More court cases are beginning to address the possibility that men and women have different standards about acceptable behavior at work, and that new legal perspective will be discussed at a daylong workshop next Saturday.
Miriam Santos, treasurer of the City of Chicago, is the featured luncheon speaker at ”The Reasonable Woman Standard: Gender Issues in the Workplace and Responsible Management,” sponsored by North Central College`s Leadership, Ethics and Values Program.
Santos will discuss diversity in the workplace in the year 2000, and how recent federal court decisions may lead to more harmonious relationships among working men, women and minorities.
In recent years, courts have begun to replace the sex-neutral
”reasonable man standard” for determining acceptable behavior with a
”reasonable woman standard” in some sex-specific criminal and civil cases.
The new standard has been used because women plaintiffs have argued successfully that a sex-neutral standard of behavior tends to be male-biased. One recent example involved a sexual-harassment case filed by a Washington state woman against a male colleague who had been sending her love letters on the job. In applying a ”reasonable woman standard,” the court in that case looked to surveys conducted for the trial that found while 70 percent of men would find such behavior innocuous, nearly the same percentage of women found it offensive. The plaintiff won the case.
Another case in which the standard came into play was a Jacksonville, Fla., shipyard worker`s sexual-harassment lawsuit against male colleagues who displayed female pornography in public work areas. There the ”reasonable woman standard” was used to determine whether such behavior constituted harassment of the woman. The court determined that it did.
The conference is geared toward men and women who work in managerial or executive positions and who are interested in exploring ways to improve the work environment. Morning sessions will feature actors depicting questionable workplace behavior in short vignettes, followed by discussion of how the
”reasonable woman standard” might be at issue in each case.
Afternoon workshops will address how the ”reasonable woman standard”
could come into play in management issues such as ”the mommy track” and sexual harassment.
”We want to develop workplaces where the reasonableness standard is inclusive of all groups,” said David Smith. He is director of the Leadership, Ethics and Values Program and organizer of the workshop along with Patricia Werhane, professor of business ethics at Loyola University; and Rosalind Burbank, a member of the board of directors at the Midwest Women`s Center.
The conference begins at 8:30 a.m. Saturday, Waste Management Inc. Leadership Development Center, 720 Butterfield Rd., Lombard. Cost is $65. To register, call 708-420-3446.
