Legal Reforms

Laws are an important way to create a baseline set of expectations for appropriate behavior, and offer specific remedies in the event sexual harassment occurs. Currently, many people—such as domestic workers, farm workers, contract workers, and some public employees—are left out of important legal protections, such as the National Labor Relations Act, Civil Rights Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, and Social Security Act, and have fewer options to address incidents. Expanding the coverage of the laws to include all workers would extend people’s rights and also encourage preventative training and engaged management more broadly.

Promising Solution 1: Extend Worker Rights

The Seattle Domestic Worker Bill of Rights: Domestic workers—people who work within their employer’s household as gardeners, housekeepers, caretakers, and so on—have historically been excluded from major legal workplace protections such as the National Labor Relations Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. As a result of fewer workplace protections and decentralized or non-existent paths for reporting harassment, domestic workers face rampant sexual harassment on the job. In response, Seattle passed a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights to protect domestic workers’ rights to a minimum wage, rights to breaks, and rights to protect their private property while on the job, regardless of contract type or employment status.

This bill is also the first to mandate the creation of an independent standards review board that brings together workers and employers to determine how to enforce the legislation and establish a central place for workers to report sexual harassment. Enacting more laws like these could be helpful in expanding rights—including legal recourse to address sexual harassment—to classes of workers excluded from civil and labor protections such as workers at small employers, contractors, and agricultural workers.

Laws are an important way to create a baseline set of expectations for appropriate behavior, and offer specific remedies in the event sexual harassment occurs.

Extend Time Limits to File a Claim: Even if you are protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, people who have experienced sexual harassment must file a claim within 180 days with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) at the federal level, extended to 300 days if the state where you are employed has its own law that extends the timeframe for claims.

Beyond the EEOC regulations, states often set their own, slightly longer timeframes, often one year from the last incident of harassment. Given that many people must overcome social stigma to speak of their experiences and report them, expanding the window of opportunity to file a claim could allow more survivors to come forward.

Create User-Friendly Reporting Processes for Sexual Harassment: One of the difficulties in understanding the scope of sexual harassment is that very few people report their experience or are able to file a claim. Clarifying and streamlining reporting processes in a user-friendly way could make it easier for people who would like to report, and for the EEOC, researchers, policymakers, and others to measure and address those experiences of harassment.

A recent report by the National Women’s Law Center recommended changes to the data entry system such as updating industry codes and creating “intake and charge forms that reflect America’s demographic shifts,” by allowing filers to select multiple, and mixed race ethnic and racial categories (moving beyond asking for a single country of origin or race). Giving more fine-grained detail about the scope of the problem could improve the design of better solutions to workplace sexual harassment.

States like New York, Pennsylvania, and California are currently attempting to eliminate non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), arbitration clauses, and other practices that silence victims of harassment. Making it easier to publicly discuss and adjudicate experiences of harassment may lessen the challenge of coming forward for those that are able to do so.

Promising Solution 2: Provide Access to Representation

After many in Hollywood revealed that prominent film producer Harvey Weinstein consistently sexually abused women, more than 300 powerful women banded together to found Time’s Up and create a legal defense fund to represent women and other targets of sexual harassment, including disabled, LGBTQ+ persons, and workers of color. The legal defense fund, based at the National Women’s Law Center, also works for systemic change through legislation that penalizes sexual misconduct. Since sexual harassment is a civil, not criminal, complaint, people who experience sexual harassment do not automatically have a right to representation as they would in the criminal justice system, so finding and affording legal support can be a challenge for many.

Promising Solution 3: Encourage Preventative Education around Sexual Education and Sexual Harassment

Gendered power dynamics and social norms develop early, and education about harassment and assault should be deployed to target these formative years. A 2011 American Association of University Women study found that nearly half of students from 7th–12th grade had experienced some kind of gender-based harassment. In 2015, California state policymakers passed a new law mandating sexual harassment and assault education for 7th–12th graders. Under California’s law, which went into effect in 2016, schools provide students with information about harassment and assault, and models for healthy relationships.

Another California law mandates teaching about consent when high school students are required to take a health class. Beyond legally mandated trainings at the state or local level, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault commissioned the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments to put together a package of materials (including a guide, training modules, and videos) to guide educators who are teaching young students about harassment and assault, and help K–12 schools prevent peer-to-peer sexual harassment among students.

California law mandates teaching about consent when high school students are required to take a health class.

Promising Solution 4: Educate and Train Workers about Sexual Harassment and Their Rights

In 2016, after months of fasting and protests by janitorial workers, California passed AB 1978, which will require businesses to register with the state and provide a pamphlet and in-person training on a variety of topics to their staff, as a way of holding businesses with outstanding wage theft or sexual harassment claims accountable. A new, culturally-relevant curriculum—being developed by janitorial workers in tandem with unions, academics, and state regulators—covers a range of topics from gender, consent, and the damaging effects of gender stereotypes to typical harassment scenarios and resources. A new bill, AB 2079, seeks to allow janitors who have been through two years of training to provide that training to their peers.

One component of the curriculum, a training video, is used as a discussion tool during in-person trainings, and models three harassment situations: One is a quid pro quo (i.e. giving better hours or shifts for sex); one is hostile work environment (a man makes homophobic comments towards another man in the break room); and a third alludes to a workplace assault. Written by and starring janitors, the videos are both based on real experiences and model what workers can do to address harassment, such as providing supportive language to someone who has been harassed, accompanying them to human resources, and speaking up as a bystander to criticize homophobic and sexist behavior. The difference in this training is that it starts early and in person, and highlights the efficacy of co-created, grassroots education products that are relevant to the workers they are designed for in an attempt to encourage prevention and make state laws more effective.