But some women have broken through the glass ceiling and, inevitably, there are men who say they have been harassed. As the following sampler of cases suggests, they may be the exception, but the treatment they say they have suffered is all too familiar.
The Jenny Graig 8 claim they endured a diet of humiliation
Employees at the Jenny Craig weight-loss centers, most of them women, spend a good deal of time boosting the self-esteem of their mostly female clientele. There is constant encouragement and plenty of praise when reduction goals are met. One of Jenny Craig's guiding principles, in fact, is empathy for people of troublesome body types. Except, say a group of aggrieved male former employees, when that body belongs to a man.
They call themselves the Boston Eight. They worked for Jenny Craig Inc. at various centers in the Boston area and contend they were singled out for abuse because of their sex. Some of the alleged ill treatment, they say, took the form of blatant sexual harassment. Joe Egan, 27, a weightlifter who worked as a counselor in 1990, claims he was constantly complimented on his "tight buns" and hunky biceps. And salesman Tracy Tinkham, 37, says he was subjected to intense hazing. He was, by most accounts, an outstanding salesman and in 1990 set a company record by selling $31,000 in goods and services in a single month. But when he began pushing for a promotion, he says, he was ridiculed. At one meeting, he claims, a female colleague told him—presumably in jest—that if he wanted to get ahead, he would have to have a sex-change operation or start wearing a pushup bra. Tinkham, who was fired in 1993 and now works in a plastics company, told one reporter that even an occasional bad mood brought ridicule. "You must be having your period," he claimed female coworkers told him. "Why don't you go take a Fern-Cycle"—a Jenny Craig concoction for menstrual bloating and cramps.
The Boston Eight—all of whom claim they quit or were fired because of discrimination—contend that the alleged sexual harassment at Jenny Craig was actually part of a far larger problem: an unwillingness at the female-dominated company to let men flourish. In a variety of complaints filed over the past several years with the state antidiscrimination agency and in court, the men say they were denied promotions, given inferior assignments and even made to perform such menial tasks as taking out the garbage. As a further indignity, they were required to wear the feminine Jenny Craig uniform—a white lab coat and a pale blue scarf. The company has called the complaints frivolous and has vowed to contest them vigorously.
A Missouri municipal worker challenges Her Honor in court
As Fred Wilken tells it, he and Mayor Betty Burch of Riverside, Mo., were riding in a city truck to the post office in March 1993 when the trouble started. Out of the blue, the 60ish mayor began complimenting Wilken, now 46, a six-year veteran of the Riverside public-works department, on his diligence. And that wasn't all. "She said that given her position she could see to it that I went far with the city," says Wilken, "and that she wanted to have a more intimate relationship with me." Wilken, who is married, says that when he politely declined, Burch didn't seem put out.
But, he claims, Burch soon became "irritable and hostile" toward him. The mayor, he says, began to criticize his performance and assign him demeaning duties, such as ordinary street maintenance. Wilken's wife, Sara, 53, contends that stress from the situation began to take an alarming toll on her husband. "He'd throw up," says Sara. "He didn't sleep. He'd buy Mylanta and drink the stuff in the middle of the night." Wilken filed grievances with the city of Riverside against Burch, alleging that he was being victimized for rebuffing her advances. Finally, after a series of run-ins with the mayor, Fred was fired last February, allegedly for using profanity. At first, Wilken had no thought of filing charges against Burch or the city. "I didn't even know the laws about sexual harassment applied to men as well as women," he says. "I finally got a book from the library and found out that, yeah, it applies to men too."
His decision to file suit last May in federal district court against the mayor and members of the Riverside city government who supported her startled many in the working-class town north of Kansas City, where the matronly Burch, married and a grandmother, has presided for six years. "It's not something she would do," says Kristin Aust, a Riverside alderwoman named in the suit. For her part, Mayor Burch flatly denies any impropriety. "The allegations are totally untrue," she says. "I don't know what he's talking about." Wilken now works as a mechanic at a steel foundry in Kansas City, Kans., and he and his family say their ordeal continues. "It's been a nightmare," says Sara. "You feel like everyone knows about it and everyone's looking at you."
An air controller finds insensitivity at a sensitivity session
He works as an air-traffic controller for O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, so Doug Hartman considers himself a man who knows how to keep his cool. That is, until he attended a cultural diversity workshop sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration in June 1992 at the Hyatt Hotel in Lisle, Ill. The purpose of the three-day meeting was, according to the FAA, to "increase sensitivity and awareness" among controllers, especially toward the feelings of women and minorities. But Hartman, 43, says that what happened during the sessions only served to degrade and infuriate him.
First, he says, came the racial epithets and curses that were hurled at him during one exercise. But what Hartman really found humiliating and what drove him to sue was the so-called gantlet, in which men were led out of the room, then returned one by one to be confronted by women and sexually intimidated by yelling and touching. Hartman says he had made it clear he didn't want to participate in the drill. "I told them I don't treat people this way," he recalls, "so I don't want to be treated this way." But he claims that when he entered the room he was besieged anyway by a group of women who made lewd comments while grabbing at his groin and buttocks. Then the women pulled out a flip chart depicting penises in different states of arousal. The smallest had his name on it. "I was punished because I didn't go along with the program," he says. "It was just mean."
For the past two years, Hartman, who is married and the father of three children, filed complaints through the FAA and the EEOC, with little success. Last September, after a complaint by the airframe controllers union, the FAA suspended the diversity workshops.
Meanwhile, Hartman has filed a $300,000 suit in federal court against the government. One of the facilitators in the sessions, Jan Lebovitz, who was not named in the suit, denies Hartman was groped. As for the penis chart, she is more equivocal, arguing, "If it was done, it was just the sort of thing women have seen done to them in the workplace." Louise Hart, whose company organized the sensitivity program under contract to the FAA, suggests that Hartman may have overreacted to the proceedings. "[The workshops] bring up emotional issues," she says. "For some people, it can make them feel like they're being blamed." But Hartman insists he has no problem with sensitivity training per se and in fact supports it—when it's done properly. What he objects to, he says, is using such programs as a sanction for the very abuses they are supposedly trying to remedy. "You shouldn't make the problem worse than it was when it started," he says.
BILL HEWITT
ANNE LONGLEY in Wakefield., Mass., KATE KLISE in Riverside and JONI H. BLACKMAN in Aurora, Ill.
- Contributors:
- Anne Longley,
- Kate Klise,
- Joni H. Blackman.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
