In the late 1970s, while feminist activism was raising public awareness of sexual harassment and appellate courts were ruling in favor of victims, women were breaking down occupational barriers. Antidiscrimination laws and the resulting affirmative action programs encouraged more women to enter traditionally male-dominated workplaces and occupations. As women began breaking into these masculine domains, they experienced a range of harassing behavior. Much of the harassment consisted of sexual graffiti, dirty jokes, repeated propositioning, and even sexual assault. Marian Swerdlow, a subway conductor in New York City in the late 1970s, described, ‘the first few months on the job, I got propositioned so consistently that I finally joked about giving a civil service exam for the position, with a filing fee and a physical.’ Judy Jarvela, who worked at Eveleth Mines in Minnesota, repeatedly found semen on the clothes in her locker, and co-worker Diane Hodge reported that her foreman came up from behind her and grabbed both her breasts in front of her co-workers.

But often the harassment experienced by women in nontraditional occupations had nothing to do with sex, but was an attempt to discourage women from staying in the trades because they were taking a ‘man's’ job. Women were subject to isolation, work sabotage, severe verbal abuse, and physical violence. Rose Melendez, a police officer in San Francisco, had male co-workers who would not speak with her and ignored her like she wasn't there. One day a coworker drove Melendez to a secluded area, pulled a gun on her, pointed it directly at her, and said ‘I just want to see how fast you women cops can run.’ Sometimes women experienced dangerous work sabotage. Pat Crull, a carpenter in California, described how ‘my [co-workers] gave me the hardest tasks they could find and then sat back to watch me struggle. Once I was assigned to carry four-hundred-pound steel beams with a guy who was about six feet tall and weighed about three hundred pounds. I was five-foot-two and weighed about a hundred and twenty-five pounds.’ Crull explained, ‘because I was older, I was rarely seen as a sex object in the way that the younger women were.