Unknown Speaker 00:05 Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Casey Wagner, and I'm going to be moderating this panel this afternoon. And it is with great pleasure that I present to you, a diverse group of women who have looked at this issue from a wide variety of perspectives. And what I'm handing to you right now is a case study of something that I have worked on, in my role as expert witness. My experience in dealing with this issue comes initially from being the counseling director of working with MS Institute, one of the two pioneering organizations in the early days of the struggle when we had to convince people that sexual harassment was a problem. Finally, mainstream America has cut up with the early work that grassroot women's organizing, had done in both defining the issue. And in identifying and working with the illegal Civil Rights and Labor communities. The issue is an issue of violence against women, as well as an issue of workplace discrimination. And so in 1994, we are going to look at the evolution of industry to have an issue that has a very interesting history. And the case study that I'm handing out, the speakers will be looking at and addressing as a point of reference and a point of departure. And this was based on an actual case that was involving two professional women in a fortune 500 company. And their male supervisor would engage in in the following behaviors that I that have been identified and directing this behavior both toward his female and male subordinates, as well as female peer in the work environment. And these interactions were would be experienced directly observed overheard by female and male subordinates. And I just wanted to identify for you some of the behaviors that were part of that workplace, telling him sexually oriented jokes, incorporating sexual innuendos into language plan, work, the word coming or your Mommy or mean the Greta, comment on physical appearance, anatomy, clothing appearance, it's amazing anyone here can concentrate on the war. On their work with you sexy Latin women around here, told female subordinates to check out others based on their physical attractiveness composed and discussed the top 10 List of female employee ranking and evaluating them according to their physical appearance, some whistling and cat calling, and did not view an anonymous article left on his table as a signal of behavior to be taken seriously, and did not take seriously constructive feedback from a colleague about his inappropriate behavior. And I just wanted to set the stage for a moment and ask you since we're a very small group, to tell us first, just a little bit about yourself very briefly, if you work, what groups or constituencies you work with? And also what is one burning question that you have that can help direct our discussion. So that it can be most meaningful since we are a nice sized group that can open up for dialogue. And the format of this afternoon, it's going to be some prepared remarks by the panelists that will use this both as a reference and a departure point and then we want to open it up for dialogue and have at least 45 minutes of dialogue with you and so we wanted to get a sense of what some of your concerns and issues were. So let's start in the middle row was always dangerous. Yes. Okay. one burning question you have about this issue of preventing sexual harassment or sexual harassment in the workplace. Unknown Speaker 04:33 The only question that I will say is what to do? What am I going to do with myself as I was asked to do something well, okay, maybe over time something that you already did. That is the man that kind of relation was house Tonight, okay. Unknown Speaker 05:02 I don't know if that makes sense. It does. So thing Unknown Speaker 05:05 that you know, I don't never happen to me before but I just want to. Unknown Speaker 05:09 Okay, great. Thank you. I need to jump oh Anita. Way I Unknown Speaker 05:17 work at L'Oreal and the burning question I have is what can you really expect within an organization? Unknown Speaker 05:29 What's reasonable to expect from an organization given the norm of being sexist or? Okay. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 05:38 I'm Associate Director with Bear Stearns. And I think the biggest question that I basically have people sexual harassment really, if women aren't exaggerating, okay, great. Thank you Okay, great, thank you. Questions Answered? I'm finishing the book. And watch the tape Unknown Speaker 06:34 a massive change Unknown Speaker 06:41 for us to reverse the case. Unknown Speaker 06:50 How it's changed the atmosphere, the chilling effect and some of the backlash. Yes. Okay. Great. Okay, good question. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 07:13 Perry, I teach at Business Law on a state university campus. Unknown Speaker 07:18 Burning the question I have is, how do you get the CEO company Unknown Speaker 07:25 president campus publish with respect to sexual conversation? Excellent. Unknown Speaker 07:34 My name is Sherry system. And I guess my two questions, the how can we work with students to help educate them and get them out of the prison of denial that sexual harassment exists before it does happen to them so that they feel when it happened, that they understand what tools or resources to identify? That's one question. Another has to do with how can we encompass human sexuality in the large spectrum of sexuality when thinking about sexual harassment because I think oftentimes the assumption that that women are heterosexual and you have to be better or sexual ways into Florida I guess my question is what what tactics Unknown Speaker 08:36 and working class women who are not unionized and are not going to touch a lawsuit news to to combat Unknown Speaker 08:48 sexual harassment in the workplace without losing their jobs Michel limits and I'm really burning questions to deal with solutions, which are best Unknown Speaker 09:24 is how women can be made to Unknown Speaker 09:27 feel more empowered and work your way. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 09:47 Hi, my name is Carmen Perez. I currently work at Goldman I recently, was also the conceptual and after going through every single chair Have a case to the litigation. And, like, basically a lot of the answers, but one main issue is how is it that you can and I know it's hard, it's how you can stop. You're too big to lie. How do you get that from not Hollywood where you go? That's a question of AIPAC. But after starting a workshop, many of the women had problems with their jobs, because they didn't give that rep that they're currently unemployed. How do you stop it? Thank you. Unknown Speaker 10:38 My name is Unknown Speaker 10:39 Patricia Davies, and currently a student or a graduate student at Columbia, I'm doing a master's in public policy administration. I work also part time as a student intern at the office of sexual harassment, Division of Human Rights. And I just completed a policy paper for an economics class on economic incentives in reducing sexual harassment workplace by, I guess, compelling corporations to use economic incentives to reduce sexual harassment training and prevention. And I guess these are the questions that I like, the reason I'm here primarily is because I am interested in working with other women. And I hear a lot of the things that people say, and I hear it so constantly, but I don't see. The reason I'm here is because I'm actually interested in doing something about it. And looking at ways that it can be studied further. And one of the things I'm interested in seeing is the predominance of harassment, certain job categories, and also in terms of harassment that occurs primarily among various ethnic and racial and class categories and how those relate to the incidence of harassment. Great. Unknown Speaker 11:52 My name is Francine wood, I have my own firm to mergers and acquisitions. Two years ago, I was working for Barclays Bank for women sexual harassment company. So I am now involved in litigation, my burning question is talking to this woman? What do you do to get through this period, which I have found out to be worse than the sexual harassment? Company? When do you go and try to get elicited get things resolved quicker? Is there a network of people you can talk to, because it's just very easy to get Unknown Speaker 12:34 on. And I graduated from college last night, and I'm now working at a non profit, where the Unknown Speaker 12:48 environment is very sexist, and my boss is very supportive. And so I'm just kind of interested in hearing those experiences. Unknown Speaker 12:59 I wanted to just frame the issue from the perspective that I've been fortunate enough to have having worked in this area since 1980. Initially, as a counseling director of Brookings Institute, we were nonprofit women's organization that under left Park Avenue and overlook the men's room, we had a very auspicious office space, and we had the public presence of being a major force to contend with in the fight against sexual harassment. But it took a tremendous amount of organizing, and a tremendous amount of illusion to create that presence, when in reality, we were volunteers and a staff of maybe five or six, generating a tremendous amount of information that came out of looking at women's experiences and women's fight that at the time that we were doing our work in, in the early days was, was taken on probably by three or four other organizations. 