Fetching Coffee as Sexual Harassment

Is asking your secretary to perform the act of fetching coffee, one of the modern office’s most mundane chores, an implied form of sexual harassment?

“Yes” is according to Tamara Klopfenstein of Levittown, NY.

Tamara’s story, first brought to my attention by Ask A Manager and covered in more depth by the Philadelphia Inquirer, highlights how delicate the relationship between boss and employee can be:

After working for a few weeks, her (male) bosses asked her to get their coffee for them. She declined, and her manager e-mailed her, saying: “This is not open for debate. Please don’t make an easy task a big deal.” Klopfenstein felt that getting coffee “reinforced outdated gender stereotypes,” so the next day, when she was asked to get coffee again, she sent an e-mail that read: “I don’t expect to serve and wait on you by making and serving you coffee every day.” Nine minutes later, she was fired. Klopfenstein promptly sued the company for sexual discrimination and sexual harassment. The judge ruled: “The act of getting coffee is not, by itself, a gender-specific act,” and dismissed the case. But Klopfenstein’s attorneys argue that “Some tasks are inherently more offensive to women.”

Ultimately, a federal court judge threw the case out due to lack of merit, which in my opinion, was the right call.

While a woman fetching coffee for her male bosses smacks of historical discrimination against women in the workplace, the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that,

To show discrimination, Klopfenstein would have had to be able to point to a male worker with a similar status who didn’t have to get coffee.

But the previous receptionists were all women and didn’t object to getting coffee for vice presidents Jay Shrager and Richard Blum, Jackson said.

Putting the harassment angle aside, the real issue at stake here is: can we refuse the parts of our jobs we don’t like?

Ms. Klopfenstein openly refused a directive from her bosses, to bring them coffee everyday at 3pm, something that all of her predecessors had willingly done in the past. Her bosses reiterated their request and explained that it was non-optional. Ms. Klopfenstein then refused to carry out an ‘essential’ (and I use this term loosely) job function and was fired.

I once watched a co-worker go through a similar battle. After several years of working at the company, she one day flat out refused to do half of her job duties—duties which were essential to the business. Management went out and hired a younger, cheaper replacement and a few months later let my co-worker go. Is it disappointing that an experienced employee was let go for a younger, cheaper version? Sure. But management hadn’t wanted to go out and hire someone new. By refusing to do her job, my co-worker forced management to make a choice, and can you really blame them for not wanting to be loyal to someone who “wasn’t a team player?”

I myself have had to do my fair share of grunt work outside the scope of my official job duties. One of the best bosses I ever had the pleasure to work for used to ask me to schedule department meetings for him. I wasn’t his assistant and I wasn’t the leader of the team, although I was in his department. Generally it was common practice for the leader of a meeting to schedule it themselves, so it felt weird that he would ask me to do something like that.

But did I do it willingly and without complaint? Of course.

For something as mundane as scheduling a meeting or fetching coffee, why start a war? Even if you don’t necessarily like doing boring tasks like copying, filing or delivering mail, someone has to do it and why risk ending up on your boss’ bad side over something so trivial? As Audrey Jackson, an administrative assistant at an engineering firm in Center City, put it:

“I would do anything for my boss except sleep with him, because he’s married,” she said.

Are Ivy-League Schools Just A Funnel For Wall Street?

Last week I wrote about a three-year old New York Times article featuring interviews with Ivy-League academics criticizing their female students’ choice to become stay-at-home mothers instead of members of a “diverse professional elite” upon graduation from their elite institutions.

One critic who was interviewed went so far as to question the value of educating females if their only goal was to become mothers:

“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Coincidentally, that same Monday my post appeared, a new article surfaced in the New York Times, again tackling the issue of what is expected of today’s Ivy-League graduates. According to the article:

Professor Howard Gardner hopes…seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

“Is this what a Harvard education is for?” asked Professor Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. “Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?”

Interesting that a man is questioning whether students (male or female) belong in the boardroom and that a woman is advocating to put more women in it. Why is success always measured by job title and salary? Why are so many young people being blindsided into a handful of careers, simply because these careers are viewed as successful by a handful of adults?

