Law School's Kathryn Abrams puts focus on feminist jurisprudence

Law Professor Kathryn Abrams teaches the popular "Feminism and Gender Discrimination" course. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By Susan Lang

Making sexual references to an employee may be sexual harassment, if the comments create a hostile working environment, but the issue is much broader. So says Cornell law Professor Kathryn Abrams, a specialist in "feminist jurisprudence" -- the study of the way the law is implicated in women's inequality or subordination, either as problem or as solution.

"Conduct that makes it hard for women to perform as well, or denies equal employment opportunity may also be sexual harassment," said Abrams, whose popular "Feminism and Gender Discrimination" course covers sexual harassment as well as violence against women, work-family conflicts, abortion and pornography.

The narrow public view of sexual harassment is not surprising, however, Abrams said, given the exhaustive coverage of Paula Jones' unsuccessful sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton.

"There certainly is a lot more attention being paid to sexual harassment because of this incident," Abrams said. Unfortunately, she added, much of the focus on the Clinton case has been misplaced.

"In sexual harassment law, the focus is not romance and titillation. Rather, it is related to equality, employment opportunities and whether a work environment has become hostile for a women," said Abrams. She noted that sexual harassment also includes non-sexualized degradation, devaluation and intimidation; and sexualized conduct may be coupled with inadequate or devaluative training or mentoring, equipment sabotage or other gender-related impediments to equality and performance on the job.

Abrams first joined the Cornell faculty as a visitor in 1990-91, after earning a B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1980, a J.D. law degree from Yale in 1984 and teaching five years at Boston University Law School. After a semester's visit to Harvard Law School, she returned to Cornell again from 1992 to 1995, during which she earned a Merrill Presidential Scholar Outstanding Educator citation and the Alice and Constance Cook Award for service to women at Cornell.

Abrams taught briefly at Northwestern University and Indiana University-Bloomington law schools, before rejoining the Cornell Law School faculty in 1997. Abrams -- who is married to William Kell, Cornell's J. Thomas Clark Professor of Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise and director of the Law School's new Small Children/Small Business Clinic -- described her frequent moves as a predictable part of accommodate the needs of a two-career family.

Now that Abrams, her husband and children have settled in Ithaca for the long haul, she said she finds herself writing and talking more and more about the legal implications and court interpretations of sexual harassment law.

"To say that its sexual harassment when a co-worker says 'you have a nice dress on' is nonsense," Abrams said, noting that such an interpretation belittles the law's foundation of ensuring women equality in the workplace. "Sexual harassment is a situation or incident that alters the workplace in a way that makes it more difficult for one to do his or her job."

If the new national awareness of the issue has put a damper on office romance or made men self-conscious, so be it, she said.

"A lot of employers and men in the workplace haven't had to second guess their actions before, and it's making them uncomfortable," she said. "I sympathize with their discomfort, but in the past, women had to bear the brunt of all the discomfort. It seems appropriate to me that everyone should be a little slower to move and a little more careful and that the discomfort level should be better allocated between the sexes."

Beyond her interest in sexual harassment, Abrams has written several dozen articles on employment discrimination, feminist jurisprudence and minority-vote dilution. Her current project is a book exploring the ways in which feminist legal theory depicts women's agency, or capacity for self-direction under circumstances of oppression.