...about how to accomplish this objective. In this piece, I wish to contribute to the larger debate by offering a response to Professor Vicki Schultz's provocative article, The Sanitized Workplace. (3) Her project builds upon her previous works on sex harassment (4) and the meaning of paid employment (5) to put forth an innovative argument with significant implications in the areas of law, workplace culture, and organizational theory. While I support her endeavor in its larger intent, I write this response to examine her arguments and recommendations critically as well as constructively in an effort to engage in the ongoing task of advancing women's aspirations in the work organization and the labor market.

In The Sanitized Workplace, Schultz argues that the feminist movement to address sex harassment in the workplace echoes the ideological underpinnings of classical-management theory in that they both advocate for an emotion-free workplace, without harmful distraction, to maximize employee efficiency. (6) She refers to a specific school of thought--the "scientific method" promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor--to assert that the nascent organization was established as a rational space where laborers focused on production with little or no personal interaction. (7) These early laborers were male, and Schultz points to the later entry of women into the workforce as introducing sexual elements into the workspace that would disrupt the rationality of organizational life, presenting a dilemma for managers who had sought to create an asexual work environment. (8) As Schultz sees it, feminist reformers in our modern era ended up resuscitating the organizational practices of early bureaucratic leaders by similarly pushing for a desexualized workplace. (9) In making this novel link between classical-management theory and the anti-sex harassment movement, Schultz is troubled by what she perceives to be unduly restrictive sex harassment policies currently in place in many work settings that reflect management's early inclination to suppress laborers' personal interactions of all kinds. (10) According to her, sexual behavior should be allowed to openly flourish in the workplace, for she believes the freedom to express oneself in sexual terms enhances one's social development at work and improves one's productivity. (11) She therefore wants to counteract the recent push for a return to the nonsexual workplace that supposedly predominated at the turn of the century.

In this work, I contest Schultz's argument that connects classical-management theory to sex harassment law and policy. As I argue in Part I, Schultz's characterization of the classical-management approach and its dominance in the field is overstated, as is the seeming alliance between the feminist movement and company management in shaping the workplace. Moreover, contrary to her depiction of the nascent organization as asexual due to its all-male labor force, I show that masculine sexuality thrives whether or not women are present and is institutionally expressed through sexually-oriented horseplay and customs. Understanding that sexuality is never truly absent from the work institution, we can see that the entry of women into the labor force and into the organization did not suddenly ignite a sexual energy that was previously nonexistent. Instead, women merely entered into the predetermined culture of the workplace and found themselves harmed by the masculine style of sexuality that dominated their work setting.

In Part II, I question Schultz's call for unrestricted sexual conduct in the workplace--what I term a sexuality-privileged organizational model--due to the probable harms that outweigh the possible benefits of allowing sexuality to prosper in the work organization. In contrast to her libertarian model, I defend the sexuality-constrained organizational paradigm in light of concerns regarding the role of work, on-the-job expectations, and larger workplace dynamics. Schultz is not uneasy about open sexuality at work because she believes that it is organizational sex-segregation that primarily gives rise to sex harassment. As a result, she advocates for gender integration at all levels of the organization to address sex harassment, recommending employer incentives in the form of differentiated employer liability rules according to the existing proportion of women in the organization. Gender integration is indeed a crucial objective, but I further consider whether the courts are best suited to implement her number-specific plan, as she suggests, by comparing the strengths of judicial lawmaking versus both agency expertise and legislative reform.

While Schultz's proposal for gender integration is important and necessary, I assert in Part III that her structural prescription nonetheless may be insufficient if we view the organization as an institution created and fundamentally shaped by masculine norms. I challenge whether an increase in the number of women alone will transform the work environment into an egalitarian and a more welcoming space. A numerical balance in gender is indisputably needed, but I hold that it is inadequate unless women, along with their male counterparts, also actively reconsider their organizational cultures and traditions rather than continue, in their better positions of influence, the disparate legacy that masculine notions of work culture have imposed upon women (and gender-nonconforming men). To move toward genuine organizational progress, I advance a framework for organizational re-signaling and reformation by recommending certain steps that a leadership committed to gender equality can take to revise institutional norms and more vitally enhance the nature of women's work experiences.