94, five was developing the equal rights advocates in San Francisco and the alliance against sexual coercion in Boston. And in the early days, the issue of defining the scope and range of what was sexual harassment was the province of grassroots organizing public speak outs, and trying to link up the issue with issues of workplace discrimination. Working with the progressive civil rights, movement, as well as working in in the area of labor. And what I've seen in the evolution of this history is, ebbs and flows. was, in the early days, when Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act was passed, the issue of gender was recognized. It wasn't until 1980, when the Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines were released that sexual harassment was seen as a slice of the gender discrimination pie. However, Bush and Reagan attempted to undermine the integrity and in fact existence of the EEOC guidelines in 1980. And if it was not for joint effort of women's groups, civil rights, labor, and progressive factors in the society, we would have not gotten those guidelines. There was such a an outcry against the attempt of the bush Reagan administration, Reagan, Bush administration to rescind the guidelines that we had to do a tremendous amount of organizing, and they were totally taken off guard by that groundswell of support that gave business a double message. And so even though those guidelines were in place in 1980, it was a double message to employers How seriously do you take it? Or the administration doesn't support it? So why should you deal with it? And, and Ruth, a little bit later on, we'll talk about the evolution of case law, but in 1986, with a very famous Supreme Court case in Florida Savings Bank versus Michel Benz, and there was another wave of attention to the issue. And then case law evolved. And employers responded, sometimes through the threat of litigation, sometimes they saw it as an issue of undermining productivity, issue of civil rights issue of human rights or was part of the class action suit that they looked to prevent by developing policies and procedures. And then again, there was a reduction in public attention. And then in 1991, with Clarence Thomas, and Anita Hill and the New York City, the women tell the truth conference. And so throughout that evolution, there had been grassroot women's organizations that had provided support and information to women. And through the backlash and the conservative trend in the times the organization's closed. And so there was not the same kind of support and advocacy 190 91 women tell the truth conference came around. And one of the mandates that came out of that conference was to redress that issue, and develop supports for women to deal with this in both legal and non legal ways. And so that, from my perspective, re affirmed the seriousness of the issue. But there had been a history Unknown Speaker 17:46 that had been influenced by law and conservative backlash. And so, as you all probably know, in 1993, the Supreme Court looked at a case cars versus forklift, where some of the issues of double jeopardy having both to be the target of unwanted behavior and prove damage will fortunately, shot down so that women weren't forced to be victimized twice. And so we are looking at an evolution of a very interesting issue that people define both on an individual level, popular culture defines it. organizations define it and the law defines that and your definition informs your response and influences your strategy. And our speakers are going to address the multifaceted aspect of this issue. And we're going to start with Marian kindess, who is a psychologist and educator. And she has built two successful practices and co founded a private psychiatric hospital. She has been on the faculties of Brooklyn College at Penn State University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She received her doctoral degree from Columbia University, and has written for numerous professional organizations. She's co edited social intervention of behavioral science approach. She's listed in who's who of American women, and has done some extensive work in this area. In her publications, and she's also on the board of the American Association of University Women. Unknown Speaker 19:41 Well, you left out the most important thing I'm about to graduate. Unknown Speaker 19:44 I left that for you to say I Unknown Speaker 19:50 have some visuals. So let's let me pass those out. So you can follow along What I'm going to do is talk a little bit about some of the gray areas and primarily talk about some of the concepts that underlie sexual harassment, I'm picking out for you, as we have a brief period of time, the segment of the work that I do addressing stereotypes and distortions that our culture supports that commit sexual harassment. The point being that if we live did not live in a culture that supported gender bias and other kinds of bias, we would not be in a culture that will support the kind of behaviors that we have, that are sexual harassment or any kind of harassment for that matter. I'm going to try to interweave some some comments about the case that that Casey distributed as I go along, I just wanted to give you a brief anecdote about different approaches to the issue of sexual harassment. Last year, I attended a national diversity conference. And the title of this conference is the fourth annual National diversity conference, and I did a workshop on sexual harassment, it was very poorly attended, because people did not see how sexual harassment related to diversity. This year, I submitted another abstract on sexual harassment and the fellow running it called me and said, We decided not to include sexual harassment this year, in this diversity conference, and you're going to talk about race and gender and other aspects of diversity, surely, so you can you can build on that. But my mind sexual harassment is a piece of it is a part of our whole diversity initiative. And to for this national conference to push it aside, was I felt significant in terms of the uphill battle that we had. Okay. Let me go on to my approach, basically, when I do address sexual harassment is to not only place in the context of diversity, but also in the context of male female relationships. Now, I say this, with the full recognition that sexual harassment is not limited to male female relationships. And but for the most part, when I'm asked to work with groups around sexual harassment issues, that is what people are focusing on. And we can deal with all kinds of harassment. But as I said, for the most part we're looking at I think ratio is something like 95% of all cases, are males harassing females. Alright, with that, let me just go on to getting into what I what I want to primarily address focus enough was I thought we should start with a little comic relief, or maybe it's not so an example of clear distinctions between what's harassment was not dressed up that we could not quite get into focus. So the boss is saying what I could do a little compliment, and you accuse me of sexual harassment. And she'd say, boss, a compliment is good job, a nice idea, not usual, great and wet t shirt. Unknown Speaker 23:59 All right. Now, I gave you some handouts, and I'm going to go straight to the first handout, what I want to do is look at some of the things that we hear in the workplace that may or may not relate to sexual harassment. I call this thing excuses. And I've spent a whole lot of time on it. But one of the concerns that Casey mentioned was backlash. And what you hear frequently is, men and women can't talk to each other anymore. No one can talk to anybody. Now I've say anything to anyone, because you're gonna get accused of sexual harassment. I'd like to think I have to tell this dissuade you all from that belief. Obviously, there are things that are appropriate. There are things that are not appropriate. And I put this together because my sense was, once somebody starts saying, are we only joking, I was only teasing. I don't mean anything by it, or Cina So I talked to all girls, I hear that all the time. You're so sensitive the other women don't mind. Once you hear that, you know someone has done something that's inappropriate. Now, this is I think more important to give to to people who are probably more likely to be guilty of saying those things. Unknown Speaker 25:27 Okay, let me talk about some of the concepts that I believe underlie the existence of sexual harassment. So one thing we're all much more comfortable, give me more like this. I'm showing you this cartoon at lunch with somebody