Court Clarifies Sex Harassment : Civil rights: Justices ease way for plaintiffs to win damages. High court says proof of adverse effect on job performance or mental health would not be required.

Sending a strong message that sexual harassment will not be tolerated, the Supreme Court made it easier Tuesday for working women to win damages if they are abused or ridiculed on the job.

Federal civil rights laws create a “broad rule of workplace equality,” said Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and those laws are violated when women or men are subjected to “intimidation, ridicule and insult” by supervisors or co-workers because of their gender.

The 9-0 ruling clarifies the law more than it breaks new legal ground. But women’s rights advocates said that the court’s firm condemnation of workplace harassment will help curtail that form of abuse. Business attorneys welcomed the ruling because it more sharply defines illegal behavior.

In recent years, some judges have decreed that a woman must suffer a distinct “injury,” such as a nervous breakdown or an inability to work, before she can win a sexual harassment case.

Rejecting those strict requirements, the high court said a complaining employee can win her case simply by showing that she suffered severe and persistent harassment, regardless of whether it hurt her job performance or her mental health.

The decision revives a sexual harassment suit filed by Teresa Harris, a Tennessee woman, whose supervisor called her a “dumb ass woman” and regularly made jokes about her anatomy. A magistrate and an all-male panel of a U.S. appeals court earlier had dismissed her claim because the harassment did not appear to have harmed her “psychological well-being.”

Women’s rights advocates hailed the quick and unanimous opinion, which came less than four weeks after the case (Harris vs. Forklift Systems, 92-1168) was heard.

“This sends a real message that the court is taking sexual harassment seriously and that employers better do so as well,” said Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center.

“I predict that we are going to see a lot of voluntary compliance with this decision,” added NOW President Patricia Ireland, as employers scramble to make sure that they have clear-cut policies against workplace harassment.

NOW issued a press release calling on corporate America to “wake up and smell the coffee now being fetched by someone other than a babe, broad or bimbo.”

Business attorneys said they were pleased with the ruling too because it clarifies the law.

“This confirms what we have been saying all along, that you can’t harass people,” said Douglas S. McDowell, counsel for the Equal Employment Advisory Council, which represents 270 corporations.

Most large companies now have policies forbidding workplace harassment, he said. Usually, these policies require victims to report any harassment to a supervisor. Generally, employees who say that they were harassed cannot sue the company if they have ignored the complaint procedure, McDowell noted.

Employers certainly have an incentive to keep such complaints out of court. In 1991, Congress amended the job bias laws to say that employers can be forced to pay up to $300,000 in damages for illegal job discrimination, which includes sexual harassment.

Tuesday’s decision was only the high court’s second dealing with sexual harassment.

The rulings stem from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employers from discriminating in “compensation, terms, conditions or privileges of employment” because of “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

No one doubted that the law was violated if a supervisor demanded sex in exchange for a job or a promotion. But it was not clear that harassment alone violated the law.

In the landmark case of Meritor Savings vs. Vinson in 1986, the court said unanimously that illegal sex discrimination is “not limited to economic or tangible discrimination.” The law also forbids sexual harassment that creates a “hostile environment” for a working woman, regardless of its impact on her job prospects, the court said.

But lower courts have split since then on how to define a hostile environment. The three U.S. appeals courts that cover the Midwest had adopted the strict standard that a harassment victim must prove she suffered psychological harm.

By contrast, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California had taken the more lenient view adopted by the high court.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the strong women’s rights ruling handed down Tuesday was the first opinion to emerge from a court that now has two female justices.

Not only did O’Connor speak for the court but new Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg added a brief statement saying that she was pleased the decision makes clear that a woman can win a sex harassment claim simply by showing that abuse and ridicule “make it more difficult (for her) to do the job.” During the argument last month, Ginsburg jousted with Justice Antonin Scalia over whether a woman’s job performance must suffer before she can file a discrimination claim.

O’Connor on Tuesday characterized the court’s opinion as following a “middle path” on sexual harassment.

To win her case, a woman must prove more than that she heard a few “merely offensive” jokes or comments. However, she is not required to prove that she suffered a “tangible psychological injury” to prevail, the opinion states.

O’Connor admitted that there is no single formula or a “mathematically precise test” to determine when an employee has been illegally harassed. Judges should examine the allegations and consider whether the victim was truly offended and whether a “reasonable person” would have viewed her workplace as a “hostile or abusive work environment.”

Several factors can be taken into account, she said, such as the “frequency of the discriminatory conduct, its severity, whether it is physically threatening or humiliating or a mere offensive utterance and whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance.”

Officials of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have said that complaints about sexual harassment have increased more than 50% since 1991. But that increase is not attributed to new laws or court rulings.

Instead, most experts attribute the increase to Anita Faye Hill’s televised accusation of sexual harassment charges during the 1991 confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas, a former EEOC chairman, joined O’Connor’s opinion without commenting separately.