Sexual Harrasment issue - Eleni Loving p.1st

http://www.npr.org/2016/02/07/465878962/weve-begun-to-draw-the-line-but-its-tough-to-define-sexual-harassment

This article says that the Supreme Court ruled in 1986  that  sexual harassment is a violation of federal civil rights law, and that sexual harassment is still a problem , such as when a professor at the University of Chicago resigned after the school found him guilty of sexual harassment. The article describes an interview of three different women about their thoughts about sexual harassment. The first one was a woman who was in law school in the early 70s. She said at that time no one knew of something called sexual harassment. Her definition now is that it is something that keeps you from doing your job, so it could be inappropriate comments all the way up to sexual assault. She also talked about the other kinds of smaller comments that someone might make that are inappropriate, but are hard to really call sexual harassment. She called these microaggressions.

The second woman is a civil engineer, a career mostly held by men. She says she has experience small inappropriate comments many times over the years. She tried to just laugh off the comments or ignore them, when she was just getting started in her career, because she was worried about someone retaliating against her for making a complaint. 

A lawyer in the interview said that sometimes courts do not respond strongly to minor examples of sexual harassment against women who are working in mostly male professions. She said they seem to believe that some of these attitudes are just part of the culture of some industries.

The last woman in the interview explained that she started her career not very long ago, during the financial crisis, and she said that sexual harassment still happens  quite a bit, but most people were nervous about complaining about anything because people were lucky to have jobs.  This last woman had friends who worked at a public relations firm that was shut down because of sexual harassment complaints, and they founded an online forum for women to share their experiences of sexual harassment. The women seem to agree that things have gotten better for women in the workplace now that courts and laws are on their side to protect them. But they also agree that sexual harassment is hard to define sometimes.