The term “sexual harassment” was coined in the 1970s by female employees of Cornell University.
A rumor that female employees of Cornell University coined the term “sexual harassment” in the 1970s circulated online in October.
People on social media appeared to be surprised by the claim that the term was coined only about 50 years ago. The rumor spread as Cornell was in the national spotlight due to a lawsuit accusing a group of seven male students of drugging and raping a female student in 2024. (Snopes has previously reported on what we know about the lawsuit, as well as what we’ve learned about the seven accused men, often referred to as the “Cornell 7.)
The claim is true.
The term “sexual harassment” first entered the cultural lexicon in the 1970s and is widely credited to a journalist named Lin Farley, then director of the women’s section of the human affairs program at Cornell University and co-founder of Working Women United, a group formed to combat sexual harassment in the workplace in 1975.
According to History.com, Farley settled on the term along with her colleagues Susan Meyer and Karen Sauvigne, who also worked in Cornell’s human affairs office.
The women were approached by a former Cornell secretary named Carmita Wood who had resigned after being sexually harassed by her supervisor, renowned nuclear physicist Boyce McDaniel. When she filed for unemployment benefits, Cornell declined.
As a result, Working Women United was formed and campaigned for Wood. In April 1975, Farley gave testimony before the Commission on Human Rights of New York City, a speech that was reported in an Aug. 19, 1975, New York Times article titled “Women Begin to Speak Out Against Sexual Harassment at Work.”
The piece reported Farley as saying: “Sexual harassment of women in their place of employment is extremely widespread. It is literally epidemic.”
The newspaper cited Farley’s work at Cornell, including a survey in which “the results indicated that more than 70 percent of the 155 respondents had experienced some form of sexual harassment and that 92 percent of the group believed it was a serious problem.”
The survey also reported that “more than 50 percent of the women who did complain, through channels, found that nothing was done.”
In May 1975, the group organized an event called “Speak-Out on Sexual Harassment of Women at Work” with an introductory speech from Farley, who said, “My name is Lin Farley and I’d like to welcome you to the first Speak-Out ever, that I know of or anyone else knows of, on the issue of sexual harassment on the job.”
In 1978, Farley published a book titled “Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job,” which discussed “the scope and extent of the phenomenon.” She gave credit to Meyer, Sauvigne, and Wood for their contributions and activism, and noted in her preface that the human affairs program at Cornell closed in 1976, which prompted her to write the book.
In the book, Farley credited the 1975 New York Times article as the “first nationally syndicated article about male sexual harassment,” writing that it resulted in women across the country joining the grassroots campaign by sharing their own experiences and ideas.
Farley published an opinion piece about the term for the Times in 2017, amid the “Me Too” movement, titled “I Coined the Term ‘Sexual Harassment.’ Corporations Stole It.”
She wrote:
It wasn’t until April 1975 that women had a word for talking about what their male bosses were doing to them.
It was that month that I first used the phrase “sexual harassment” in public, during a hearing on women in the workplace by the New York City Human Rights Commission, at which I was testifying as an instructor at Cornell University. The New York Times covered the hearing in an article that was reprinted across the country. And thus, a concept was born.
[…]
The decades since have been disappointing. The working women’s revolution I once envisioned hasn’t happened. But not only that, the term, which once held so much promise, has been co-opted, sanitized, stripped of its power to shock, disturb and galvanize. Today the term “sexual harassment” may be ubiquitous; the behavior, unfortunately, remains ubiquitous, too.
For further reading on the Cornell 7 case, Snopes previously wrote a breakdown of the lawsuit and investigated what has happened to the accused since the lawsuit was filed.