who's talking with your voice. I'm sorry, I can't make this. Clear, you see there. Were just more comfortable to tell you the truth when I do a workshop and they're all women are much more comfortable than when they're men and women. This is an and given the fact that women are relatively new entrants not in the workforce. But at higher levels in the workforce, we have to expect that there is going to be not only resistance, but uncertainty and fear. One of the telling thing, I want to do a mixed workshop just on gender in general, I have people working in same sex groups and generating various kinds of questions depending on how I feel. One of the things I often do is I have the men and the women generate questions, they'd like to ask the other gender or use others post the opposite. I'm trying to make us less embedded and less oppositional. And one of the questions I invariably get from the men's group because there is a sense of somebody who's talking about this at lunch today about the two women are talking, the men getting nervous, there's some kind of conspiracy going on there cooking something up. Now, this is anecdotal. But it's something to keep in mind when you're entering a male domain and basically our workplaces are male domains. The second concept that I'd like to introduce is something called out group homogeneity sounds very impressive some social psychologists invented it. What does that mean? It means I'm an ex I'm a woman tricky so I walk around because assumption I know women all women are different. But for if I'm a man my assumption is that horse all men are different, but you know, just like a woman and we do that with groups we do not belong to so I might walk around with the notion that all Asians are good at math. Which of course we know. So we think that every exit branded X is different from every other x each of us is unique, but all those y's are the same. All right, that's another concept that we carry around with us and that contributes to the way we look at people Unknown Speaker 28:27 okay Unknown Speaker 28:32 now, how do we look at people we look at people on the basis of everything we have ever learned moments ago Boy, am I getting a time signal wearing these glasses I can't see anything but it was flapping. Alright, we walk around with what we have learned and we know what we know from where we were, we were Christians do something to what we came with and what our culture has been and what we have been taught. And we all are unique. So we all have different perceptions. I want to start with this because here we are all looking at the very same thing. Tell me what you see. Somebody put one, say in another training. All right. What do you see? Unknown Speaker 29:42 You see? Every seat boat? No. Unknown Speaker 29:49 All right. How many people here what do you see? You see the young woman? Does anybody see anything else besides a young woman? US See an old woman? Is there anyone who doesn't see anything? You see a man that is? Because the Unknown Speaker 30:10 focus is not to. Okay. Don't go away. We'll work on that. Is there anyone who can see both who sees both? The young woman and the old one? Now look, isn't this an interesting phenomenon such a simple phenomenon? It's an every psychology, introductory psychology textbook. In my day, we're all looking at the same thing, but we do not see the same. How many times just post that happens in the course of the workday? How many times now, if you add to that, some factors that are bound to make us even more different, like race, gender, age, educational background, if life experience, whatever, but certainly gender is one, we're going to increase the probability that two people talking together may not and looking at the same thing may not be talking about the same thing. Okay, we don't have a whole lot of time, but I hate to leave people up in the air. Who does not see the old woman. You don't see the old woman. Okay, surely would you help her? Okay. Unknown Speaker 31:29 This is her kerchief. This is her hair. This is her eyes. And this is her nose, her mouth and her chin. But if you see the young woman right, this is her hair eyes wearing something Unknown Speaker 32:05 you can help us bring a new domain Unknown Speaker 32:09 100 We're gonna jump away. Okay. All right. Okay, you're doing fine, fine. Okay, we're up to now. Unknown Speaker 32:25 All right, my point is that we bring with us our culture. And we bring with us our orientation and we bring with us our stereotypes. Now I gave you a handout about gender stereotypes given I have five minutes. I'm not going to belabor this I'd rather show you my show and tell the we all walk around carrying stereotypes with us and gender being something highly visible. As soon as we see someone identify what gender they are those stereotypes just feed right in. Okay I put down here what the definition is and how stereotypes influences now what I'd like to do is give you a demonstration All right, what Unknown Speaker 33:24 is this picture of football playing football Unknown Speaker 33:27 match at least I'm gonna try not making part of it what is this a picture of Unknown Speaker 33:39 in a cheerleader everybody knows Unknown Speaker 33:45 that. It's amazing. Everyone knows as a football cheerleader in heels. Unknown Speaker 33:52 Unfortunately okay. Not when I went when we do not have so long lot of information. Unknown Speaker 34:01 We rely on stereotypes. So you all just told me that's a football player and as a football player chasing the cheerleader or a woman says racist now we didn't have a whole lot of information about that I gave you limited information and that's what you came up with and you came up with that because that is what a stereotypical response but now I'm gonna give you more information. Okay, now that you have more information you can back away from the stereotype and get to what this actually is probably, of course is not fair. Unknown Speaker 34:55 Mike was fair. Yeah. Unknown Speaker 34:59 All right. put them in, in our society. And since we are limited our time, I'm going to focus on male female issues. We have various stereotypes about men and women, and all of these feed to a very fertile ground for sexual harassment. The one thing I think you have this in your handout. These are some comments of societal gender stereotypes. Men are more successful. male role and male characters are more valued, men are expected to be more successful than women. Somebody mentioned today about what childcare workers get paid? Well as there's one study that I love, they compare jobs that were identified as male jobs and jobs or identify as female jobs and guess which we're reading? Would you believe that it's much more complex to be a newspaper delivery rather than a home health care worker? That one kind of got me I'd much rather have a more complex person taking care of me my home, probably my newspaper at the door. But one was fine as masculine one was the client. And that's, that's the basis upon which sexual harassment or in which sexual harassment occurs. Okay. All right now we're trying to do is just lay out the whole issue of how stereotypes are out there, how they influence our perception. And obviously, I've done this rather briefly. Now I'm going to say just a few words about what do we do? How do we get past these stereotypes, there's two approaches to doing work in diversity, genders, sexual harassment, one is let's just change behavior. And that's great, I want change. But if we don't change, what produces the behavior, it's going to come out in some other way, it's going to go underground is going to come out indirectly, the backlash will be so subtle, you will not see it getting we know very well in psychology that if you, if you punished a rant, it will stop doing that what you are punishing me for until you stop. Okay, so we need to in some way, change the underlying attitudes and, and get rid of the stereotypes, at least diminish them. And I have a whole list of suggestions of how we can do that in the workplace. In three minutes, I'm going to give you my list, and you're gonna have a long discussion later on. I never talked about the case. I knew once I got going, I would totally get off on my track. All right, first of all, we need to recognize sexual harassment as a serious issue. And not trivial opposite. One of the concerns that I have is that I have encountered people who are quote professionals in the field trivializing harassment. One trainer said to a group, if you ask a woman out once, and she refuses, that's not sexual harassment. But if you asked her, I said, as she refused the first time. raise my hand gently. And that kind of statement misleads people about what sexual harassment is. And I think that just increases the anxiety that we're creating in the workplace. We do not want destroy relationships between people in the workplace, we want them to get better, not worse. So I have a handout, which was with my other handouts. All right, well, I'll find it. When I get when I find it, I will give it