Congress Has Its Own Sexual Harassment Problem


Over the weekend, four female senators came forward with their own accounts of sexual harassment. Elizabeth Warren recounted that when she was a law professor, she was chased around a desk by a senior faculty member as he tried to put his hands on her. Claire McCaskill recalled that when she was a state legislator, she asked for advice on how to get legislation passed. She said the House speaker responded: “Did you bring your kneepads?”
Since the Weinstein story broke, men in politics have stood up to condemn the Hollywood executive. Senators like Chuck Schumer and Patrick Leahy announced that they would donate Weinstein’s campaign donations to women’s organizations. Joe Biden was recently applauded for vociferously stating that “it is long past time for the powerful men in Hollywood to speak up. To be strong enough to say something. Because silence is complicity.” (As Rebecca Traister pointed out in New York Magazine, Biden’s remarks failed to acknowledge his own complicity in Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas, in which he led the all-white, all-male committee that worked to bully and shame her.)
But these men also need to look into their own backyard. In 2015, Vox reported that a progressive strategist “recalled moving to DC and having three different women give her lists of which members of Congress she should avoid being alone in a room with. The lists included members from both parties, and there were enough of them that all three lists had different names.” One woman in the piece said that experiencing inappropriate advances from powerful men in politics is “bipartisan and almost like a rite of passage in DC.”
Roll Call, which published an extensive piece on sexual harassment in Congress in February, found that “four in 10 of the women who responded to a CQ Roll Call survey of congressional staff in July said they believed sexual harassment is a problem on Capitol Hill, while one in six said they personally had been victimized.”
None of this is in any way surprising given that only 19 percent of those elected to Congress are women. According to Legistorm, 16,304 people work in the House and the Senate, with a large age difference between elected officials and staffers—in both the House and Senate, the average age of staffers is 31, while the average age of Senators and House members is 63 and 59, respectively.
But the scene of women on the Hill coming forward to tell their stories while men jump to condemn a toxic culture stands in sharp contrast against the fact that when it comes to reporting sexual harassment on Capitol Hill, the policies in place still remain highly outdated.
Originally, Congress had exempted itself from discrimination and workplace laws until 1995, when it passed the Congressional Accountability Act, sponsored by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and signed into law by Bill Clinton. The accountability act ended those exemptions and installed the Office of Compliance, a non-partisan, independent agency. While private employees and those working for the federal government file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, employees on the Hill refer to the Office of Compliance. But these changes are over 20 years old and it is clear that there is still a long way to go—in the Office of Compliance’s fiscal year 2016 report, there were only six requests from the House and two from the Senate for confidential counseling, the first step in a long process of asserting a claim.
The process for reporting harassment to the Office of Compliance works like this: Before employees can even file a complaint, they are required to go through 30 days of counseling (which they may seek to reduce), then 30 days of mediation, and then there is a 30 day “cooling off” period. The Office of Compliance outlines the following reason for its unique process in its report:
The OOC’s unique dispute resolution program allows employees and employers to first work together under the guidance of our skilled mediators in an effort to reach agreeable settlement terms.
Read another way, the process also serves to keep disputes internal for a certain period of time, working in the favor of elected officials.