Doesn’t sexual harassment have to involve sexual advances or other conduct that is sexual in nature?
No. The 1980 EEOC Guidelines on Sexual Harassment do suggest that conduct constituting sexual harassment must be “conduct of a sexual nature,” but it is just as wrong and just as unlawful to harass people with gender-based conduct of a nonsexual nature. Consider, for example, a man and a woman each holding the same kind of job in an organization. If their supervisor gives demeaning and inappropriate assignments (such as serving coffee, picking up dry cleaning, emptying a waste basket) to the woman, but not to the man, because of the woman’s gender, that conduct, if sufficiently severe or pervasive, could amount to harassment on the basis of sex even thought eh assignments are not sexual in nature but whether it was based on the victim’s gender.