to you. This was an article short article that I wrote about policies and procedures, and that's one way to start working on this problem. Another way is for us to start supporting equality in the workplace, whether it's gender, racial, whatever, we have to start supporting quality. Unknown Speaker 39:34 We have to stop colluding, somebody said that she smiles when somebody she sees sexual harassment. We have to stop smiling. We have to stop saying that's inappropriate. We were talking about lunch about how do you do this kind of very difficult thing to do. We need to train ourselves to be able to not just be assertive visible, past the assertiveness movement. But how to be able to come out and tell people what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, how we want to be treated, without it becoming adversarial. We have to devaluate our own organizations. And we have to provide more education and training to everybody. And I have to agree with what people have said today about getting the CEO top level people. If you don't get the top there, you're not going to get anybody here. And if the top level are just getting paying lip service to diversity, training, or sexual harassment, then what you're going to get is people who are not my last 10. going through the motions, but not really caring about the result. So with that, I'm gonna end with one cartoon that I left, because I want to go back to my favorite people. This is what we do not want. In the workplace. You read the never since the Thomas Hill flat employee morale has been the toiler pathway. No, I didn't mean toilet. I meant the bathroom. No, I didn't mean bathroom. I meant the restroom. No, I meant the lady. No, no, no, I meant the woman's room. No, the men's room. No, unisexual not UNICEF, no sex. I mentioned sex. I am innocent. And she says it's okay. We're all kind of Flirting with Disaster right now. And he said I was not flirting, no flirting. Okay, my last word is that's not what we want. We want to be able to have normal relationships that are respectful of each other. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 41:59 I think one of the the comments that Marian made about defining behavior is one of the most confusing issues for people in 1994. Because we're looking at real subtleties of behavior, and ways that people can learn how to interact with each other differently. And if you look in the second aspect of the case, responses to supervisors behavior, some of the comments that Mary made about how people defined behavior Unknown Speaker 42:36 are illustrated. Sometimes the women in this particular case did not immediately labeled any of their supervisors behavior as sexual harassment because we all have our own notions of what is sexual harassment. Several women subscribe to a common misperception that unless I'm propositioned by my boss, then it's not sexual harassment. And some women describe their supervisors behaviors in more neutral terms, not necessarily ascribing to some of the stereotypical male behavior by saying, You're a pig, or you shouldn't be doing this as a supervisor. And there was some discussion of behavior that was sexual in nature and a discussion of power relationships. And I want to just leave that as as a bit of a context and and introduce Shirley Munoz, who's going to look at intersections of gender and race and how it plays himself out in people's response and interpretation of behavior. Surely, Munos is a senior partner of the core group of professional services for a firm specializing in planning, training and research to address technical and human needs created by changes in organizations. She has specifically led programs and team building bias and performance and cross cultural communication and using conflict promote organizational performance, some key issues that will play themselves out very clearly in this discussion. She is an expert in diversity management. She was a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and currently serves as an adjunct faculty to the EEO Studies program at Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and holds an ed in curriculum and Techmount and teaching from Teachers College. Unknown Speaker 44:31 Here to the case study, but let me tell you how I would like to address this. We actually like to address this from a personal life to address it as a Puerto Rican woman, and how we deal with the issues laid out in case definition of the issue. What are the psychological what are the personal impacts and the issue of how you deal with your management or the administration. And finally, we issue of how what you do when you're the choices you have in the organization, let me tell you what I want to do from my ethnic perspective. I do so because as women, we share certain status. And I use the word minority and of course in an American sense, but in the sense of when your culture is not the dominant culture. What happens to you? And what are some of the tools Unknown Speaker 45:44 and some of the things that I've learned Unknown Speaker 45:48 well, the first thing that happens I just want to lay this out when you are in a minority culture is that when you grow up you want to be granted dominant culture so I didn't like being shown the nurse I remember when someone in school asked me my ethnicity Unknown Speaker 46:10 as I said I was watching Unknown Speaker 46:15 attitudes your beliefs are being taught and link it to the issue of this stuff. I went through that the next day regaining making certain decisions am I going to end because I am so white collar despite having African blood Unknown Speaker 46:55 I am always treated as a white woman. And so I have a decision to make if you don't Unknown Speaker 47:07 you 14 celibate backstage, so I went to stage one of really hating my curly hair. And my black I went to school is basically a class neighborhood. So for us, I thought I'd just start falling figured out, but I'm actually fairly. But your, your way you feel emotionally is the way you see yourself. So I went to college, and I was at the moment only. And the next stage I went through, and I'm saying that it was my room, or no. That's really part of the issue. So what I want to say in terms of sexual harassment, make a parallel, it's been believed that there's something wrong with me. But there's nothing wrong with the norms that men have set up in the workplace, that my job is with them. And if their norm is to make that sexually aggressive behavior, then I have to be able to deal with it. When I was a young girl, I was told that I didn't smile. Now, I haven't noticed. You don't want to become a nervous habit. The second issue was the ability that you say, Okay, I'm going to now you know, I had an ethnic solidarity. And I didn't associate with Anglo men, and make that separation, as I got a little older, around 30 and made this decision that I needed to find somebody who's going to please what I'm telling you is that I'm a crossover, and it was very painful, criticize, and saying in terms of defining the issue, is that I decided that in sexual harassment, that you have to appreciate that there are men out there and I work with a lot of the Police Department in Washington that I have, and I prove my work there. And transportation, there are men this work will find this behavior so that it is important to build those because they were people I think the issue about how I'm looking at other women. And I want to say to you, we've all been, I've seen employers, including me, I can tell you when an organization usually someone who's gone organization and makeup, and then your skirt down with an ankle bone, no bad. If you are an individual, and you're not the head of the organization, you know, 64. In the 60s, we had fantasy that the individual change agents change the end, it doesn't matter. If you're the one person, the one thing, one thing or whatever, in your organization, I'm going to tell you that culture is more powerful than you will either culture rate, we need to get out. Because in fact, the group is more powerful than the individual person. On the other hand, when I'm saying to you, is that you need for your untying for a personal issue. Second issue is that what he has seen, look at police precincts, when there's one woman in that precinct, except when there's 50%, of 35% of women, it's a safer environment, women get together and talk. Now, I want to say that the issue between sexual making a sexual proposition inspection sometimes it can't. Well, the real question is how you handle conflict. And what I mean by that, years ago, I read the same thing, and I would have said, it's a sexual proposition. And because I had a lot of good strategies for that. Right? I named it that one guy only made proposition $10 and said here, need something be my guess, don't bother me. Unknown Speaker 52:13 Right? Because for me, I understood. Well, what my advice on a personal level, is that me to a say, what are the political implication, if there is no support in the organization may be dangerous to be there. And