The Effects of Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment on the job can have a number of serious consequences, both for the harassed individual and for other workers who experience it secondhand and become demoralized or intimidated at work.

1. Loss of Job

Sometimes the connection between sexual harassment and the injuries it causes is simple and direct: A worker is fired for refusing to go along with the sexual demands of a coworker or supervisor. Usually the management uses some other pretext for the firing, but the reasons are often quite transparent.

Sometimes the firing technically occurs because of some other event, but it is still clearly related to sexual harassment. For example, if a company downgrades an employee’s job and assignments because of a harassment incident and then fires him or her for complaining about the demotion, that injury is legally caused by sexual harassment.

If an employee is temporarily unable to work as a result of the harassment and the management uses that as an excuse to fire him or her, that is also considered legally related to the harassment.

2. Loss of Wages and Other Benefits

An employee who resists sexual advances or objects to obscene humor in the office may suffer work-related consequences including:

• being denied a promotion

• being demoted, or

• suffering various economic losses.

That employee may also suffer harm to his or her standing within the company, which could jeopardize future pay increases and opportunities for promotion.

A loss of wages usually entails a loss of other job benefits as well, such as pension contributions, medical benefits, overtime pay, bonuses, sick pay, shift differential pay, vacation pay, and participation in any company profit-sharing plan.

3. Forced Reassignment

Sometimes a company responds to an employee’s complaint of sexual harassment by transferring that individual somewhere else in the company and leaving the harasser unpunished. This forced reassignment is another form of job-connected injury, and it may be compounded if it results in a loss of pay or benefits or reduced opportunities for advancement.

4. Constructive Discharge

Sometimes the sexual harassment is so severe that the employee quits. If the situation was intolerable and the employee was justified in quitting, sexual harassment caused him or her to be constructively discharged—that is, forced to leave. While often difficult to prove, courts treat this as an illegal firing.

5. Penalties for Retaliation

Employees are frequently fired or penalized for reporting sexual harassment or otherwise trying to stop it. Such workplace reprimands are called retaliation. In such cases, the injury is legally considered to be a direct result of the sexual harassment.

6. Personal Injuries

In addition to job-connected losses, a sexually harassed worker often suffers serious and costly personal injuries—ranging from stress-related illnesses to serious physical and emotional problems.

Sexual harassment also causes a great many other types of physical, mental, and emotional injuries. Some of these injuries are stress-related, but others are caused by physical pranks or violent acts directed at the harassed worker.