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Excerpt from Love and Profit: The Art of Caring Leadership Sexual Harassment It's all very well to talk about love and caring in the workplace, but now let's talk about sexual harassment. If anything is clear, it is that men and women see it differently. The Wall Street Journal reported a piece of research which showed that men and women generally agreed on what constitutes sexual harassment, but they did not agree on how women should respond. Forty-six percent of the men said that women should be flattered; only five percent of the women agreed. If anything else is clear, it is that men do it to women more often than women do it to men. In fact, a man would likely not complain for fear of appearing less than masculine. I recall, as an adolescent, reading in the Memphis Commercial Appeal about a man who complained to police that he was taken at gunpoint into the woods by two women and raped. I wondered why he was complaining. What was wrong with him? Now I hear grown men wonder why women complain about comments which are "just joking" or "should be flattering." "What do they expect," men ask, "when they wear those goddamned miniskirts?" It is difficult for many men to separate women's desire to be attractive and to express a sexual identity from their desire also to maintain a sexual privacy and separateness that is inviolable by words, looks, or gestures. The difficulty is understandable, particularly in men of the fifties who have been goaded from boyhood into believing that sex somehow is connected to power, and that if men don't establish that power, women will. Consider the old joke: "The good news is that the Lord gave the world pussy. The bad news is that he put women in charge of it." There are thousands of sexist jokes, but this may be the ultimate one, in which women's sexuality was created by a masculine God as a commodity. The result is a struggle whose outcome can never benefit women, except by men's rules. Only in the past fifteen years or so has this struggle been outlawed from the workplace. Not a minute too soon, of course, but we are left with a dilemma. Somehow we must accept and tolerate appropriate expressions of caring, of support, and of affection in a workplace which now accepts those expressions partly because so many women have come into business. It is ironic that I now find myself, more often than not, hugging men and shaking hands with women. Recently I met with a young woman salesperson, a feminist, whom I had hired and to whom I had been something of a mentor. It had been a while since we'd seen one another, so she gave me a warm and exuberant hug. It was important and appropriate. She initiated it and I'm sure she thought nothing of it. But why? Why was it appropriate? I can name 50 other people with whom I have an equal relationship but with whom the hug would not have been appropriate. Why did she think nothing of it? Surely she can name 50 men with whom she has worked but whom she would not have hugged. What was the difference? She might have her own answer, but I know mine: The difference has to do with power and motive. Sexism and sexual harassment are always about power, not about affection and caring. Sexism and sexual harassment are always one-sided, never mutual. And I know this: Employees, including managers, must care for one another, and the frequently intertwined nature of our personal/professional relationships makes rules impossible, except those clearly established by law. And this: Motive and mutuality are the keys to appropriateness, so despite the complexities, sexual harassment is not all that hard to identify, within ourselves or other people. I can recognize it when I see it. And so can you.
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Love & Profit by James A. Autry. |
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