The organization as a gendered entity: a response to professor Schultz's the sanitized workplace.

• Author: Lee, Rebecca K.
• Position: Response to Vicki Schultz, Yale Law Journal, vol. 112, P. 2061, 2003

In the two decades since the Supreme Court first recognized the legal harm of sex harassment (1) in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, (2) the trajectory of sex harassment law and policy continues to be controversial, even among gender scholars who seek to advance workplace equality but disagree 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.

1. 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...