Text 1 Sex discrimination in Japan

The management tech­niques of Japanese busi­ness firms are admired around the world – yet more than 70 percent of these companies re­fuse to accept applications from female college graduates. Accord­ing Japan’s labor ministry, less than 20 percent of the nation's businesses offer men and women equal opportunities on the job. Overall, women hold only 6.2 per­cent of all executive positions in Japanese companies.

Japan's 22 million working women represent 40 percent of the I country's paid labor force; how­ever, women account for only 6.4 percent of the nation's scientists, 2.4 percent of its engineers, and 9 percent of its lawyers. Women's wages average only about half as much as men's, in good part because most women are restricted to traditionally female (and lesser-paying) occupations such as teaching and clerical work. Akiko, a 23-year-old office worker at a trading company, is fairly typical of Japa­nese women in the work force. Like most female college graduates, she serves as an assistant to the men in her office, bringing them tea and handling their errands.

These work patterns must be viewed in the context of a cul­ture that regards women's place – especially married women’s place – as being in the home. In a 2000 survey of Japanese women 20 to 59 years old, only 17 percent felt that the desirable lifestyle for women was to work indefinitely. Most re­spondents (55 percent) favored "withdrawing into home life" and reentering the labor force at some later time (ideally on a part-time basis).

Despite the continuing impor­tance of traditional gender-role socialization, Japan has been in­fluenced by the international movement for women's rights. In 2001, after seven years of public debate, Japan's parliament—at the time, about 97 percent male— passed an Equal Employment Bill which would encourage employers to end sex discrimination in hiring, assignment, and promotion poli­cies. One key target of the new law was severe restrictions on overtime and late-night work by women; these restrictions have prevented many women from entering or ad­vancing in their chosen occupa­tions. However, Japanese feminist groups remain dissatisfied be­cause the Equal Employment Bill merely requires employers to "en­deavor" to achieve sexual equality and lacks strong sanctions to pre­vent continued discrimination against women.

Text 2 Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment – the demand that someone respond to or tolerate un­wanted sexual advances from a person who has power over the victim – made headlines in 1991 during the Senate hearings on President George Bush's ap­pointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. In the course of the hearings, Anita Hill, a law professor, ac­cused Judge Thomas of having sexually harassed her when she worked on his start. He had persistently asked her for dates, she said, and made offensive sex­ual comments when she refused. Thomas denied the accusations and was eventu­ally confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. We will probably never know for sure who was telling the truth. But what scandalized many women was the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee evaluating Judge Thomas's appointment initially ignored the charge of sexual harassment. The public learned of Pro­fessor Hill's accusation only because it was leaked to the press; the all-male Sen­ate committee apparently saw the issue as insignificant.

Several themes illustrating the key so­ciological concepts came together in the Hill–Thomas episode. First of all, the social structure of the Senate was (and is) extremely unbalanced in gender terms: Of 100 senators in 1991, only two were women. Second, in part because of this social structure, women lacked the power to insist that issues important to them be taken seriously. This is part of a broader cultural pattern in which male harassment of women is not treated as a major problem. Indeed, women are re­luctant to report instances of harass­ment; existing patterns of functional integration fail to offer procedures for responding to women's complaints. In addition, functional links between school and workplace, and between one workplace and another, discourage women from speaking out when to do so would mean losing a valuable work rec­ommendation. When faced with reports of harassment, it is functional for men in positions of power to ignore compara­tively powerless women. One result of the Thomas hearings was to make many women resolve to take political action to make sure that their voices were heard, that more women were elected to Congress, and that men would take seriously the hardship that sexual harass­ment causes women.

Sexual harassment is a particular problem in workplaces and in relation­ships of unequal power. It takes place because men (harassers are usually, though not always, men) abuse their power, and because our culture denies that this is serious—suggesting in effect that "boys will be boys." Sexual harass­ment can be limited to sexual jokes in a classroom or on the job that make women feel uncomfortable. It is more serious when a woman's professor or boss or co-worker makes a sexual advance, especially when the woman has clearly indicated that such attentions are un­welcome. It is extremely serious when a woman's refusal of a sexual advance re­sults in punitive treatment or denial of a promotion. This is also illegal, although male-dominated judges and grievance committees have been slow to enforce the law.

Sexual harassment causes difficulties not just when women who reject sexual advances are penalized, but whenever women work in an atmosphere where they fear they must either tolerate har­assment or lose their jobs. Harassment illustrates the fears – small and large – that women in our society are forced to live with because of the unequal power relationship between men and women. The Hill–Thomas case suggests that women's fear of speaking out is realistic, given the gender inequality built into the social structure.

Sexual harassment is not as extreme a crime as rape, but the underlying prob­lems are similar. Both are products of a culture that encourages male sexual aggressiveness, and both have been dis­missed by the "powers that be" because of the comparative powerlessness of women. It is still difficult, for example, to get date rape (forced sexual inter­course with a person the victim went out with voluntarily) taken seriously as a crime. Men, who have the power through the legal system to define what constitutes rape, typically consider this sort of assault trivial or even blame the victim for having provoked it. In one famous case of date rape, the boxer Mike Tyson was convicted of raping a con­testant in the Miss Black America beauty pageant. In an echo of the Hill–Thomas case, thousands of Afri­can-American church women were star­tled to hear the head of their religious denomination say that Tyson should be given a light sentence or set free – and some other ministers backed him up. As the women noted, all the ministers were male. Even though women were a ma­jority of the church members, the men dominated the leadership of the church.