Female City Employees Use Variety of Tactics to Fight Harassment : Workplace: Some say throwing an elbow to the groin is more effective than filing a formal complaint. But most prefer not to make waves.

From sewer permit counters to animal shelters, from corner offices with splendid downtown views to cramped clerical modules, women who work for the city of Los Angeles say they prefer to rely on their own instincts rather than formal channels to fight sexual harassment.

Some choose to elbow men in the groin. Others laugh off dirty puns. Some cast their eyes downward and walk on as if they never heard a thing. Most, confronted with testy workers, simply shine them on rather than make waves that could dampen their careers.

Sexual harassment was the talk of City Hall and its satellite offices Wednesday after a survey showed that 37% of all women employees who filled out questionnaires felt they had been sexually harassed on the job in the past year. Only 9% of those responding said they had made informal complaints. Fewer had resorted to official channels, but were happy they were available.

“I didn’t want everyone looking at me funny,” said one Bureau of Sanitation worker explaining why she didn’t file a complaint after a superior propositioned her repeatedly. “I like my job. . . . (So) after I finished vomiting, I made clear to the man that if he made any further comments, I would file a complaint.”

She said the threat has stopped him--so far.

Sherrell Adams, a clerk-typist in the city’s Building and Safety Department, said she lives with the annoyance of a fellow worker sidling up to her every time she has to pull a file from a drawer near his desk.

“He’s too old to change,” she said.

Since sexual harassment complaints have arisen more frequently at City Hall, she said, many men she works with have grown “standoffish,” as if afraid of saying the wrong thing. No point, she said, in rocking the boat.

The most common response of female civil servants asked about sexual harassment on Wednesday was a quick look to see who was behind them.

In the city’s asphalt plant, a hot and isolated operation beside the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River, men seated at heavy equipment were lifting tons of gravel into immense piles on Wednesday.

One man in orange overalls scratched his head when asked if there were any female employees at the plant. “We have a clerk, over in the office,” he said.

There, a single female clerk sat behind a tidy desk in a corner. A male clerk glanced at her over a newspaper when a reporter asked her to comment on relations between men and women in her office.

“You’ll have to call downtown,” she said.

Two female library assistants at the Central Library on Spring Street looked at each other knowingly when asked about sexual harassment. Far more than two in five city employees have been harassed, if not by co-workers, by security guards or even book borrowers, they said.

In the 10th-floor City Hall cafeteria Wednesday, employees talked of the survey over plates of turkey and pudding du jour. The talk seemed to raise the corners of lips more than eyebrows; in a bureaucracy this large, there is something about the formal term “sexual harassment” that still amuses.

“Yeah, it’s real,” said one of two personnel managers lunching together. She said she has grown accustomed to occasional taunts.

“Keep me abreast of things,” one Los Angeles police officer joked with her not long ago as he stared at her chest. She said she laughed him off because instincts told her his remark was not lascivious.

Her companion said she had the tricky duty Tuesday of telling the head of a heavily male department that there had been complaints about bathing-beauty calendars and the like adorning the office.

“I was trying to get him to think like a ‘reasonable women,’ ” she said. “Then I realized that was quite a stretch.”

At another table, one tall woman manager with 17 years in the bureaucracy demonstrated methods she said have helped her prevent sexual harassment.

“It all comes back to defining your space,” she said, throwing back her shoulders and gesturing in a manner that seemed, well, male. “You must set your posture erect. If you’re meek and cowering, you’re never going to be capable of defining your own space--or your own needs.”

Once, a supervisor called her into a private conference, closed the door and put his hand on her thigh.

“A jab of the right elbow in the gut helped fix that situation,” she said. “I opened the door, stood in the doorway, and asked, ‘Do we need to continue this meeting or not?’ It ended about two minutes later.”

But she acknowledged that not every woman can pull off such a maneuver. She said she worries about foreign-born employees who seem too reticent to assert themselves.

“One guy in our office goes around calling everybody ‘Cutie,’ ” said Nicki Girmay, an Eritrea-born geologist. “I don’t mind. It’s nothing compared to Africa, where the boss would go around kissing you but you couldn’t say anything.”

Most said they felt Civil Service regulations afforded them at least some protection against such behavior that women outside the system lacked. But using that system, some said, was painful.

A young supervisory clerk who filed a complaint in the Building and Safety Department said she figured she could deal with the repercussions from her supervisor but wasn’t prepared for the response of a co-worker who demanded he sleep with her in exchange for his testimony.

“Basically, I told the person to get the hell out of my face,” she said. “Now he’s a witness against me.”