The XX Factor: What women really think.

Sexual Assault Still a Pervasive Problem in Military War Zones

Keep Your Hands Off My ... Paycheck

But I think the question is: What's the goal? Are you trying to have the best possible career, when you can easily find a comparable job elsewhere? Moving on may be best for your sanity. Are you stuck in a job—say, because you're a single mother in a recession-stunned region, with few other options? Register your complaint—but have allies within and outside the company before you do.

Or if your harasser is predatory, serially making life miserable for one woman after another, and you want to put a stop to it, not just for your own sake but for everyone's? Please, please, file with HR, and also go to the EEOC and file your complaint! Do not leave that man in place. Maria Hinojosa, at NOW on PBS, recently talked to some teens who took their companies to court and won. Making the company pay also puts other employers on notice: The cost of replacing your supervisor is less than the cost of fighting your lawsuit.

No matter what you do, your encounter with sexual harassment—which takes you away from full career concentration for however long you're worrying about avoiding your harasser's hands and hostility—is part of why we have a wage gap. On  average—in every job category—women working full-time make less than men working full-time, as the New York Times shows so beautifully here. Forget what men do to women on the job for a few months before you quit or complain: What's really disgusting is making a quarter or a third less than your male peers.

"Fixing the System From Within Can Be Over-rated"

Laurie Ruettimann, the author of the original Lemondrop post about sexual harassment in the workplace that Bonnie commented on yesterday, has responded to her in the Fray:

Thanks for the link to the article on Lemondrop. I'm not advocating that women accept harassment. I'm not suggesting that you should quit before you find another job. I am not saying that Human Resources departments are incapable of managing sexual harassment investigations (although many of them are incapable of anything other than eating donuts).

Here is what I'm saying.

*You are responsible for your own career.

As feminists, we often want to fix the system from within. I've been there, and fixing the system from within can be overrated. Thank goodness for those trailblazers and fighters who sue the shit out of companies. Those women make work better for us.

Unfortunately, many of us don't have the means to hire a lawyer and fight a long and brutal legal fight that we'll most likely lose. In this age of social media and external marketplace pressures, I suggest that there is no bigger employee advocate than you. It's important to protect your own interests and act accordingly.

I'm not advocating running away from a fight. I'm an advocate for brushing the dirt of your shitty company off your shoulders.

 Fellow feminists, what do you think? Is fixing the system from within over-rated?

Is That a Pubic Hair on My Coke Can?

Is Your Daughter Safe At Work? Watch PBS on Friday To Find Out.

Many people think "sexual harassment" refers to aggressive flirting or sexual horseplay on the job. But to get into court, harassment has to be intrusive, aggressive, and nearly endless—predatory or nearly so. And few teens (girls or boys) know what to do when a supervisor begins to talk ceaselessly and intimately about their bodies and lives, discussing sex acts in detail, propositioning mercilessly, pinning them in a car or stockroom, and groping, grabbing, stalking, threatening, or sexually assaulting them.

The collaboration grows out of research I did a few years ago, which resulted in a Good Housekeeping article with this blog post's title. Maria Hinojosa, PBS NOW senior correspondent, takes that research and runs with it, talking to young women who were unprepared for what they faced at work. The show tracks these young women's legal journeys, and examines how sexual harassment affects an estimated hundreds of thousands of teens across the country—many of whom don't know how to report workplace abuse, or even how to recognize when their bosses cross the line.

I hope you all will watch ... and we can discuss. (Especially you, Susannah, since you and I had an exchange about the subject back in January. I would love to know what you think.)

Why, Exactly, Is Sexual Harassment—er, Sexual Terrorism—OK?

To your point: I am sorry you had such a brutal work environment, and sorry that the sexuality was "the least of it." I understand that low-wage jobs are brutal. Many in my extended family, and from my high school, have worked or do work Nickel-and-Dimed jobs: trucking, waitressing, cashiering, retail, construction. (Although the men's jobs regularly pay more than the women's.) Glad you don't have to live that way now.

But I have to say, reading your post, I'm not exactly sure why you think sexual harassment is OK. Because it's the least of it? Um, not always. And why should anyone have to tolerate the kind of sexual harassment that's brutal, grinding, daily terrorism? Consider the experience of a teen who worked at a Pizza Hut, whose co-worker rubbed his, um, "private parts" (as she put it in the deposition that I read) against her bottom whenever she was at the cash register, who held a knife to her throat when demanding sex and then said he was "just kidding," who threw her to the floor and dry-humped her and would have actually raped her except that the manager walked in. When the teen complained, her manager cut her hours.

Or the Peerless Park, Mo., Burger King workers whom I talked with at length, who were so traumatized by similar daily grindings and attempted assaults that one—call her "Ellen," because she asked me for pseudonymity—told me that whenever she saw a car like that of her former manager, she stopped being able to breathe, and had to go immediately home and lock herself in the house for a day. This was two years later. She'd never heard the term PTSD, and when I gently suggested counseling—although that's not a journalist's place!—she told me she couldn't afford it.  