I. SEXUALITY IN THE ORGANIZATION

In her latest work on sex harassment, Schultz describes the feminist push to address sex harassment in the workplace as an anti-sexuality campaign that she contends converges with early management's agenda to cleanse the organization of personal elements that could distract workers from their jobs. (12) Schultz asserts that along with the rise of the bureaucracy at the turn of the century came the rise of professional managers who espoused a rationality-dependent work ethic that separated emotions from work to promote maximum efficiency and productivity. (13) These managers perceived the work organization as a place where rationality was to be championed and human passions suppressed. (14) Through the division of work, they focused on applying their knowledge and expertise to map out the goals of the organization, using workers to simply serve as the human vehicles through which to implement them. (15)

Schultz argues by inference that classical-management theorists must have also banned sexuality in the early bureaucracy since it would disrupt the rationality of the organizational sphere and threaten the organizational order. (16) Understanding that sexuality is culturally incompatible with the "passionless logic" of the organization, Schultz concludes that early managers most likely tried to keep sexual elements outside the company. (17)

The entrance of women into the labor force, however, created a problem for managers who feared that women's presence in the workplace would spark the sexual components they tried so hard to keep separate from the organization. (18) Schultz argues that feminists, in advocating for women's equality at work, adopted management's goal to rid the workplace of all sexuality rather than push for a new conception of the workplace that would embrace and celebrate sexuality. (19) Thus, by pursuing the former strategy, feminists sowed the seeds of the anti-sex harassment movement, which sought to address and curb men's sexual behavior at work that hindered women's opportunities for equal employment. (20) This movement, led by radical feminist lawyer and scholar Catharine MacKinnon, linked female subordination at work with unwanted sexual advances and advocated for the legal recognition of sex harassment as a form of sex discrimination. (21)

Schultz's argument that feminists have aligned themselves with management seems a bit odd because, even accepting her contention that feminist reformers adopted an approach similar to the one embraced by managers, their purposes for doing so clearly differ. Management sought to improve overall employee productivity, whereas feminist reformers sought to improve the working conditions of female employees. Viewed in this way, Schultz actually sits on the same side as MacKinnon's camp, as both are focused on worker rights in order to make the work environment a better place where women and men have the same opportunities to flourish. Recognizing then that Schultz and MacKinnon both share the same larger aspiration, Schultz's suggestion that the goals of the feminist movement lie on the managerial end of the workplace arena, far from aiming to protect and enhance employees' well-being, seems peculiar. Instead, the difference lies in their respective approaches to reaching the same employee-focused objective, demonstrated by Schultz's proposal for a laissez-faire policy regarding workplace relations in contrast to MacKinnon's more regulated stance.

We should further recall that the larger feminist movement has resisted and challenged the central force that rationality occupies in Western thought and practice, which favors "masculine" reason over "feminine" emotion. (22) As the oft-recited slogan indicates, the movement progressed from the conviction that "the personal is political," and feminist organizers and organization builders have encouraged group and organizational cultures that draw out and re-channel expressions of emotion toward female empowerment and socio-political change. (23)

Schultz acknowledges that feminists are not usually characterized as allies to company management, but suggests that their shared mission of purifying the workplace of sexuality is not so strange in light of our American work ethic that values the separation of work and sex. (24) She believes this work ethic stems from the organizational philosophy of early management theorists who developed a new way of managing workers during the emergence and rise of the bureaucracy at the turn of the twentieth century. (25) She highlights the management approach of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the engineer who became well-known for his theory of scientific management, as a prime example of this managerial method. (26) Schultz makes particular reference to Taylor's method as representative of classical-management theory and its related focus on rationality without passion. Taylor's theory included the practice of "stopwatch time study," in which work was disaggregated into simple steps, each of which was then timed to determine the most efficient production rate. (27) His approach also included an "incentive wage" system, which paid different wage rates according to the pace of production to motivate workers to produce output within the time frame deemed efficient for the task. (28) Schultz points to Taylorism to assert that early organizational managers banned all things not related to work, including all personal interactions that could slow down the operations of the bureaucratic machine.

