A Hot Topic Cools Off : Sex Harassment Suits’ Low Profile Reflects Changing Times in the Capitol

At any other moment in the legislative year but this one, this double-time dash to the finish line, the details of sexual harassment accusations against two legislators and their chiefs of staff might be meat and drink in this gossipy marble hive.

This week, though, both the man who oversees the handling of the Assembly’s sexual harassment training and a Senate staffer who feels not enough is being done agree--one with pride, the other with dismay--that “This is not the topic du jour, it really isn’t.”

That’s what they call progress.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, in the Capitol’s droit de seigneur atmosphere of a private men’s club where a legislator could--no joke--show off in front of a lobbyist by pitching pennies into a secretary’s blouse and getting a big laugh, “sexual harassment” was a phrase from an alien vocabulary; such behavior wasn’t even on the misconduct map.

Says one longtime Democratic staff woman: “I think any woman who has worked any length of time in the Capitol probably has been sexually harassed at one time or another.”

Men in power did it because they could, and women who worked for them “put up with it,” says a veteran legislative staffer, for fear of losing their jobs. “Before, you knew going into it or thereafter that it was part of the job, or there were expectations, and no one said anything,” she said. “That’s not true anymore.” In the past, someone who complained might be told, with a shrug, “You know how they are.”

Today, after Anita Hill, after new laws and big lawsuits, “they” are taking some notice.

The cases that brought the issue home here in recent weeks involved Assembly members Mickey Conroy (R-Orange) and Rusty Areias (D-San Jose). An Assembly investigation corroborated most of the sexual harassment allegations against Conroy and his chief of staff by a former legislative aide who is suing the pair. Investigators found that their actions were the product “not of malice, but of ignorance and/or poor judgment.” Areias and his chief of staff have been sued by a woman who claims the chief of staff made advances, and Areias ignored her complaints of them.

A Republican staff member who says she has never encountered overt sexual harassment has realized that in the last couple of weeks, even men who reached out innocently to pat her on the back “stopped before they touched me. . . . I think it’s made people think about what they say and do.” And in any case, “there’s so much information out there--lawsuits, training, seminars. I’d expect that people who live in a fishbowl would be more careful of their actions.”

Twenty years after she came here as a teen-age intern and witnessed some “troubling” antics, Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-Burlingame) carried the measure that brought the Legislature into compliance with federal harassment laws, beginning the internal training and disciplinary processes that are in effect today.

On Tuesday, on a break from the marathon sessions, she was in her Assembly office tending her 3-week-old daughter--something else that wouldn’t have happened back then, because there were almost no women legislators.

“Victims,” she says, “recognize they’re being taken seriously. In the early ‘70s, they weren’t. Is (the climate) better? I think so. Have members and staff become more sensitive? I think they have. Is this still a place where it will continue to be a problem? I think so.”

For Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), a legislator for more than 15 years, the “lifestyle” of the Legislature--long, late hours, sometimes far from families, makes people “become very relaxed around one another,” and there is casual talk at which “some people would be offended: Some of it is blunt, at times off-color. If you’d not been around that kind of thing, I think it could perhaps be somewhat intimidating.”

While women should always speak up--”if it gets too bad I just walk out of the room”--at the same time “there has to be a sensitivity to what is offensive, and that’s why we’ve been trying to set the standards,” she said.

In a workplace historically populated by men, Bergeson says, they were “likely to say anything that comes into their heads; I think that’s more prevalent than this obvious ‘If you don’t go to bed with me, I’m not going to give you a raise.’ ”

In the supermarket-sweep rush to the end of the session Wednesday, two telling bills passed that some years ago would have been considered ridiculous, and the member who dared to bring them to the floor might have been laughed out of his gilt-and-white chamber.

One bill would prohibit merchants from charging more money for goods or services such as haircuts, clothing alterations and dry-cleaning, based solely on a person’s sex, and would bar employers from dictating that women employees not wear slacks to work.

And Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) wrote a bill awaiting the governor’s signature that would allow alleged victims of sexual harassment to sue certain professionals, such as bankers and landlords. It soared through the Assembly with a good dozen votes more than its author expected.

Everyone agrees that women legislators have made a vast difference in the climate and the substance of this place. When it comes to sexual harassment, so have words like “liability.”

“The liabilities associated with these penalties can be very expensive,” said Speier. “And the question will be raised, should the taxpayers pay for this” if public officials are found liable?

That also plays into Bob Connelly’s thinking. The Assembly’s chief administrative officer, Connelly organized the training sessions, the guidelines put out on yellow paper reserved for must-read matters, and the 88-minute videotape that is required viewing for everyone from the Assembly Speaker on down.

With all that, he believes, “if people are still afraid to make complaints, then they haven’t gotten the word, or we haven’t gotten the word out as well as we should.”

Anne Blackshaw is a veteran women’s issues activist now working for Hayden. She is the Senate staffer who is sorry that recent sexual harassment accusations are not Topic A.

“There’s no shortage of the institution saying sexual harassment is wrong, not to be tolerated by members or employees, but it’s the follow-up . . . that’s where they fall short. . . . If women feel they’re not believed, they’re less inclined to come forward.”

Even progress, she worries, is not what it seems. “That’s often what’s more dangerous. We have this feeling that things are different, that we no longer tolerate that kind of behavior, but really it’s just dispersed in different forms . . . more subtly.”