courts suits are wrong. But sometimes, you know, that's it, because there's an issue of pride and you don't want to be evicted. And that's what you guys would do. But on the second level, you have to make sure that you know, the strategies of conflict and negotiation, you're able to speak. On the second issue around women, those of us who have feet have a little more experience, or know how to do the stock or get people out of our faces, and pick me up. And one of my last story, is when I was working with police precinct, and there was just one woman who happened to be lucky enough to have COVID. And she became the spokesperson for their racism bearing group with us. Now, my reactions with her could have been, listen, you need to be that wasn't my reaction. You know why? Because a woman who can get herself into the police force, who is gonna, you know, the struggle with some of these women get up and come to you for situations, and that is a step up. And what I appreciated was that that woman was fighting for her life. And the way she survived in the organization was to comply. So my question myself is, how do I support her? And my thing, my support about the union is in the sense of trying to female judgmental, to be by example, right? For me, I was going to show her a woman in authority 30 men and community leaders and take them through conflict resolution exercise, she wasn't going to help me. And I wasn't going to ask, but I wasn't going to judge her either. So we have to understand looking at the issue and look at it is to say, we all have that identity as people who are not in the not the dominant culture and We have ourselves to go through stages of development. And maybe we will go to some level so Hakan, right, yes, come out of school become more demoralized. And they were going to that next level for where we join with each other to help us understand and define these issues together. Right? It's hard to before, it's hard to figure out these issues from a woman's point of view. Without other women, what we are doing right here is finding those issues for ourselves and golfing spreads from each other. And the third, I would say, is to say, we have to join with other people, for for a man of the people who are like minded to push the sport is a civil rights issue. One of my teachers when I was a young student, was black on remember, this kid had gotten those Puerto Rican kindergarten with special education class. And remember, we've, we've got coupons. Now, she said to me that when I was 20, and it's the same advice I'll give you, this is a very struggle. So you're gonna get hurt. And you're going to win some. And one of the issues always teaching in survival school, to which you gotta look to the future and say, What do I want it to be? Some of us are going to go to court, some of us are going to take positions of authority, and we will lead men and women, right. And some of us will know better schools, including ourselves, look to the future about the way we want it. The second piece is you got to bail out the boat, you got to do something about your own survival. And you got to ask yourself, what do I have to do? First. And then my last thing is my three minutes. Excellent, is around the issue, I want to go to the issue of the actual core. Things are important for women of color. We don't seem to be there has been this comment that and I think Unknown Speaker 57:15 that the oil money, sometimes you get the same that that's an ethnic card. I'm a Latino male, you're a female, you should support me. And God forbid, we shouldn't be nurtured. I think that when we are in the world of work, we can leave the nurturance home for our husbands, our children, our lovers. I think that you will suffer because when women are not nurtured, they disappoint. But I think the nurturance is yours. And if you give it to me like in the workplace, it's about the issues of power, and authority. And what's the sexuality is happening is that men playing the game of competition, try to knock women out of the competition by sexualizing them so that they will ignore them from the issue of that maybe the women can do the job as well, or as more bad. And what I always say is I'm in competition to win. And if you get in front of me, I will work out to do so one of the things is that we have to acknowledge the desire for power and authority. And the issue of ethnic loyalty is something that is not the appropriate issue. The issue is equity and equality. And I one last point I wanted to address is the issue of gay and lesbian rights, particularly lesbians. I feel very strongly that when we look at issues of sexual harassment, we are really talking about inappropriate sexual behavior here, and that we have to begin to, to understand the broader equity issues that we have to support an equity agenda. We have to be just as supportive of race issues of game lifting rights. ageism, we have to say what we want and and my last point is that how do we go to the rest of your organization is that our sexual harassment agenda is a fairness issue, that everyone should be allowed to achieve the level that they need to, and that that's where I'm willing to rest, not with a specific ethnic agenda. It's the Unknown Speaker 59:53 fairness agenda. In moving towards an understanding of intervention and moving toward an understanding of obligation and responsibility of employers, because this isn't a workplace issue, this is an issue of equity. And this is an issue that is defined by legal mandates. Kathy Cavallo from Bear Stearns will look at both the case study and her own experience in defining what's appropriate behavior for supervisors, what are appropriate interventions for management to take, and what is an organizational agenda in addressing and preventing this issue. Kathy Cavallo has been with Bear Stearns for 23 years, started out as a secretary, and is currently a vice president and EEO officer. So she has fought the good fight, and I introduce you to Catholic Ebola. Unknown Speaker 1:00:58 Hi, my, I'm an HR person. So my perspective is as the employer and the employees advocate, within an organization, and from my point of view, my obligation is number one to protect my firm Bear Stearns, from breaking or impinging on anybody's rights as an employee or as a human being. And the second is to make sure that anybody that works for Bear Stearns, any employee rights are protected as far as Bear Stearns is concerned. And so when I look at workplace sexual harassment in the workplace, I look at what what does Bear Stearns, as my employer do, as an employer to protect the rights of its employees. And what Bear Stearns does, and what any smart employer should do, as far as sexual harassment is concerned, is to have a policy and a mechanism in place so that an employee knows exactly what their rights are, as it pertains to sexual harassment or discrimination on any count, race, age, sexual preference, whatever. And if, if you're looking, if you're a new, a young adult, young person coming into the workplace, and you want to know, you want to go into an environment, that's the most conducive for you to be what you want to be in the years to come. Then as if I was a young person starting out, I would look into the organization. And there's lots of ways of finding about out about a corporation before you go for an interview. You go to the personnel department or the HR department, and you'll look and see Do they have a little bulletin board, which posts what their policies are pertaining to discrimination as opposed to employment discrimination and sexual harassment? Do they have a policy put posted up there? I find a law student who knows how to investigate court cases and find out does this firm have any past history somehow? Have they dealt with these types of issues? In the past? Read study, what is my industry like my industry is male dominated. Everybody knows that. But I'm a truck. I'm a perfect example of somebody who started out typical Italian American family where I was never gone to college. My job was to get married and have babies. And as I got older, and I got married, and the babies didn't come them, I'm stuck saying, well, now what am I going to do? So then I went back to school. After I was put into HR put into school, I went back to school, got a degree, and then I worked myself up within the organization. But I did that, because my organization was nurturing at the time, I had a mentor. So it's very important to have a mentor somebody who could guide me, because I didn't know what to do and how to do it and who I should be careful with and who I shouldn't be careful with. Everybody here has been sexually harassed. If you've been a female, there's, there's no way that you cannot, you can say that you've never been sexually harassed, or biased in some way been treated by us. So we all have to find ways to deal with it. If we're strong enough, and we resourceful enough, you can find a way. Now as an organization, typical a male dominated organization, there's a lot of resistance, but there are