Harassment a Hot Topic Among S.D. Businesses

Offices around the city are abuzz about the U.S. Senate hearings into whether U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed his former assistant Anita Hill, now a University of Oklahoma law professor.

Interest is expected to heighten even further today as the Senate moves toward a dramatic vote on whether to confirm Thomas for the Supreme Court.

“The majority of our audience is interested in nothing else,” KSDO-AM executive producer Gayle Falkenthal said Monday. The local radio station’s talk shows and opinion polls drew “an incredibly heavy response” from San Diegans who are caught up in the unprecedented hearings, Falkenthal said.

The predicament is heightened by what Bank of Commerce President Pete Davis said are confused and conflicting ideas of what constitutes sexual harassment.

“I don’t know any other area of the law where men and women see something so differently,” Davis said. “I truly believe that the vast majority of humans sincerely want to be sensitive to other humans.” But society, he said, still lacks “a truly clear understanding of what sexual harassment is.”

San Diegans interviewed after Hill’s electrifying testimony Friday suggested that the sexual harassment hearing will change the way men and women relate at the office.

“I’ll guarantee you that lots of CEOs are now demanding that their human resources people meet and tell them what the sexual harassment laws are,” said N. Bruce Ferris, founder of the Compensation Practices Assn. of San Diego County, which tracks personnel matters. Ferris spent part of Monday briefing Maxwell Laboratories Chairman Alan C. Kolb on developments in sexual harassment regulations.

“What will change is you will have companies and supervisors advising their people that they have exposure to potential harassment cases if they are unprofessional and unbusinesslike,” said a downtown San Diego money manager in his 40s who asked not to be identified.

For Bank of Commerce’s Davis, the dramatic hearings underscore how difficult it is for managers to decipher complex federal regulations and make on-the-spot determinations when a sexual harassment charge arises.

Although the Senate has had the luxury of gathering testimony before its vote, executives often are being pressed to make instant decisions on when harassment has or hasn’t occurred, Davis said. Lacking the “wisdom of Solomon,” managers run the real risk of being hit with lawsuits filed by disgruntled employees, Davis said.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that women now account for such a large percentage of the nation’s work force--and the fact that men and women increasingly are using the workplace to find mates, Davis said.

But it will be difficult to craft a list of topics that are out of bounds because “what’s offensive to one person is not offensive to another,” Davis said.

“The problem is that there’s no standard,” Ferris said. “I can use a four-letter word that has nothing to do with sex, but that might be construed as ‘gutter talk.’ ” A male might talk to two women at the same time, and harassment would depend on how one of them perceives the conversation, Ferris said.

The San Diego money manager, who is single, said the Hill-Thomas confrontation will work to women’s benefit.

“I think it really points out how much control men have in this society and how long women have had to put up with it,” he said. “Even men who are proponents of women’s rights are going to have a raised awareness of the problems women face.”

A single San Diego attorney said the issue “will definitely make people more sensitive in the workplace about sexual innuendoes or approaches. . . . It is the kind of thing that men didn’t think much about, and now they will have a hard time not thinking about it. It’s one of your classic impulsive acts to approach a woman.”

The attorney, who asked that his name not be used, also expects the Thomas-Hill issue to compel “women who feel aggrieved to come up with claims. And, human relationships being what they are, some of those claims are likely to bedistorted by emotion.”

“The classic case is a consensual relationship that, when it is terminated, is then characterized as an oppressive or harassing relationship.” the attorney said, noting that it is also the toughest to sort out.

Ferris predicted that the Thomas hearings will generate an increase in reports of sexual harassment.

“This case will also become the accepted measurement of sexual harassment cases,” Ferris said. “People will want to know if the comments were as bad as in the Thomas matter. . . . It will be a gauge of sexual harassment.”

A wave of complaints already has surfaced, according to 9to5, a Cleveland-based working woman’s support organization that operates a Job Problem Hotline. In the days since Hill made her allegations, 9to5 has received more than 1,200 telephone calls from women who say they have been sexually harassed.

Real estate consultant Sanford Goodkin questioned the effectiveness of laws and regulations that attempt to solve what are basically moral issues. “This is an intellectual soap opera,” Goodkin said of the hearings.

The controversy has served to underscore the delicate balance that employers must keep when they deal with employees, said Goodkin, who is interviewing candidates to serve as his secretary.

Two female associates who screened applicants for the secretarial opening also gave Goodkin a “page full of caveats about questions I could not (legally) ask or broach . . . and that frightens me, it scares me,” Goodkin said.

Michael Shames, executive director of Utility Consumers Action Network, a San Diego-based consumer group, was less shocked by the testimony than the apparent lack of concern about the proceedings among students in a business ethics class that he teaches at the University of San Diego.

Students in his Friday morning class “weren’t as attuned as I thought they would be,” Shames said. “Some said they hadn’t had time to read the newspaper yet.” Shames intends to hit hard at sex harassment later in the term, when students are scheduled to discuss regulations governing the workplace.

For Ferris, the Thomas affair proves a simple rule that personnel managers have often preached: “Don’t mess around at work,” Ferris said. “Sexual harassment is not new. . . . it’s just that the laws are new.”

Times staff writer Chris Kraul contributed to this story.