USA TODAY International Edition
Anita Hill: No more room for sexual harassment
Too many still accept familiar excuses, she says
SAN FRANCISCO A quarter century after her testimony in Senate confirmation hearings for U. S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill says the nation is still too easily and too frequently accepting men’s excuses for sexual harassment.
It’s high time to challenge the cultural status quo, Hill told USA TODAY in a rare interview.
Take Donald Trump being elected president after boasting on tape of forcing himself on women, or Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, ousted Wednesday after the disclosure of settlements involving sexual harassment allegations.
“We have a whole host of people accepting that as just something men do as opposed to understanding it as predatory behavior that is not only immoral but is also illegal,” she says.
There is one big difference. Even in a country still roiled by gender and racial tensions, women are finding their voices and telling their stories in ways that were not possible in 1991, when the nation tuned in on television for two non- stop weeks to Hill and her gripping testimony, the lurid details of which Thomas vehemently denied.
Susan Fowler, a software engineer, reached millions with her detailed account of a culture of rampant sexism at ride- hailing company Uber on her personal blog. And, in response to a unnerving string of revelations about workplace harassment, women have flooded social media with raw recollections ripped from their everyday work lives of being subjected to leering bosses and crude remarks, of being groped and assaulted.
“The idea that these kinds of behaviors can stay hidden is fading because there are ways to get them out. I think the key is to keep pushing,” Hill says. “When you deal with someone like Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, the key is for people to keep coming forward.” Former Fox News CEO Ailes resigned last year after several claims of sexual harassment, which he denied.
Though some dismissed her testimony against Thomas as a partisan attack, for many Hill is a torch- bearer in the decades- long fight against sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace. Thomas had been Hill’s supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Her testimony in 1991 before Congress put sexual harassment on the front page, replete with tales of pornography Thomas enjoyed watching and boasts of his penis size. It also put her reputation on trial. To this day Hill does not believe a white woman would have received the same treatment. During the hearings, Thomas claimed that he, not she, was the victim of a “high- tech lynching.” Despite protests of the handling of the hearings, the committee and the full Senate voted to confirm Thomas to a seat on the Supreme Court.
Public outcry helped sweep four women into Senate seats, including Carol Moseley Braun and Dianne Feinstein, who broke the all- male hold on the Senate Judiciary Committee. A record 24 women were elected to the House, and 1992 was dubbed the “The Year of the Woman” as hundreds more ran for state legislatures, school boards and county positions.
Now, with Trump in office, the nation is seeing millions of women march in the streets and many run for office again.
In hindsight, Hill, who teaches at Brandeis University and advises a law firm on civil rights and employment cases, views the public nature of the confirmation hearings as a safety net, because it allowed people to see what was happening, even if they drew vastly different conclusions about her testimony.
Hill spoke with USA TODAY this week. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: For many in this country, you epitomize the fight against sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace. Having gone through everything you have, would you do it again?
A: My answer is absolutely yes. Initially, I was concerned about the whole public aspect of it, but in fact what I have come to understand in the long run is that by being public there was a safety net, if you will, because everyone could see. People had different opinions about what it meant, but they saw what was going on. I can only imagine what things might have happened if everything had been behind the scenes.
Q: Do you have any regrets? Would you do anything differently?
A: I regret that there still were some behind- the- scenes attacks, and not just on me. There were people who came forward to sup- port me because they really wanted my testimony to be heard. There were retaliations against them.
I regret those things but, after 25 years and after going over and over my behavior, I’m not sure I could have done anything different. ... I think the behavior that needed to be changed was the behavior of the Senate committee.
Q: Did intersectionality play a role in how you were treated?
A: Absolutely. I am absolutely clear that the Senate Judiciary Committee was not ready to hear any claims of sexual harassment from anyone. I do think that some of the reactions that were so enlivened and robust and against my testifying were a reaction both to my race and to my gender.
When Clarence Thomas claimed to be a victim of a lynching, the reaction was very swift. It was almost as if people were repulsed by this idea of a lynching, but that metaphor was misused in ways that attempted to erase my racial identity, my whole history and family history of being people who had been threatened by lynching. It erased the ability for an African- American woman to be the owner of an African-American racial experience.
That is another factor and another way my intersectionality played. It gave him the opportunity to represent the race. So it alienated people of color, and some people in the African-American community. And it erased the history of sexual abuse of African- American women.
Q: Have things improved for women? Have we taken any steps backwards?
A: I don’t think we have taken steps backwards. I think there have been improvements. But we are just now starting to understand how complex the problems are.
I think we view sexual harassment as an individual behavior problem. But what we are starting to really understand is that the problems are institutional.
The problem with sexual harassment isn’t just because people behave badly. The problem is our inability to develop productive responses to it, and that exists because of our culture that accepts it, because that culture then gets built into how we approach solutions to it.
It gets built into the choices we make about who can be believed. And even when we find sexual harassment exists, the solutions are very often to move the women who have complained to other positions.
The one example of that came from the blog by Susan Fowler. When she made her complaint, she was told her options would be to move to another group and move away from the job she wanted to do or to allow herself to stay knowing she would not get good evaluations. To me, what that says is that it’s not just a personal problem, it’s an institutional problem.
Q: That division you experienced is still taking place today. Women can’t count on being believed and that discourages many of them from coming forward. How do we break that cycle?
A: Well, I think we just have to keep telling the stories. We can’t retreat.
Susan Fowler’s blog is a new tool that wasn’t available in 1991 to me. And we’re finding ways to connect and to tell our stories.
The idea that these kinds of behaviors can stay hidden is fading because there are ways to get them out. I think the key is to keep pushing. When you deal with someone like Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, the key is for people to keep coming forward.