The clear trend is towards greater activity in all aspects of sexual harassment filings. The EEOC resolved many more cases in 2001 than it did in 1993 and reduced the backlog of cases it has tended to carry. Case resolutions are up 64%. Cases dismissed on a finding of no reasonable cause are up 119%. Cases found to have reasonable cause are up too, by 37% and those resolved in favor of the plaintiff, up by 89%. Can we say conclusively from these data that more people are being sexually harassed at work in 2001 than were in 1993? Probably not.
One high-profile discrimination case can have an important impact on trends in filing legal charges of a similar kind. In the case of sexual harassment discrimination, the 1990s had three very prominent, high profile cases that brought sexual harassment to the fore-front of public discourse in a way never seen before.
First, in 1991, came sexual harassment allegations during confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas for a seat on the United State Supreme Court. Professor Anita Hill asserted that Thomas had harassed her while they were both employed, coincidentally, by the EEOC. Her graphic comments were made public, and subsequent hearings were broadcast widely.
The second case was the Tailhook scandal in which women attending a naval aviator's convention were sexually harassed, groped, and assaulted. After one of these women, Lt. Paula Coughlin, complained to her superior officer — only to be told, "that's what you get when you go on the third deck full of drunk aviators"10 — she filed an official complaint that lead to a lengthy and much publicized investigation.
Finally, in 1994, came allegations by Paula Jones that then President Clinton had sexually harassed her in 1991 while he was governor of Arkansas. These charges were investigated and litigated and covered prominently in the press until they were thrown out in 1998. Some may argue that the coverage continues.
Together, these cases served to keep sexual harassment front-and-center in the media for almost the entirety of the 1990s. All of this public attention was accompanied by legislative changes. In late 1991 the Senate amended the Civil Rights Act and made it possible for victims of sexual harassment to sue for punitive damages, not just back pay.
The cumulative result has been increasing numbers of case filings, charge resolutions, and money awarded to successful plaintiffs. On the chart are shown monetary benefits earned by successful plaintiffs. Charges resolved in favor of the plaintiff were up 89% between 1993 and 2001. Monetary benefits won increased by 111% to $53 million.
Can conclude that instances of sexual harassment are on the rise? No, not with any great degree of certainty. The underlying problem is that we have little reliable data from which to start. What we can say is that the likelihood of an incident of sexual harassment going unreported has probably dropped. It may even be true that attention to the subject, and quickly growing liability to employers, has helped to encourage the establishment of aggressive policies to protect employees from being sexually discriminated against and harassed.
This area of the law is very much in flux. As the legal system deals with defining hostile environment, human resource managers try to craft policies that will allow co-workers their freedom and privacy while preventing harmful behavior. The problem for employers is that "no one has figured out exactly what that policy should be — least of all the lawyers and judges who keep adding new loops and threads to the complex web of sexual harassment law."11
Source: U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Charge Statistics FY 1992 through FY 2001. Online. Available: http://www.eeoc.gov/stats/charges.html. Quote by Admiral Snyder is from: Women's Rights on Trial. 1st Edition. Gale, 1997, p. 312. Quote by John Cloud is from: Cloud, John. Sex And The Law. March 23, 1998, Vol. 151, No.11. Online. Available: http://www.time.com/time/%85magazine/1998/ March 11, 2002.
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