Sex Harassment: The Problem That Won’t Go Away

Some of the men treat women as if they exist only for their enjoyment. For their birthdays, the men bring cakes shaped like a woman’s bosom. That is offensive.

There were so many posters of naked women in my office that I decided to bring in some of men from Chippendales just to counteract the ones the men had.

I need more information on what to do if an offensive comment by a supervisor is made regarding sex or race. I feel I can’t do anything about it, because if I try, I will probably lose my job.

You might think these are comments from the 1960s, when women began--through sheer numbers and affirmative action lobbying--to make their presence felt in the nation’s work force. But they are not. They are observations of the ‘80s, from the recently released survey of women employed by the city of Los Angeles, ranging from department supervisors to police and security officers, from attorneys to clerk typists.

More than one-third of those women who replied to the confidential questionnaire, 4,826 of the city’s 12,000 women employees, cited instances of sexual harassment in the workplace; 70% said filing complaints about it would be fruitless; 61% feared retaliation if they reported it.

Saying he was “outraged” by the survey results, Mayor Tom Bradley issued a “tougher” city policy on sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, citing state and federal laws that prohibit it.

All of which seemed to leave most observers with one nagging question: How, after more than two decades of significant advancements by working women, could sexual harassment still be such a factor in the workplace?

“Between 70% and 90% of women (nationally) say they have been sexually harassed during their working life,” said Deborah Meyer of 9 to 5, National Assn. of Working Women, referring to recent national studies.

“It’s very high, and it’s shocking. But these things take so long to make their way through the culture. Men are still looking at women as objects, whether it is in the home, workplace or a bar.

“And as the number of women increases in the workplace, the less secure men are about their power and the ability to control them,” she said. Meyer is associate director of the Cleveland-based membership group for office workers. “Sexual harassment is used to exert control over a woman, to put her in her place. It’s a very old-fashioned form of sexism. The culture is changing, but it takes a very long time to change.”

“It’s an evolutionary process,” said Detective Kena Brutsch, female officers coordinator, who handles sexual harassment complaints for the Los Angeles Police Department. “There are still some dinosaurs, but there are new employees coming on all the time.

“As the men work with women, they (women) are becoming more and more accepted. It’s all a matter of time. It’s the problem of educating people that this is not acceptable in the workplace and creates a hostile environment.”

Brutsch, who is part of the LAPD’s family support group office, said she has had “as many civilians--daughters, wives and girlfriends of officers”--call her about how to make sexual harassment complaints in private industry as complaints within the department.

“I have also had men (from LAPD) call, as well as women,” she said.

“When I have lectured groups of women about sexual harassment, some are very amazed that there’s a name for it,” said Lynn Hecht Schafran, director of national judicial education programs of the National Organization for Women, who has been active in working with the state task forces studying harassment of women in the courts.

“They thought they had to endure that kind of treatment because they are women in the work force. That’s chilling.”

Prevalent in Some Jobs

In Los Angeles, the city survey by the Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women confirmed what nationwide ones have found: Sexual harassment is a fact of life in the work force across the board, but there is a higher instance of it in traditionally male-dominated jobs, such as police and security officers, firefighters and paramedics, engineers, maintenance workers and mechanics.

“There is not one female paramedic on this job who has has not been sexually harassed,” Los Angeles city paramedic Rebecca Hegwer said in response to the commission’s survey. Hegwer is second vice president of the United Paramedics of Los Angeles.

Hegwer mentioned the city Fire Department’s ongoing problem of what to do about sexually explicit material in the fire stations, where men and women firefighters and paramedics must share working, sleeping and kitchen quarters while on duty.

Talking about pornographic movies that she has seen being shown, she added: “If you haven’t been there (in the job), you don’t know the subtleties that go on. Dealing with it (sexual harassment) on a strictly intellectual level is different from dealing with it at the gut level.”

