It is illegal to harass someone due to their sex or gender. Most people think of sexual harassment as solely sexual in nature. However, harassment may include unwelcome romantic advances, as well as offensive remarks about someone's sex or gender. Both the victim and the perpetrator of the harassment may be a man or a woman, and the harassment may even be same sex harassment. Harassment may include a wide range of unwelcome conduct related to sex or gender.
It may include requests for sexual favors, jokes, touching, groping, assault, rape, repeated requests for dates, offensive remarks, and innuendoes. There is no prohibition on offhand, isolated remarks.
Instead, harassment becomes illegal when it is either so frequent or so severe that it generates a hostile work environment or when it results in adverse employment actions, such as being fired, suspended, demoted, or losing benefits. The harasser may be a supervisor, coworker, client, or customer. The nature of the harasser's relationship to the victim and the actions that are taken by the employer to handle the matter will determine whether a worker may hold their employer liable.
However, Title VII only protects employees of employers that have at least 15 employees. It also has caps on damages based on the size of the employer. Our sexual harassment lawyers can help Jersey City workers determine which laws should form the basis of a claim.
The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination prohibits all employers, irrespective of their size, from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, marital status, and domestic partnership or civil union status.
