarks, offensive sexual innuendo, indecent exposure, sexting, sexual roleplay, collecting or disseminating photos of the victim in private moments, demanding or requesting sexual favors as bribery, and sexual assault like groping or rape. In most countries, certain types of workplace sexual harassment are illegal as a form of employment discrimination. The legal and social understanding of sexual harassment varies by culture. Employment laws do not impose a "general civility code", so they generally do not prohibit minor isolated harassment incidents. In many countries, harassment may be considered illegal when it is frequent or severe enough to create a hostile or offensive work environment, or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim's demotion, firing, or quitting). Over 100 countries have laws against both hostile environment and quid pro quo types of sexual harassment, and dozens have laws specifically addressing sexual harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity. For many businesses or organizations, preventing sexual harassment and defending employees from sexual harassment charges have become key goals of legal decision-making.
Etymology and history The term "sexual harassment" was coined in the 1970s, and its meaning and popularity as a concept have grown over time. However, the behaviors it describes are common across cultures and eras, and have also been described by other terms. Although discussion of sexual harassment has frequently been silenced and trivialized over time, reports of workplace sexual harassment have been documented since at least the 1600s. The framing of sexual harassment as a legal issue also originated in the 1970s. Since the 1990s, many countries have adopted laws targeting sexual harassment, and social movements like #MeToo have raised awareness of the concept and spurred social and legal change.
The term "sexual harassment" The first documented use of the term "sexual harassment" was in a 1973 report about discrimination called "Saturn's Rings" by Mary Rowe, Ph.D. At the time, Rowe was the Special Assistant to the President and Chancellor for Women and Work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Due to her efforts at MIT, the university was one of the first large organizations in the U.S. to develop specific policies and procedures aimed at stopping sexual harassment. Rowe says that harassment of women in the workplace was being discussed in women's groups in Massachusetts in the early 1970s. At Cornell University, instructor Lin Farley discovered that women in a discussion group repeatedly described being fired or quitting a job because they were harassed and intimidated by men. She and colleagues used the term "sexual harassment" to describe the problem and generate interest in a "Speak Out" event in May 1975. She later described sexual harassment at length in 1975 testimony before the New York City Human Rights Commission. In the book In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (1999), journalist Susan Brownmiller says the women at Cornell became public activists after being asked for help by Carmita Dickerson Wood, a 44-year-old single mother who was being harassed by a faculty member at Cornell's Department of Nuclear Physics. These activists, Lin Farley, Susan Meyer, and Karen Sauvigne, went on to form Working Women United, which, along with the Alliance Against Sexual Coercion (founded in 1976 by Freada Klein, Lynn Wehrli, and Elizabeth Cohn-Stuntz), was among the pioneer organizations to bring sexual harassment to public attention in the late 1970s. Farley also wrote a book to raise awareness, Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job, first published by McGraw-Hill in 1978. Sexual Shakedown inspired the first workplace training video on sexual harassment.
Legal view The legal understanding of sexual harassment developed through lawsuits women brought forward in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. The development of U.S. laws on sexual harassment in workplaces shaped similar developments in other countries. Many of the women pursuing the earliest U.S. cases were African American, often former civil rights activists, who applied principles of civil rights to sex discrimination. Early precedent was set with Williams v. Saxbe (1976) and Paulette L. Barnes, Appellant, v. Douglas M. Costle, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (1977) which determined it was sex discrimination to fire someone for refusing a supervisor's advances. In 1979, American legal scholar and activist Catharine MacKinnon published a seminal book called Sexual Harassment of Working Women. She popularized the argument that some workplace sexual harassment was consistent with sex discrimination and therefore prohibited behavior under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. MacKinnon also developed the legal classification of sexual harassment types, as quid pro quo or hostile environment harassment. MacKinnon's arguments were key to developing international legal understandings of sexual harassment.
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