A closer examination of Taylorism in actual practice, however, reveals that Taylor did not in fact abandon all personal aspects in his managerial style. Although exacting in form, he often demonstrated sympathy when interacting with his workers, taking the time to listen to their troubles. (29) As Taylor himself recognized, it was impracticable to neglect laborers' human dimensions at work, undercutting Schultz's emphasis on the entirely emotionless organization that Taylor supposedly upheld and reinforced.

While Schultz is correct in that Taylor's shop-management approach required its workers to function for the most part like robots at work, Schultz's focus on Taylorism as the uncontested managerial philosophy of its time is inaccurate. Although Taylor's scientific method did become well-known and was replicated to varying extents by factory managers, worker resistance remained an important obstacle to mass implementation of his system, even causing Congress to investigate Taylor's controversial practices. (30) In short, Schultz overstates the impact of Taylor and his approach, also overemphasizing contemporary management's return to Taylor's "passionless" organizational ways and the feminist movement's campaign to do the same. (31)

Schultz recognizes that human passions, including sexuality, cannot be fully expelled from the organization, (32) thus weakening the notion that sexuality was ever truly missing from the workplace, including in the early all-male organization. Given that sexuality is a basic human force, as Schultz also emphasizes, (33) sexual elements make their way into the organizational space regardless of whether women are present or not. She notes the presence of sexuality is not necessarily tied to the presence of women, and yet seemingly accepts that the early organization was or could have remained vacant of sexual features. (34) It is not surprising that instances of sexuality can be found in all types of organizations, long before women entered the workforce. Schultz, citing organizational theorists, suggests that our culture believes men are able to curb their sexuality while women unleash or exude it. (35) All-male environments, however, certainly are not devoid of sexuality simply because women are absent from them; on the contrary, all-men settings commonly exhibit intra-gender, sexually aggressive traditions. Consider, for instance, the masculine practice of horseplay, within both work and other settings, much of which involves highly sexualized behavior and language. (36) Evidence of strong sexuality in well-established, all-male institutions confirms that the presence of women is not required to render an environment sexually charged. (37) In the hostile environment sex harassment context, women's entrance into the institution altered the targeting of sexual expression, but their entry hardly introduced it. (38)

The organizational culture of the military is a case in point. Male sexuality is widely infused into the combat culture in military units, as soldiers have long participated in sexual joking and explicit conversation as a way to forge personal closeness. (39) Even the Army leadership, believing this kind of bonding enhances unit performance, has openly allowed and endorsed sexually-oriented talk among its soldiers. (40) During the 1970s, the Army regularly featured in its official monthly magazine a picture of a pinup girl as part of this sexualized culture, (41) and male soldiers stationed abroad could take part in officially sponsored trips to local red-light districts as breaks from training. (42) Training runs and marches provided further opportunity for military commanders to reinforce images of aggressive, masculine sexuality through the use of sexually graphic cadence calls. (43) Sexuality, in essence, was deployed as a way to control the troops. (44)

Military schools, which are still heavily male-dominated, likewise engage in and carry on traditions that are sexual in form. Despite being legally forced to accept women in the early 1990s, the Citadel, a publicly funded military academy, remains a nearly all-male institution, mainly because female cadets have suffered at the hands of their male classmates. (45)

Many of the traditions at this school are sexualized, such as the daily communal shower; "Senior Rip-Off Day," where senior cadets tear off one another's clothing, throw the clothes into a bonfire, and tumble and embrace on the ground; and the birthday tradition, which involves stripping the birthday cadet, tying him to a chair, and coating him with shaving cream. (46) Pictures of cadets casually participating in various forms of intimate behavior with one another, including many instances of hugging and kissing, abound in the school's yearbook. (47) The Citadel serves as an example of how sexuality figures significantly into the culture of an austere and hierarchical male-occupied institution where order and discipline are valued. Military customs are "driven by a group dynamic centered around male perceptions and sensibilities, male psychology and power, male anxieties and the affirmation of masculinity," (48) all of which contribute to an open and explicit sexual culture among servicemen.

