Women Harassing Men: A Growing Problem or the Stuff of Fiction? : Workplace: Michael Crichton, who addresses the issue in ‘Disclosure,’ says it is an escalating trend, but many researchers in the field disagree.

At Avon Products Inc., an employee repeatedly made unwelcome advances to a colleague, asking for dates, calling the co-worker at home and leaving harassing notes.

Once the human resources department was notified, the offending employee was pulled aside and warned that termination was the next step if the incidents didn’t stop.

A typical sexual harassment case, right?

Wrong. The events, which occurred over several months, involved a woman harassing a man, said Ron Shane, Avon’s manager of employee relations.

“It got to the point he was so bothered that he couldn’t function on the job,” Shane said. “He was nervous about her aggressive actions.”

The story was not unlike the tale spun by Michael Crichton in his latest novel, “Disclosure.”

The book tells of an ambitious woman who gets a promotion that a former boyfriend believed he’d get. She then tries to seduce him.

In interviews since the book’s publication, Crichton has said he wrote the novel believing sexual harassment of men is a real and growing problem as women enter positions of power within corporate America.

Many researchers in the field disagree.

“I think it’s mostly male fantasy,” said Deborah Nord, acting director of the women’s studies program at Princeton University. “That Crichton would write a novel about the issue is more indicative of a cultural anxiety than reality.”

Nord she said she believed the novel reflects a male fear of public accountability for private behavior, not male anxiety about women holding positions of power.

There is little evidence to show sexual harassment of men by their female colleagues or bosses is widespread, said Susan L. Webb, a leading authority on sexual harassment.

“Crichton has certainly displayed that he is an excellent novelist but he is not an expert in sexual harassment,” she said.

Still, Webb said, when male employees are harassed it is just as significant as when women receive unwanted sexual advances. Between 15% and 18% of men say they have been harassed by someone, although there is evidence to suggest more harassment of men by men than by women, she said.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that polices workplace harassment complaints, says that last year 9%--almost 12,000--of those complaints were filed by men, although the EEOC has taken none to trial. Once again, it was unclear how many complaints involved men harassing men and how many involved women harassing men, spokesman Mike Widomski said.

In many years of working with the issue of sexual harassment, Webb has seen only one case of a woman harassing a man on the job, and he chose to quit after two years of tolerating the advances rather than come forward.

“If you think it’s difficult for a woman to speak up, it’s even more so for a man to speak up,” Webb said. “We tend to laugh them out of the room.”

Those who see female harassment of men as a growing issue point to the increasing numbers of women in the work force and in positions of power.

More than 58 million women now hold jobs, compared with 35 million in 1973, and almost 72 million will be employed by the year 2005, Labor Department projections show.

In the realm of workplace authority, however, women are still far behind men.

Only 6.2% of seats on the boards of the largest companies are held by women and they fill only 5% of senior management positions, says Catalyst, a business research organization specializing in women’s workplace issues.

Still, there is a sense that women are growing more powerful on the job, if advertising is any barometer of society, and it often presents itself as such.

At least two widely seen television commercials show men as the object of women’s sexual fantasies, and some men aren’t happy.

A Coca-Cola commercial called “Diet Coke Break” features a handsome male construction worker who removes his shirt and downs a soft drink while female office workers observe from a window and drool.

Another for Hyundai called “Parking Lot” features two businesswomen eyeing men as they drop off flashy cars for valet parking, commenting on the car types and, indirectly, each man’s sexual endowments.

Sidney Siller, a New York attorney and head of a heterosexual male advocacy group known as the National Organization for Men, described the Hyundai ad as a sexual put-down of men.

“It’s gender denigration and bad taste,” he said.

Siller applauded Crichton’s book.

“I’m glad he wrote it,” Siller said. “Sexual harassment by women is really a coming thing and it will start to surface more as we get toward that glass ceiling.” He referred to what is perceived in the workplace as an unseen but sharply felt limit to the progress of many women in corporate America.

Nord said the commercials indicated advertisers believe women want to see themselves in the position of sexual spectator.

“It makes the assumption there is a sexual liberation going on for women that takes the form of women ogling men and being able to talk about ogling men,” Nord said.

Bob Garfield, a critic for Advertising Age, a weekly trade publication, said despite the sexual content, he couldn’t get worked up about either commercial. But he conceded that were the roles reversed, he might.

“There’s something liberating about women being able to do some mindless panting in the tradition of several trillion men before them,” he said.

Webb, whose Seattle consulting firm, Pacific Resource Development Group Inc., advises companies about sexual harassment issues, also found it hard to worry about the commercials.

“When you’re talking of a less powerful group poking fun at the powerful, it becomes much less harassing and less hurtful and more funny,” Webb said.

“Men can afford to be admired sexually because it doesn’t detract from their seriousness in the workplace,” she said. “They are still President of the United States, they are still presidents of companies.”