STUDIES in America have shown increasing evidence of sexual harassment by email, a conference in Cork over the weekend has been told.
The fifth European Conference on Information Systems was addressed by Ms Janice Sipior and Mr Burke Ward, of Villanova University, Pennsylvania, who presented a joint paper on the subject. They said the use of email had given rise to a growing number of cases of sexual harassment; coupled with this, the use of email messages as evidence in litigation was increasing in the United States.
In their paper, Ms Sipior and Mr Ward said four female employees received a settlement of $2.2 million from the Chevron Corporation for a sexual harassment case in 1995.
Additionally, Chevron was ordered to pay the women's legal fees and court costs. While Chevron denied the charges, the women claimed, among other things, to have been subjected to offensive mail messages. Among the messages circulated were comments about clothes and parts of the body. The women also claimed to have been the targets of offensive jokes, pornography appearing on screen and pornographic interoffice mail. Considered in conjunction with other evidence, the court determined this amounted to a sexually hostile environment.
Referring to another case, Ms Sipior and Mr Ward said a female employee of the Microsoft Corporation, Ms Karen Strauss, alleged her company had failed to promote her because of her gender. In a case she took against the corporation, Ms Strauss offered evidence of email messages from her supervisor which were offensive to her and which the court decided meant there had been inappropriate behaviour.
In a further example, the conference was told a male employee had complained that, while working for the Minneapolis Community Development Agency in 1994, a female administrative assistant sent him unwelcome messages via email. When he informed her that her actions were unwelcome, she sent him a further message requesting "more than a friendship". He asked her to desist; but she did not and the court reached a verdict that there was sufficient evidence to suggest that he had been harassed.
A government employee serving as ombudsman of King County, Seattle, was accused of sexual harassment for having forwarded "an incredibly offensive" email message to a female employee. Two weeks after having received the message, she complained to another member of the council. Although the offender apologised, members of the council viewed his behaviour as grounds for dismissal. A public hearing was held and the council decided to terminate his employment.
A female attorney claimed she was forced to resign from Nationwide Mutual Insurance because of retaliation against her for complaining that she was sexually harassed by her supervisor. He had sent her sexually explicit email messages and in a subsequent action it was decided that Nationwide had fostered an environment that permitted such harassment by failing to enforce a policy against it.
In a $2.5 million sexual harassment lawsuit which is yet to be resolved a female employee of Calsonic International Inc is alleging that her main supervisor used email messages to make lewd remarks about her body and to demand that she should meet him in his hotel room on a business trip.
The conference was told that in a Japanese study 70 per cent of the respondents said they had suffered sexual harassment at work.
The European rates ranged from 17 per cent in Sweden to 67 per cent in Germany and 80 per cent in Spain. A study by the European Union concluded that sexual harassment was widespread and that it constituted an intolerable violation of the dignity of workers.