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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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As far as I can tell, the letter of the law is this:

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) defines sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when:

Submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment; Submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment decisions affecting such individual; or Such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance by creating an intimidating hostile or sexually offensive work environment.”

That doesn't sound like it is too broad or should have a chilling effect on benign behaviors, 'unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance' seems like a pretty high bar that's hard to do by accident, and you should have plenty of warning before meeting that bar if you're paying attention. In particular, I don't think any individual comment (especially a marginally-benign one) can meet that third standard alone, it would require a pattern of behavior to interfere with work performance that severely, so you should get warnings along the way.

Of course, IANAL, I don't know if there are other statutes that apply or how this one has been interpreted, but like I said my impression is that the actual in-trial application is even more stringent than this might imply, not less. Open to anyone with more info though.

I do think, again, that a lot of the problem here is another meta-layer removed; not what a clean reading of the statute says is sexual harassment, but what people imagine the statute might refer to based on popular media discussions of the topic (or, perhaps more perniciously, discussions by corporate lawyers trying to avoid any possible liability, or discussions by for-profit 'educators' on this topic trying to create business for themselves).