1990's Business and the Economy | Love, Business, and the Law

The Discovery of Sexual Harassment.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s the concept of sexual harassment existed only in the mind of a young legal scholar named Catherine A. MacKinnon. By the 1990s MacKinnon had become a prominent law professor at the University of Michigan and 15,000 sexual harassment complaints were being filed annually with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Now it is impossible for even the most diligent of executives to stay current with the vast and diverse body of precedent and law that sexual harassment cases have generated. Few, though, can afford to ignore the numbers, such as the record $34 million payment that Mitsubishi Motor Corporation made in 1998 to settle an EEOC investigation of alleged harassment taking place at their plant in Normal, Illinois. The legal system has also disciplined companies for an apparently too rigid enforcement of sexual harassment policies. When...