Laws needed to stop customers sexually harassing workers

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick has called for an overhaul of sex discrimination laws, to include customers or clients who harass workers.

Ms Broderick said loopholes in the Sex Discrimination Act were leaving female employees vulnerable to sexual harassment by their customers or clients and called for ACt to be extended to provide the needed extra protection.

"If you have a customer who harasses a service provider, the service provider doesn’t have protection under the Act," she said.

"When you talk to women they say that the sexual harassment was actually from a major client of their organisation ...a lot of it is about power imbalance. Women don’t raise it because they are fearful about their jobs."

Ms Broderick has also previously called for the Sex Discrimination Act to be fixed to give men the same rights as women. She has also nominated breastfeeding mothers as another group in need of greater protection from discrimination.

Ms Broderick commissioned a national telephone survey of 2000 people in July 2008 as a step on from the information she gathered on her national listening tour. The survey was designed to track trends in the incidence and nature of sexual harassment.

Concerns raised in South Australian focus groups during her tour included:

• A young woman working as a supermarket cashier, who was asked to wear a transparent uniform, and told to take off tops that she wore underneath the uniform;

• A man who expressed confusion about sexual harassment particularly the line between where work ends and private life begins.

• "One South Australian woman described it as career death to bring a complaint," Ms Broderick said.

Ms Broderick said the telephone survey findings, expected to be released in November 2008, would lead to a new education strategy targeting workplaces.

The laws should also allow fro employers who were repeat offenders to be encouraged to enter into a gender equality agreement, Ms Broderick said.