ways around resistance. And one of the ways the we used to get around resistance is education and communication. We have dinosaurs, every company has dinosaurs. These people will eventually you know go by the way the die. They'll die, but they will assure that they last a long time. But the problem that we have is that the I that I see is we have a Yeah, a lot of young men coming up, who I thought at this point would be more enlightened. Unknown Speaker 1:05:09 And they're not. Okay. So not only are we fighting the old guys, we're fighting the new guys. But that's okay. At least at the younger level, we can still change some behaviors, either through threats or intimidation, or physical violence, we can change people's thinking. Right? So there are ways of dealing with it is what I'm saying. And so as a as a, as an HR person, my job is to find a way for our employees to deal with the problems that they have. And we have very, there are lots of creative solutions. I dealt with it not from an HR point from a sexual harassment point of view until I met Casey. And then Casey helped me mature into the other first of all, knowing understanding things like coping mechanisms, and, and all that other yada yada stuff that I had never had access to. Now, I understand that, and I apply the things that I've learned from her. And I applied that to other discrimination. So what kind of a corporation Do you want to get into organization? What is the The gender makeup of the organization, how many females are at the top, how many are at the bottom, most corporations, the bottom, it's predominantly male at the top. But in our industry, women are moving, they're moving up slowly. And depending on how aggressive you are, how intelligent you are, and how flexible you are, and how you have to be not as sensitive. One of the things that I hear a lot during these changes, the men feel way too sensitive, they don't understand that if you've been beaten up and kicked, you tend to get a little bit sensitive, as you get up there. So they don't understand that it's really not our fault that we are sensitive, they think we should be more like the guys, because to them, that's the norm, they don't understand, we cannot be like the guys, we don't want to be like the guys, we just want to be treated fairly. So in order for them to understand that we want to be treated fairly, they have to understand that we're not a threat to them. We just want to coexist. We like them sexually, if that's our preference, we just want to be buddies, if that's the other way that we want to be with them. We just want to coexist. So if you get them to not feel that that is a threat, and that they should understand that I'm no different, they should treat me the way they would treat their wives, or their mothers, or their sisters, that we are just one of the guys to a point. We have our own sexuality. We have our own temperament. We have our own agendas, but we're not a threat to them. Once they know that we're not a threat to them, then they seem to relax. But it seems to be as if it's with some taking something from that. How do we accomplish this? It's very difficult. education, communication. I think that if we had more courses in school, as these young people are coming up through the ranks, to understand what the issues are, what should they know about me as a female? What should they know about people of different diversity of different races and religions and ages? What should they know? So that it'll help them to deal with me, we seem to be able we seem to be trying to treat treat the problem after it's already a cancer. And so as an employer, that's what we do. We're putting band aids on situations because we are at a loss because it's already at a point where it's it's almost impossible to change. So then what happens when you get to that point you threatened because if you can't change somebody emotionally insight and and make them understand what the logical reasons why I deserve to have the same pay that he's getting, or we have three should have the same job and same have the same rights, then you have to threaten. So you'll always have that financial threats, legal threats, which is what she's going to get into. And so as an organization, we are affected, why we have a very good personnel director, we and then I work together, we know what we have to do. We protect our employees, we protect the firm. And we set the groundwork so that if somebody has a problem, they know who they can go to. It's posted, we publish it, we give it to all new employees. We don't somebody wants to sue us, they're not going to be able to claim they didn't know that they had people to come to. They didn't know they can't say they didn't have options. We give people enough options. They know exactly where they can go. If they choose not to do that, then that's their decision. But I will be able to go to court and say I gave them options and that Bear Stearns gave them options. So if you have options, there's always a way without having to go to court because there are other alternate ways of saying solving these problems. Unknown Speaker 1:10:03 And that means interventions. And psychologically it's a whole, I've learned a lot. I mean, I'm not a psychologist, but I've learned to mediate, we've learned to sit down and bring people into a room who are from on opposing sides, and find a happy medium so that this person can do the job and this person can do their job. So it's a give and take, it takes us to be flexible. I've been harassed, but I don't bear any Greg grudges. And it's not a Bear Stearns that I was harassed. So it's a long time ago. But I'm still responsible enough to know that everybody faces discrimination, if you're a male, if you're a black male, you face discrimination. Nowadays, even all whites aren't equal, depending on what school you go to, and what economic background you're from. So everybody at some point is going to be discriminated against, it's just a matter of when. And so if we can all find a way to deal with that and get on but get on past it, we can all coexist. And as an employer, that's all we want to do get everybody to coexist. So we can produce widgets, or bonds, or stocks or whatever the heck we do to make a living. Kevin, Unknown Speaker 1:11:12 how would you respond as an ER, HR person to the fact in this particular case study that this supervisor did not take seriously an anonymous article left on his desk about sexual harassment? Or did not take seriously some constructive feedback from his colleague about inappropriate behavior? How would what what is your concern about that as an HR person? Unknown Speaker 1:11:37 And how would you intervene to teach these supervisors Unknown Speaker 1:11:41 something different? What Unknown Speaker 1:11:42 would you want them to know? What would you want them to Unknown Speaker 1:11:44 do differently? Unknown Speaker 1:11:45 Well, first, I'd like to know, do they have a policy in place of that the supervisor had known should have known better? If there was no policy, it's very difficult for you to go to an supervisor and say, You're an idiot, why did you do this? If there's a policy in place, and he knowingly violated the policy, then he'd been able to across if he did not know, because we didn't tell him that these are the parameters of what you're on how you're supposed to treat your employees, then we have to educate him first. And he has to be told, this is what you can expect that in this day and age with communication, that people understand what the scope of the law is, and what they can do and what they can't do. And when you do training, they want you to be very specific, where is the line? What can I say? What can I say? How should I say it? What is it going to accept? What is what will, what will I say to her that's going to upset her, they want very specific detail. And you know that you can't do that. What offends you will not offend me. So I can't say to a supervisor, what he can tell exactly, you can say A, B and C but you can't date say h i, j and k and men to get to when they get defensive wants you to be very specific. Alright, if you tell me that, I can't say this, then I won't say it. But meanwhile, they're not even thinking that the other thing that they're saying or doing is totally illegal. So. So it's an education process is a communication process. You tell people what you expect them to do. And especially if you're an employer, and you're in management position, if you if I make you a manager, I'm responsible for you. I'm responsible for your behavior. And I'm responsible for how you to treat your employees. So I am not going to leave it up to you to decide in the old days. How did you become a supervisor? You were the clerk who worked their way up, no management skills, no training, that's how you became supervisor. Okay, so you didn't know what was the what was expected. Any good employer will tell you exactly what they want you to do and how they want you to do it. Thank you is Unknown Speaker 1:14:00 from the National Legal