After years of watching friends and family getting laid-off and overworked, many of today’s college students are questioning the true value of corporate life:

As Adam M. Guren, a new Harvard graduate who will be pursuing his doctorate in economics, put it, “A lot of students have been asking the question: ‘We came to Harvard as freshmen to change the world, and we’re leaving to become investment bankers — why is this?’ ”

The official word on the value and purpose of higher education comes from the President of Amherst (also male):

“We’re in the business of graduating people who will make the world better in some way,” said Anthony Marx, Amherst’s president. “That’s what justifies the expense of the education.”

If the purpose of an education is to help its recipients make the world a better place, does the role of parent not fulfill that purpose? Most universities claim that they are training the leaders of tomorrow, but why does their vision of leader stick so narrowly to the C-suite? Isn’t someone who cares for, educates, motivates and encourages considered a leader? Are mothers and fathers not the leaders of a family?

I think it’s time for the elder academics to stop wasting so much time on what their students are accomplishing after graduation and more time ensuring the quality of their education. Trust that the younger generation can decide their future for themselves and stop hovering over us like helicopter parents.

When Did “Mom” Become a Four-Lettered Word?

As I transition from “young woman” to simply “woman,” I spend more and more time contemplating just exactly how the rest of my life is going to look. Deciding what I want in my life has been easy. Exciting and fulfilling career? Yes. Loving and supportive husband? Yes. 2.5 kids with a dog and a house in the suburbs? Yes. What is proving to be more difficult is figuring out exactly how I’m going to be able to realistically meld all of these aspects together.

While family and friends tell me I’m too young to be worrying about such things, it seems I am not the only young woman who is creating a life plan. Three years ago, an article appeared in the New York Times that catalogued interviews with hundreds of young women undergrads attending an ivy-league university questioning them about their future plans. The women surveyed were all highly educated, accomplished and appeared to be quite ambitious, several even expressing plans to pursue advanced or professional degrees. These were women with unlimited potential, who, according to the article, were:

“being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these [top] institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.”

The world was their oyster, their opportunities endless. So what did 60% of these women want to do with their futures?

Become stay-at-home moms—at least for a few years anyway.

This has stirred up considerable controversy and dismay from academic leaders:

“It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.”

I find it interesting that the very academics who instill education are now questioning its value. Does education lose its value based on the actions of its recipient? Is the value of an education directly correlated to how it’s applied? And how exactly do universities measure the “return on their investments?” By the ratio of tuition dollars to an alumni’s charitable donations? Stay-at-home mothers would be less likely to donate as much as their working counterparts, so does that make them less valuable, less of a productive force in society?

I always thought learning was important for learning’s sake. Few academics seem to agree:

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students’ minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

“What does concern me,” said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, “is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”

Think outside of the box? I thought that’s what most of us went to college to learn? If these universities aren’t teaching their students that, then perhaps their education is not as valuable as the university thinks it is. But what if these universities are succeeding? What if they are opening women’s minds to all of the possibilities that exist for them, but young women are looking at everything and still deciding that motherhood is important to them? What implications does that have on feminism and current gender roles?

Traditional feminists were not entirely surprised by these findings, criticizing society for forcing women to choose between motherhood and a career:

“They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they’re accepting it,” said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women’s and gender studies at Yale. “Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

“I really believed 25 years ago,” Dr. Wexler added, “that this would be solved by now.”

I tend to agree with Dr. Wexler. I would love to work full time in a high powered career and be good wife and mother. But the current state of corporate America makes this very challenging for most women. I think that many young women witnessed how difficult it was for their working mothers and are deliberately choosing to take the opposite path. Does this make these women anti-feminist? Not exactly.

My interpretation of feminism is that women should have options, the same options and opportunities as men. Fifty years ago, women were not able to have their own credit cards, rent an apartment without a male co-signer or control her own reproductive system. Now, women are able to buy their own property, occupy the C-suite and even walk on the moon.

Becoming a parent is also a choice, one that both women and men can select. Why do we automatically de-value the choice to be a parent because fewer men than women opt to be an active one? Isn’t this a form of discrimination, the type that feminists have been fighting against since the beginning of the 20^th century?

We have given women choices, it’s time to stop condemning them for making them.