Or how about the Montgomery, Ill., Dial factory cleaning woman who was assaulted by her manager—by assaulted, I mean an attempted rape that was interrupted when someone else came into the room (I read excerpts of this sworn testimony too)—in a case in which 100 different women went on the record about such horrific harassment as being stalked and threatened; grabbed by the crotch and lifted into the air; or circled by men on the factory floor, grabbed, their heads shoved toward some guy's unzipped crotch. Or was that last one the Ford case? Or Eveleth Taconite? Or Mitsubishi? Sorry, I have talked to so many of these women, and read the depositions and written testimony in so many of these lawsuits, that I get them mixed up. They're brutal. They're designed to keep women in the lower-paying jobs on the ladder. They're inexcusable.

And I haven't even gotten into what happens to women in the financial services industry—it's too gross to post. For the ugly details, check out Susan Antilla's stunning book, Tales from the Boom-Boom Room.

All this should be illegal. Oh wait—it is!—because it alters the "terms and conditions" of keeping a job, based on a woman's sex, making it impossible for her to earn a fair living.

The good news: Rachel Spicuglia got her job back. The bad news: Hundreds of thousands of other women still have to fend off exhausting and dehumanizing sexualized threats if they want to keep bringing home their skinny pink paychecks. And in a bad economy, that's very bad news for women. 

Who's Sexually Harassing Whom?

Well, E.J., having spent several years of my adult life working as a waitress, I take issue with your post. Over a two-year period, I worked at two restaurants. For most of that time, I worked at one of the most high-end restaurants in town. Sexual harassment? That was the least of it. When I was hired, there were 13 servers. Eleven were hard-core substances abusers: cocaine addicts, alcoholics, one crackhead. There were three drug operations. Pot, coke, and whatever else you wanted to get your hands on were sold by the valets, in the kitchen, and on the floor. One night, a buser went after a chef with a butcher knife; he was fired only after he didn't show up for work because he'd been shot. By the end of many shifts, most of the servers were coked out of their heads or too drunk to talk. To reiterate, this was a very upscale place. Some of the most high-profile people in the area dined there. Maybe it took getting high to deal with the never-ending demands of the wealthy patrons upon whom we waited.

So, sexual harassment? Uh, yes. Chefs in their 30s had sex with hostesses in their teens. Managers had sex with servers. One young, drunk waitress performed oral sex on the executive chef in the liquor closet during a shift. This extremely high-stress environment was virtually nonstop rife with sexual innuendo, grabbing, and harassment. Every table had to be served bread we cut in the kitchen, and it was a regular occurrence that the cooks would holler at us to "Shake it!" as we sliced the bread. We were regularly objectified, fondled, and solicited.

And the fact of the matter is that we women sexually harassed right back. We flirted with managers to get better shifts, we unbuttoned buttons on our uniforms to get bigger tips, we regularly used sexual innuendos, physical contact, and body language to squeeze as many dollars as possible out of the men with whom we worked and upon whom we waited. Why? For the money. Because we were desperate. Because we were broke. Because we could.

I was raised by two English professors in the most liberal place in America: Berkeley, Calif. I'm all too familiar with feminist rhetoric, with academics in ivory towers who point down at the masses to declare what the populace should and should not do, with those who seem to perceive the world as a place in which what "should" happen is what does happen. That's not reality. When it comes to sex—or sexual harassment, for that matter—the situations are often neither black nor white but decidedly gray. The idea that it's possible to eliminate or police human sexuality in any context is a fantasy.

For those of you interested in reading a moving, compelling, and insightful book about what it's really like to live and work in the trenches of America by a woman who found out the truth by sticking her head into the toilets of America's rich, buy yourselves a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

Waitress Loses Job Because She Was Sexually Assaulted. Ho-Hum, Another Day of Working While Female!

While we wonder whether our sensitivity to sexist press coverage of elite women candidates is a good or bad sign—thanks and welcome to XX Factor, Eve—ordinary working women out there are still losing their jobs because some guy thinks their breasts double as doorknobs, available for anyone to squeeze. Check out Rebekah Spicuglia's painfully specific post about how her sister lost her waitressing job at Chili's. Notice the very best part:

When my sister, Rachel Spicuglia, a five-year employee of Chili's Restaurant (owned by Brinker International), reported to her manager the escalating sexual harassment she was receiving from the cooks, which had culminated in an assault that morning in the walk-in refrigerator, the manager asked Rachel if the offending employee had gotten a "full cup" when he had grabbed her breasts.

I post this not because this case is unusual, but precisely because it isn't. This one just happens to be written up publicly. As I found while collaborating on Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even, American companies shell out millions upon millions of dollars each year to make up for truly vile sexual harassment—assault, groping, stalking, and deeply disgusting daily comments. Waitresses in particular should get hazard pay. And the waitress cases aren't as bad as the ones I read involving aspiring electricians, videographers, higher-paid factory workers, women in finance, and other cases in which women try to get "men's" jobs—those stories start reading like terror on the job. 

I'll write more about this another day but reading this just now on HuffPo, I snapped. According to the largest and most credible study—of the federal workforce—approximately 3 percent of women report being sexually assaulted at work. That's millions of women a year. The lower down the food chain you are, the more likely you will be harassed—holding down your earnings significantly while you fight or flee. Which is why sexual harassment is against the law, by the way—because it stops women from earning a fair living.

Why should so many women have to risk their bodily integrity just to feed their families?