One of the things I love about our legal system is reading articles like this one:
A woman who was fired from her job as a receptionist after she refused to get coffee for the men in the office has lost her Title VII sexual harassment suit now that a federal judge has declared that there's nothing sexist about requiring workers to serve coffee -- even if those workers are always women.
"The act of getting coffee is not, by itself, a gender-specific act," U.S. District Judge Berle M. Schiller wrote in Klopfenstein v. National Sales and Supply.
Schiller found that plaintiff Tamara Klopfenstein failed to allege even a prima facie case of sex discrimination because she cannot show that she was treated differently from any "similarly situated" male employees since there was only one receptionist in the office and the job had always been held by a woman.
Plaintiffs attorneys Timothy M. Kolman and Rufus A. Jennings of Timothy M. Kolman & Associates in Langhorne, Pa., said in an interview that they intend to appeal the ruling, and that Schiller erred by failing to recognize that some tasks are "inherently more offensive to women."
It's an interesting argument that certain tasks are inherently more offensive to women. Does the same hold true for men? If a female boss asks a male subordinate to open a jar or reach something on a high shelf, is that offensive? And what other tasks would be inherently offensive to women in an office?
I once had a boss who wanted me to deliver some flowers for him (how we got the flowers is a long and tedious story, but he hadn't wanted to accept them and, instead, wanted them to go somewhere else). I complained to his supervisor, who sided with me that it wasn't part of my job. OTOH, getting coffee can be considered a traditional part of a receptionist's job, even if it wasn't a stated job duty. You can bet it is now.
Cross-posted at Common Sense Political Thought.
|