A fellow employee spends a lot of time downloading pornography from the Internet to his work computer. Is this sexual harassment?
It depends. Is this employee’s computer screen visible to anyone who passes? Does he draw others’ attention to what he has downloaded? Does he continue to download pornography after he has been told that others find it offensive? If so, this could be sexual harassment just because the activity is not directed at you does not mean that you cannot be affected. Q: The other day, a fellow employee told me a joke that had mild sexual content. I wasn’t offended by it, and we both found the joke to be funny. Today, we both got a memo from our boss saying our conduct was inappropriate and a potential violation of the company’s sexual harassment policy. Was the joke harassment? A: While one joke alone may not be harassment, it could part of a hostile environment. In this situation, you need to remember that the question is not whether you or the employee who told the joke was offended, but whether a “reasonable person” would find it offensive. The other point to remember is that someone must ha
