Sexual Harassment Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Sexual Harassment - Research Paper Example (The Masschusetts Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights pp. 3-5) What is sexual harassment in employment? Sexual harassment is a situation where an unwanted attention of a sexual behavior occurs in the process of working or seeking work and hence threatens the ability of an individual to earn a living. . (The Masschusetts Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights pp. 3-5) Is it a serious problem? Harassment can be with different behaviors like passing distracting or annoying comments to intimidate, giving threats or demanding to have sexual conduct. The most troublesome and serious situation happens when an employee faces a supervisor who makes sexual demands accompanied by job-related threats. Majority of the people thinks that such situation becomes very critical to handle. Such situations especially happen where jobs are scarce and when the employee has few job skills. (Conte pp. 6-10) However, less unmitigated forms of harassment may also have the serious effect of threatening the income of an employee or his or her career prospects. Acts that may appear to be disturbing and distracting from the victim's perspective, may sufficiently lead to a fall in work performance or might even try to take majority day offs in order to ignore such situations. (Conte pp. 6-7) Who are the victims? According to most of the studies, this kind of problem of encountering sex related threats demands, and annoying behavior are being mostly faced by women. This is understood because it is very consistent with the way power is distributed in the workplace as women workers are typically at the bottom of the job ladder, and those in supervisory positions are mostly males. (Boland p. 12-18) There are many variations to these work places like professors happen to be mostly male, are in a position to take advantage of students, female enrollment in skilled trades apprenticeships is increasing, but instructors, union officials, and foremen are almost invariably male and even female professionals employed by corporations, government agencies, and other large institutions are almost always responsible to male executives. Those who claim that there are places where males get harassed by females do have a point and must get equal consideration, but very few females are in a position to take advantage over males in the workplace. Sexual overtures from the employee to the supervisor hardly entail the threat associated with the reverse. (Boland p. 12-18) Why is this issue receiving so much attention recently? Sexual harassment in the workplace is a very old problem. Women have put up with it in the past because there has been no simple escape. However, recent increases in the number of women in the labor force have made us aware of a whole range of ignored issues of concern to working women—harassment, child care, comparable worth, and others. In the last few years, court decisions and guidelines of Federal and State agencies h ave made it clear that sexual harassment is illegal and has defined the responsibilities of employers in