The Workplace Gets Raunchier

By Christopher Farrell

More women say they’re hearing “sexually inappropriate” comments at work, according to a 2007 phone survey just released by Novations Group, a Boston consultant. Some 38% of women said they heard sexual innuendo, wisecracks, or taunts at the office last year, up from 22% in 2006. The percentage of men hearing such comments stayed steady, at 45%. Indeed, men were more likely than women to hear all types of tasteless or questionable comments, with 44% saying they heard racial slurs, for instance, compared with 24% of women.
Novations CEO Michael Hyter says the big increase in sexual remarks heard by women is hard to explain. One theory, he says, is that women’s
impatience with such comments—rather than the comments’ frequency—is rising. But Paul Secunda, professor of law at the University of Mississippi, says the responses could partly reflect a lowering of barriers between the sexes, with male employees making remarks more openly as a way of treating women like peers. The problem, he says, is that “what might be reasonable to a man may not be reasonable to a woman.” That difference, he adds, “shows up in sexual harassment case law.”