Other examples of all-male (or nearly all-male) sites with highly sexualized cultures include fire departments, where sexual pin-ups in lockers and sexual banter are regular sights and sounds, (49) and prisons, where rape and sexual aggression by male inmates as well as by male correctional officers are rampant and routine. (50) The sexually-oriented rituals and conventions that blatantly exist in these institutions demonstrate the ways in which sexual expressions frequently pervade men-only environments, contradicting Schultz's claim that the emerging organization was sexuality-free because it was entirely male-occupied. Men are sexual beings whether or not women are in their company, and thus it is inaccurate to suggest that women's entry into the work environment triggered a sexual energy that was allegedly latent or nonexistent in male-only settings. Instead, women's entrance into the workplace unleashed hostile behavior against them that commonly was sexual in character and form. At the Citadel, for example, female professors who joined the faculty endured lewd phone calls and obscene pictures and notes from men on campus. (51) Women who joined male institutions stepped into a predetermined workplace culture that was originally male-occupied and thus male-identified. Consequently, women found themselves harmed by male sexual demands that dominated their working space, harms that were eventually recognized as the legal injury of sex harassment. (52)

Many hostile environment cases show that sex harassment can result from sexual motives, (53) but sexual design is not a necessary precondition to render a charge viable under Title VII. As the Supreme Court held in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., (54) sex harassment need not arise out of sexual desire; rather, it only must be "because of sex." (55) In this vein, Schultz has brilliantly pointed out in an earlier work that harassment is also used to conserve traditional spheres of male labor by undermining women's confidence and equal footing on the job and sabotaging their work performance. (56) Sex harassment is perpetrated along a range of gender-hostile discriminatory actions, including both sexualized and nonsexualized harassment, to prevent women from thriving and claiming a permanent place in male-dominated workplaces. Our attention to nonsexual forms of harassment, however, should not eclipse our awareness of sexual forms of harassment that have been and continue to be inflicted on many female (and male) workers. Against this backdrop, I next consider whether unrestrained sexuality at work is a beneficial policy.

II. MAPPING THE LINKS: SEXUALITY, SEX HARASSMENT, AND SEX SEGREGATION

Schultz argues that the current sex harassment movement is basically a movement to eradicate sexuality from the workplace that goes beyond what is legally required to address sex harassment. (57) She contends the legal focus on sexual conduct encourages organizations to shield themselves from liability by being over-cautious and prohibiting all forms of sexuality. (58) She finds the strict spotlight on sexual conduct problematic because it narrowly views sex harassment as sexually-defined rather than gender-grounded, when in fact she believes that harassment is largely perpetrated through nonsexual ways that try to portray women as incompetent on the job. (59) In her view, Human Resources (HR) managers of today are following in the footsteps of their managerial predecessors by attempting to stamp out sexuality from the workplace, now equipped with feminist arguments for such restrictive policies. (60)

Schultz points to empirical evidence, which she concedes is not entirely conclusive, to show that HR professionals define actions such as "sexual jokes, remarks, and teasing" as types of harassment, although this behavior on its own does not constitute harassment that is actionable under the law. (61) While isolated occurrences of this behavior may not amount to a hostile work environment under the current legal standard, such behavior likely would establish an actionable hostile environment if it frequently recurred over time or was coupled with other gender-biased behavior. In a hostile environment situation, it is important to look at the totality of factors, as the Supreme Court recognized in Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., (62) rather than only individual episodes of harassment, because it is the working environment that must be abusive, and as such necessarily involves a diffuse but ubiquitous harmful atmosphere in which many female workers are forced to work. Hostile environment sex harassment is more prevalent than quid pro quo harassment, (63) an unsurprising statistic considering the latter is a palpable form of harassment that is easier to curb.

Schultz argues that personnel managers are overly restraining employees' sexual conduct by implementing overbroad policies, but policies that reach beyond what the law requires are not necessarily unfavorable if we view the law as providing only the minimum level of legal protection from harassment. Antidiscrimination laws, we should hope, do not limit all that we seek to achieve in improving workplace relations, and sex harassment law as currently understood should not prevent society from achieving a higher degree of mutual respect in all work organizations. Just as race discrimination law has helped bring about a greater awareness of both the obvious and subtle harms of racial prejudice, sex discrimination law--including sex harassment law--has brought about a greater understanding of the apparent and not-so-apparent abuses in gender relations. As a survey report put out by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the federal agency...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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