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By Root 891 0

does not exist in the profession or that women lawyers are not its targets. In a 1991 survey conducted by the American Bar Association’s Committee on the Status of Women, four of five women lawyers said that they had experienced or witnessed incidents of sexual harassment in their workplace. Surveys from around the country support this finding. And women versed in civil rights law are no more likely to bring claims than other women lawyers. In 1994 a group of female attorneys with the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the country, complained publicly for the first time about a pattern of gender bias that had existed in the NAACP for years. Their allegations included harassment-related charges as well as charges that women were not paid comparably to men in similar positions and were not promoted at the same rate as men. Despite their familiarity with civil rights law, these women did not sue to complain about violations of their civil rights. For years they attempted to deal with the matter internally. There is no factual basis for Hatch’s implied assertion that women lawyers either are not victims of discrimination or are more likely to complain immediately.

Hatch may have been making an even more troubling, if veiled, assertion in his statement from the Senate floor: that well-educated older women do not deserve sympathy even if they are harassed. While women in these categories may be in a better position to complain about sexual harassment, they are still subject to the social and legal constraints that compel other women to remain silent. As court cases and empirical studies show, neither education nor professional achievement nor age insulates a woman from the attacks on character often waged if she raises a sexual harassment claim.

Hatch’s misguided observation reminds me of a comment attributed in 1981 to Phyllis Schlafly of the conservative Eagle Foundation, who claims that men hardly ever ask sexual favors of women from whom the certain answer is no. Virtuous women are seldom accosted by unwelcomed sexual propositions or familiarities, obscene talk, or profane language. Accordingly, since virtuous women so seldom experience harassment, the numerous claims must be raised by women without virtue and thus society should not be concerned about it.

Stretching the imagination to assume that Schlafly is correct about the experiences of the virtuous woman does not resolve the problem. Schlafly still misses the point that the law is in place to protect a victim’s civil rights, not her virtue. The issue of virtue has no bearing on the question of the law’s application. Similarly, my age and education had no bearing on whether the behavior Thomas engaged in was offensive. After all, we do not require that a man who complains about a mugging show that he is a good person or even that he acted sensibly to prevent the mugging. Nor should we care in the case of a mugging whether the victim has other resources. We ask only that he show that he was mugged. Very often we conclude that he was by simply taking his word for it. Hatch and Schlafly reduce the issue of harassment to the question of who is most likable rather than whether there has been a violation of a person’s civil rights. Schlafly stacks the deck by declaring that victims lack virtue. Senator Hatch did likewise by implicitly limiting the right to complain to young women with only a high school education.

Unfortunately, it is true that society is often less sympathetic to victims of sexual harassment who in its assessment ought to be able to take care of themselves. Hatch played on that lack of sympathy and missed the point altogether that the issue of the hearing was not sympathy for me but whether an individual who had engaged in harassing behavior should be appointed to a lifetime term to the country’s court of last resort. Here again, context is important. If the character and fitness of the nominee are the central issue, the age, education, or profession of the complaining witness should not matter. For even if society is willing to say that it