Mary Anne Case cited on Sex and the Workplace

Margaret Mead's Left-Field Idea For Solving The Sexual Harassment Problem

The heart of Mead's proposal was that American society, faced with women entering the workplace in large numbers, should forge a new taboo accordingly:

How to deal with the problems, the social discord and dissonance, in the relations between women and men? The complaints, the legal remedies and the support institutions developed by women all are part of the response to the new conception of women's rights. But I believe we need something much more pervasive, a climate of opinion that includes men as well as women, and that will affect not only adult relations and behavior on the job but also the expectations about the adult world that guide our children's progress into that world.
What we need, in fact, are new taboos that are appropriate to the new society we are struggling to create—taboos that will operate within the work setting as once they operated within the household. Neither men nor women should expect that sex can be used either to victimize women who need to keep their jobs or to keep women from advancement or to help men advance their own careers. A taboo enjoins. We need one that saves clearly and unequivocally, “You don't make passes at or sleep with the people you work with.”

In 2008, legal scholar Mary Anne Case explored the idea in the Vermont Law Review, refining it somewhat: “What I would want to focus on discouraging in the workplace is not any and all eroticism or search for sexual partners, but sex initiated between people hierarchically arranged in a direct reporting relationship with one another.”

Countering another scholar who had argued that a workplace sex taboo would push male supervisors to avoid business trips or closed-door meetings with female employees, causing those employees to lose out on key opportunities, Case argued: “It is precisely in the absence of an effective taboo that we worry about leaving men unsupervised with women, or adults unsupervised with children.” A taboo against supervisor-supervised sex would render a shared business trip a neutral affair, totally uncharged by possibility.

Read more at Slate