Found at All Levels

“We have found sexual harassment cases at all levels, from a managerial level to the lowest semiskilled worker, in jobs where you wouldn’t expect to find it,” said Beverly King, director of human resources and personnel of the Department of Water and Power, the city’s largest department with more than 11,000 employees.

“The most typical complaints (of sexual harassment) are co-worker to co-worker, and they are about unwanted attention, mostly verbal. Although there are certainly the out-and-out ‘will you or won’t you’ ones.”

Because 20% of DWP’s employees are women and “because we knew there was a problem of being a male-dominated, skilled craft and engineering organization,” King said, the DWP instituted a sexual harassment education program in 1980. DWP has continued to update it with training sessions, employee and management seminars, and videos and posters about policy and what constitutes sexual harassment.

Since the program was started, King said, DWP has gotten 50 formal and informal complaints about sexual harassment.

Higher Awareness Cited

“More than any other department,” she said. “But you like to think that’s not because you are a bad department, but because you are making people aware of what cannot be tolerated. We have terminated employees for sexual harassment. One physically attacked a woman, but that’s relatively rare.”

On whatever level among city employees, Mayor Bradley insisted 10 days ago that “sexual harassment is a very serious matter and simply will not be tolerated.”

With that, Bradley outlined a more forceful policy on sexual harassment than his original directive in 1981, ordering city department heads to investigate any allegations of sexual harassment and tell employees how to make a formal complaint. If that wasn’t sufficient, he said, city employees with sexual harassment complaints should call his office.

“When the commission did its ‘needs assessment’ study last year, they found that an overwhelming majority of women who felt they had been sexually harassed either didn’t know how to report the incident or lacked confidence in the integrity of the procedure,” Bradley said. “That’s simply unacceptable.”

Women Feared Consequences

In the survey, women employees reported 3,384 instances when they wanted to file an employee complaint, but did not because they thought it wouldn’t do any good, and/or they might lose their jobs because of it.

According to Susan Rose, executive director of the commission, a good indicator of women’s fear of retaliation was the way some returned the surveys.

“Some of the questionnaires came back with 25 staples in them, stapled totally shut. One staple wouldn’t do it. Others were sealed in separate envelopes or dropped off personally.”

“I thought there had been more education that such conduct is illegal and will not be tolerated in city departments anymore,” said attorney Diane Goodman, a commission member who helped draft the new recommendations to the mayor after the survey was tabulated. “They also had a high fear of retaliation.”

“It was an extremely important survey because we had such a high response and it documents how many problems there are--stress, educational advancement, child care, sexual harassment,” said Ruth Miller, a labor representative who serves as vice chairman of the commission. “I was surprised at the percentage reporting sexual harassment. I didn’t think it would be that high.”

Harassment Defined

Goodman said she also was amazed when she began reading individual anonymous responses “that overall people didn’t think they had experienced it (sexual harassment). A lot of people think of sexual harassment as being propositioned, not other forms.”

Under the city’s new executive directive from the mayor, sexual harassment is defined as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature” in the workplace or made a condition of a person’s employment.

“Sexual references are made in my law firm regularly, or in court,” Goodman said. “Most of the time they are not offensive. When they are, they should be dealt with.

“The work force hasn’t yet changed to accommodate the fact that women are in it permanently. That’s why you see high percentages of the women citing problems of stress (40%), child care (21%) and sexual harassment. The work force as a whole hasn’t adjusted to women. The needs have changed drastically since the ‘50s when women were primarily in the home.”

Mayor Orders Counselors

Responding to the commission’s recommendations, Bradley has ordered that each city department have a designated sexual harassment counselor and that all employees be given his or her phone number.

And the city personnel and labor relations committee is expected to ask the City Council to appropriate $20,000 to hire a consultant on sexual harassment problems, who will train city department managers and supervisors.

“I am sure that the city does better than most organizations as far as sexual harassment,” said Councilwoman Joy Picus, who chairs the personnel committee that received the commission’s original recommendations.

“Having it (the policy) in place and making sure it is used is the difficult thing. That’s probably where we fall down.”