Defense and Education Fund, and is a staff attorney. They're a staff attorney there she graduated from the UCLA School of Law, and from Smith College as an undergraduate. She specializes in sexual harassment and other forms of employment discrimination, reproductive rights and violence against women. She was part of the governor's task force on sexual harassment, and was a member of the planning committee and panelist on women tell the truth conference in 1991. She is very involved in litigation both looking at sexual harassment in the workplace and also doing some cutting edge work in the area of sexual harassment in schools. introduce Miss Jones. Thank you. Well, I think the reason they put me last is because while everyone else has talked about training rats, I indeed am the one that sets out to punish the rat, engage in sexual harassment. It's a job that I enjoy, someone has to do it I think it's really important to seem kind of what we've heard this afternoon is important because there is a backlash against sexual harassment complaints. And in fact litigation, when we talk about the social understanding of harassment, I think a lot of that comes to from the media. And the media has indeed trivialize the issue of sexual harassment, bring it to the fore of what is the difference between flirting and sexual harassment, they have trivialized it by raising the specter of just hordes of women rushing out, getting free legal assistance, to bring massive lawsuits and recover millions of dollars. Let me tell you, this is not happening. Any woman who has been harassed and has sought health, legal assistance and dealing with that harassment, knows of the inability to find low costs, and in fact, sometimes even get into the office door of an attorney, the law is not the first place that someone who has arrest him. It is indeed, the last place that someone ends up is the last place that someone ends up because a company and employer nonprofit organization does not take the harassment seriously, someone ends up in my office, because other strategies, other ways to deal with harassment have failed. And so someone is less with no option to preserve their dignity to preserve their ability to work than to go to court. But I think as we look at harassment, we have to start by understanding in terms of the law, harassment is against the law, not as some people suspect, because the law so concerned with women's feelings, it's against the law, because it interferes with someone's ability to do their work. It doesn't exist to give women special treatment or preferential treatment, it exists so that women can be treated equally, and unfortunately, to law that sometimes me as badly as the men in the office. But that's certainly what it means it means equal treatment and not preferential treatment. So what I want to do today is talk a little bit about the basic principles of sexual harassment, and gender discrimination, legal principles. And I do want to talk a little bit about the case study that you have gotten at the beginning of session, because I think that helps us focus in on the type of analysis that courts are forced to do when they take the legal principles and try to apply them to facts. Let me let me start by talking to you about some of the limitations of the law, harassment, and of course, gender discrimination laws only protect you in the workplace, and it only protects you. In fact, in certain workplaces, the federal law, if you have less than 15 employees, you're not protected. You may be protected by state and local laws, which allow for smaller workplaces. But that's one very practical consideration on in terms of legal protection. The other thing, and I think you've gotten a sense of that from the other speakers, discrimination laws, and laws are not generic, they apply to people. And people are not just women. They're not just black men, not just Asian, many of these instances of harassment, discrimination present, not just sexual harassment, but other types and forms of discrimination. And of course, this makes sense. Since discrimination and harassment, the basis is power. The basis is someone who is different from yourself. And if there is a workplace that will not respect workers as women, they will not respect other workers either. So we have to look at discrimination in the context of all the different types of discrimination that Unknown Speaker 1:19:00 are faced. Unknown Speaker 1:19:02 And the other realization, what we have to remember is that when we think about litigation, and we think about pursuing a lawsuit, it is not single, a technical question of whether or not there is a legal issue present. We have to look at these cases in the broader context of what is right, and what will resolve the situation for the individual involved. For many women going to court will not be their first choice. And you come and you see a lawyer to help you think about perhaps some other choices you would have, but certainly as I will emphasize at the end, the reason I think it's important for everyone to know about the laws of harassment and to understand them is before you can decide what some of these strategies are, what strategies you need to use, and so that you can protect your rights. You have to know what those rights are. And that is one of the most powerful weapons against harassment and discrimination If your employer might not know if you know what your rights are, and you make it very clear that, you know, I think that is a very powerful strategy that will come in use. The other thing is, because we went through and heard some of the discussion for people and where you're from and what issues you're interested in, the focus of my remarks will be on employment discrimination in the workplace. Because Title Seven is the law that covers that. There's a different law called Title Nine that covers the school. And I can talk about that in terms of the questions that people may have. Some of these principles are the same, but the law in sexual harassment in schools is very new. It's very different in some aspects, and it's developing as we speak. So the principles in sexual harassment are not as settled as they are in the workplace context. Let me start by saying that sexual harassment, as you heard is a specific form of sexual discrimination. That is important, particularly I think, sometimes in blue collar jobs, where there is a union contract and other grievance procedures that people might have their workplaces. Sometimes people tell me, well, we don't have a policy against sexual harassment, and we don't have really any recourse. But then you look, they have something against employment, sexual discrimination, those rules, those guidelines, those procedures, would also cover sexual harassment. So that's why it's important to think of harassment as a form of discrimination. It's prohibited in federal law by Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is a law that was enacted to eradicate various forms of employment discrimination. And it is served as a model for also state and local laws which prohibit discrimination. There's a New York State law that prohibits discrimination. And one of the most progressive laws, which is relatively new is the New York City Law. It covers workplaces with as few as four employers, it has other aspects that are far more user friendly to victims of discrimination. It Title Seven prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, and religion. Of course, an obvious exception that is not covered by the federal law is sexual orientation that is not covered by Title Seven, that is covered by the city law and perhaps some other local ordinances. And it may be covered by the workplace policies themselves. But at this juncture in time, that does not give in protection by our federal law. And it prohibits discrimination in the basis of hiring, firing, work assignments, conditions, promotions, benefits, retirement policies and wages. But I think it's important, this is a concept that sometimes people have a problem with when I say, it doesn't apply to bad bosses, one of the defenses that we had been seeing to some of these sexual harassment cases is not this guy was a defensive, this guy wasn't a horrendous management. It's just that he was a bad boss to everybody. He was obnoxious to man, he was obnoxious to children, any animals that passed by, Unknown Speaker 1:23:26 it was bad for them, too. And as horrible as that is, that is a defense. Because in all of these cases of sexual harassment or other type of discrimination, you have to prove that it was the basis of one of these categories. But again, a point I want to emphasize that the law doesn't allow you to respond does not mean there aren't other responses, because someone who would get up in court and accompany that would say he's horrendous to everyone. I think that's a real management problem. Because it's not just discrimination. You have a bad manager. When the law was first enacted, sex was was a category, but certainly they didn't consider the concept of