The phrase sexual harassment only entered print in a 1973 MIT report
The behaviour is ancient, with workplace complaints traceable to at least the 1600s, but the name is barely fifty years old. Mary Rowe used it in a 1973 report at MIT, and Cornell activists took it to the public in 1975. Within five decades, 142 countries had written workplace protections into law.
Rowe was then an adviser on women and work to MIT's president and chancellor, and her report, titled Saturn's Rings, made the university one of the first big American organisations with formal anti-harassment procedures. Around the same time at Cornell, instructor Lin Farley noticed that women in a discussion group kept describing jobs they had lost or quit because men intimidated them. She and colleagues adopted the term to promote a Speak Out in May 1975, and Farley testified on the subject to the New York City Human Rights Commission that year. Her 1978 book Sexual Shakedown inspired the first workplace training video on the topic.
The law was built case by case. Many of the women bringing the earliest American suits were African American, often veterans of the civil rights movement, who applied its principles to sex discrimination. Rulings in 1976 and 1977 found that firing someone for turning down a supervisor was discrimination. In 1979 Catharine MacKinnon argued that such conduct breached Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and sorted it into two categories still used worldwide: quid pro quo demands tied to job consequences, and conduct creating a hostile environment. The Supreme Court endorsed the principle in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, and Alexander v. Yale in 1980 extended protection to students.
Other countries followed. Britain developed precedents under its 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, and by 1994 more than a dozen nations, including Japan, Canada and Sweden, had specific laws. By 2021, 103 countries prohibited both main types of workplace harassment, 39 explicitly covered sexual orientation and 24 addressed gender identity. Employment law does not impose a general civility code, so isolated minor incidents are usually not illegal.
Researchers stress something the public often misses. The most common form is gender harassment, sexist jokes, imagery or stereotyped remarks, which has nothing to do with attraction; legal scholar Katherine Franke called it a technology of sexism. Because the word sexual implies desire, some researchers prefer the term sex-based harassment. A 2023 to 2024 study interviewing 90 people at six European universities found most linked harassment to men holding authority.
Source: Sexual harassment
