When does an office flirtation cross the line into sexual harassment? A federal court sitting in Pennsylvania recently faced such a situation.

What happened. A woman took a temporary job as an administrative assistant with Cingular Wireless (location unidentified in court records) in June 2004. In October 2004, her manager allegedly began to make sexual comments to her, indicating that he was interested in her sexually. One incident involved a long Instant Messenger (IM) conversation during which the manager described a sexual dream he had had about her. Over the following weeks, she said, the manager began verbally harassing her almost daily, explicitly stating his interest in--and sexual fantasies about--her. She also stated that the manager implied that if she had sex with him, he could help her find a permanent position.

She sought to put a stop to this behavior by meeting with him in his office, and during that meeting, he made sexually suggestive comments and tried to grab and hug her to prevent her from leaving the room. She filled out a sexual harassment complaint with Cingular, which investigated, but didn't discipline, the manager. She left the company in mid-December 2004 and later sued it on a number of bases, including maintaining a sexually hostile work environment. Cingular asked the court to dismiss the case at an early stage.

What the court said. In order to prove a hostile work environment claim, the employee had to show: (1) that she suffered intentional discrimination because of her sex, (2) the discrimination was severe or pervasive, (3) it detrimentally affected her, (4) it would have detrimentally affected a reasonable person in like circumstances, and (5) there is a basis for employer liability. The court examined the manager's behavior against this standard.

On the IM exchange, the court said it wasn't evidence of an objectively hostile environment because the employee willingly discussed the sex dream with the manager. The court decided that a reasonable person wouldn't find that the IM conversation between the two constituted anything other than flirtation. The court warned against mistaking ordinary socializing in the workplace, such as male-on-male horseplay or intersexual flirtation, as discriminatory conditions of employment.

In regard to the other events, even assuming that they constituted harassment, they were at best sporadic and isolated, and none were sufficiently severe to rise to the level of a hostile work environment. The court granted Cingular's motion. Kraus v. Cingular Wireless, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, No. 06-775 (1/8/08).

Point to remember: Isolated incidents of sexual behavior are usually not enough to prove a sexually hostile environment. Such behavior, to be actionable, must permeate the workplace and change the very nature of the plaintiff's employment.