sexual harassment. What that means is the law itself doesn't define sexual harassment. It doesn't provide any at all. If you picked up Title Seven, it wouldn't tell you this is sexual harassment. This is harassing conduct. This is not that was left for the court cases to develop. And it started, as Casey had mentioned, with the EEOC, developing guidelines, and I'm going to give you the legal definition of sexual harassment, which was initially which was an issue with the EEOC and adopted by the Supreme Court in 1986. In the merit of case, one type of sexual harassment which everyone agrees now it's really bad and there's less controversy about that is quid pro quo. And that is of course, conditioning benefits on sexual contact or some sexual behavior with someone, and that's generally a supervisor, someone who is in a position of power or authority to offer some benefits. The other type of harassment is really the type that has generated the most controversy. It's called hostile environment, harassment. And in fact, these two can be in combination, there can be a combination, quid pro quo, and hostile environment. The hostile excuse me environment means unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical conduct that has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work, or creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive working environment. Now, of course, needless to say, this is not the kind of quick definition that supervisors and workers thrown around. But I find, I do find in my work, it's somewhat disingenuous that people don't understand what harassment is because people do not leave common sense at the door when they come to work. I pick up this case study, and I think, Mr. Supervisor, would your mother have a hard time say thinking this is something you shouldn't be doing it to work, telling sexually oriented jokes. I'm checking out the physical attractiveness of female employees. And we can just go through the list of what's described in this case study. I think it is a liar, and someone who is self delusional for someone to say, I did not know this is harassment. When you look at the facts in this scenario, the only issue are really the more technical legal issues. Is the office big enough to fit within the context of one of the laws? Is this an employee? Is this a supervisor? Or is this a employee, the standard of when an employer is liable is different. If it is a supervisor, if they're acting as a supervisor, while they're engaging in misconduct, that's really it for the company. I mean, they're gonna have a hard time defending that. There's a different standard. If it is another employee, if you're working with a colleague, and who's engaged in this behavior, they're rightfully so the company hasn't given that coworker, any power authority over you. The test then for the company, is that whether the company knew or should have known of the harassment, and even that that is not enough. The next part of this step, which is important, and I think why companies now are really trying to get on board and address this, they knew or should have known and fail to take adequate remedial action that goes to what you have heard about a company putting in place, policies, procedures, where their workers could go, knowing how to handle these complaints, and that will have many incidences. Unknown Speaker 1:28:02 Prevent liability from attaching to the company. But again, if you look at this case study, let's assume for a moment this the coworker they should have known why should they knew everybody in the company knows about it, it's always amazing to me from the perspective of a company defending this action. There's one manager who is in charge of the company who didn't know what everybody else knew people on the streets knew about this. But somehow the manager did not know about it. When is this pervasive? Only an employer who is shutting their eyes intentionally will not know about it. So that's, that's some of the things we can learn from that scenario. The other scenario, in terms of what I want to mention is the Supreme Court case that was just decided recently, Harris versus forthwith distance. Now from the television and radio attention, you would have assumed that indeed, this was a revolutionary case. Let me tell you, Harris, that nothing new Harris in many ways is not different from Maratha, which was decided in 1986. It's just that appears now maybe people are listening, because essentially, the issue that was presented to the court was whether before someone could go to court and have a cause of action was essentially whether they suffered a nervous breakdown or whether they suffered severe psychological injury. Well, the Supreme Court had never said you had to be severely psychologically injured to have a sexual harassment complaint. Most of the courts that had considered it the lower courts had found that that is not what you need. And if you think about it, common sense tells you you don't need to be a psychological injury for a couple of reasons. One, why as a public policy matter, would we want people to let harassment exists for so long? that it has gotten so bad that someone has really been severely injured before we, as a public policy matter would want to move forward and do something about it. We wouldn't. We want to encourage companies and workers to do something before there's a severe injury. The other reason is, and I think this is something very important. And again, a theme I'm going to pick up from the other speakers, we have sexual harassment laws, not just because of the personal harm that has suffered by someone who is the target of harassment, we have sexual harassment laws, because it is discrimination, because we as a society do not want to abide by discrimination in our workplaces. And as a discrimination matter, we deserve to intercede as soon as we have, so that all our workers are treated fairly and equally in, Unknown Speaker 1:30:56 in their workplace. And finally, let's look at the case study. Because I think in one sense, what everyone really is looking for, is not only exploration of the issues, but what can you do what can be done legally? So I thought about this scenario, if these women had come to me, what would I say to them? What would I do? Well, first thing that I would want to do and as an attorney to I don't tell them anything, I would ask questions. And by eliciting and fleshing out more about what had happened, I would be in a better position to assess what I could do for them. Because the unique part of my job, it's different. It's not enough just to sexual harassment exists, I have to prove it, that this is a standard that, hopefully in the discussion, we can flush out that as you need, from the position that some of the other speakers are. And I always say to him, because you don't have a legal case does not mean you do not have recourse. But what I am left with is trying to figure out if we can prove a legal case. So what do we want to look at? We want to look at the totality of the circumstances. Those are the new buzzwords for how to assess whether sexual harassment exists. And it is certainly true when you go on to talk about this issue. People want you to draw a line, is this harassment is this not? You always, it's the totality of the circumstances, because everyone does not harass in the same way. And in response to some of the backlash. I suggested this notion of totality of circumstances, certainly in a legal context is not unique. This is not something that is developed just in sexual harassment. It is it is an age old theory and concept in the law, that you have to look at the whole circumstances the whole picture to see if there's been a wrongdoing. So do not accept that it's somehow unique that women made this up for this touchy feely way to go the court, this is a principle in the law that has historically been recognized. And in fact, in this case, it's easy. This guy's a pig. He's a sexist pig. And the only the another question is whether he's also a racist pig. One of the elements that was suggested to me that I would want to explore further is if there's a pattern of harassment that is different for the women of color than the other one. Because in the often there might be and in fact, if you look at the early cases of sexual harassment, it was usually women of color that were bringing those cases. And so here, we might be looking at a combination sexual harassment, and racial harassment case. So that's one of the reasons you also want to look at the totality of circumstances. The other element that is very, very important for preservation of the rights dates when these events occur. This I think is the harm and why the information is so important. Even if ultimately you don't go to court, you want to preserve your rights. There are very strict deadlines for when an event occurs, and how long you have to go to court or seek recourse. So it is very important that if you are the victim or the target, you keep good records of when things occurred. The other part was