Many Americans don’t think “that much” about sexual harassment these days. For Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, even the term “sexual harassment” may sound hoary — recalling the culture war days of the early 1990s and bringing to mind nostalgic images of Nirvana concerts, the falling Berlin Wall and the Clinton-Bush-Perot Presidential election.
However, sexual harassment is alive and well in many American workplaces, and it still exacts a tremendous psychological toll on the women and men who experience it. Statistics suggest that this behavior is still way-unreported. Many female and male employees who suffer through it also fall victims to employment problems like overtime violations, tip pool violations, discrimination and retaliation. They fall silent because they don’t understand their rights or know how to protect them in the judicial system.
Nevertheless, American workers definitely have it better than workers in other parts of the world — parts of the world like Egypt. Consider a shocking 2013 United Nations report, “Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women,” which found that the vast, vast majority of the female population in Egypt – 99.3 percent! – claim to have suffered sexual harassment.