When IT finds someone’s been browsing offensive Web sites on a work computer, you’d normally fire the employee. But what happens when it’s a computer several employees share?

That’s what happened in this recent case:

All employees in one department of a hospital shared a computer. Employees each had their own username and password, and company policy required them to log in under their own name and log out when they were finished.

But in practice, the first employee to use the computer would normally stay logged in all day, with all employees working under that name.

During one shift, an employee noticed pornographic sites in the computer’s Web browsing history. She complained to HR, who brought the matter to IT for an investigation.

It turned out that the only male employee in the department was logged in to the computer at the time the porn sites were visited. He denied going to the sites, citing the common practice of all employees sharing one login ID.

A further investigation showed the man was the only department employee scheduled to work on a day when some some of the sites were browsed. He was fired.

Still, he said he didn’t do it — and he sued the hospital for gender discrimination, claiming they assumed he viewed the pornography because he was the only male employee.

The company asked a judge to toss the case, arguing it conducted a thorough investigation before the employee was fired.

The court agreed. First, since the man was logged in to the computer at the time, it was reasonable to start the investigation with him. And the list of possible perpetrators was narrowed down even further by comparing employees’ schedules with the times the sites were accessed, giving the company good cause to fire the employee.

Lesson: When multiple employees share one computer, it’s smart to create a policy requiring individuals to log in and out. But to track activity, the company still has to enforce the policy. If the hospital had done that in this case, it may have avoided the lawsuit altogether.

Cite: Farr v. St. Francis Hospital and Health Centers

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics produced data showing in 2008, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median weekly earnings that were about 80% of the median for their male counterparts. Median weekly wages were $638 for women, $798 for men. In 1979,  women earned about 62% of what men made.

Here’s a percentage comparison to men between ‘79 and ‘08, by typical age groups in the workforce:

• Age 20-24: ‘79 — women made 61% of what men made; ‘08 — women made 80% of what men made
• 25-34: ‘79 — 68%; ‘08 — 88%
• 35-44: ‘79 — 58%; ‘08 — 77%
• 45-54: ‘79 — 57%; ‘08 — 77%
• 55-64: ‘79 — 60%; ‘08 — 78%

Clearly, women who work in in entry-level positions that typically go to workers under age 25 come the closest — 88% — to equaling the pay of their male counterparts. In most other age groups, women make about three-quarters of what male counterparts make.

Apart from the cold numbers, there’s the big question: Even with the gains, women still make less. Why?

Some of course will point to sex discrimination. Others will say it’s because women more often than men drop out in mid- or early-career to raise children, and then have to play catch-up later on.

For whatever reason, the gap exists.

To see the full BLS report, “Highlights of Women’s Earnings 2008,” go here.

That’s what one construction firm learned recently after settling a sexual harassment suit brought by a male employee.

The employee claimed his male supervisor subject him to a constant barrage of obscene comments, sexual innuendos, propositions and implied physical threats.

When he brought the conduct to attention of upper management, he was allegedly told, “This is a construction site; this kind of thing goes on all the time.”

With help from the EEOC, the employee sued. The company agreed to settle for an undisclosed amount.

The lesson: Managers need to take all harassment complaints seriously, no matter what the genders of the accuser and the accused.

Cite: EEOC v. Haydon Brothers Contracting, Inc.

In many situations, yes, as long as the documentation is in order. But here’s a case where a manager’s flexibility went too far — and got the company in big trouble:

A male bus driver was fired after dropping a student off at an unauthorized stop, in violation of the school district’s policy.

The problem: A few other drivers, all female, had broken the same rule but were never disciplined.

So the male driver sued, claiming he was fired because of his gender.

His manager argued the decision was partially based on the man’s previous performance — during his tenure, he’d been involved in one accident, and the school district had gotten several complaints about him from students’ parents.

His unauthorized stop was just the final straw.

What did the court think?

The judge sided with the employee. He presented a lot of evidence of how frequently the policy was broken. One female driver was caught making unauthorized stops on a regular basis for two years, without any disciplinary action.

The man did have problems in the past, but the school district couldn’t prove the rule had ever been taken seriously by management when female employees were involved.

The lesson for managers: You don’t have to treat every employee exactly the same, even when they violate the same policy. In some cases, such as when there’ve been previous behavior problems, the company might decide to fire an employee while only warning the other.

But firing someone while taking absolutely no action against anyone else is likely to lead to a discrimination lawsuit.

Cite: Dinkins v. Suffolk Transportation Services.

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Which of course leads to the question:  Why do women pick on other women? Workplace psychologists have at least three theories:

Scarcity. As women advance, the number of spots available to them at the top of the workplace pyramid tends to tighten. When that happens, the bullying begins.

The boot camp. Many women believe they’ve struggled on their own to “make it” against the odds, so why give a lift to someone else? Let them struggle, too.

Reverse favoritism. Some women who are in positions of authority fear they’ll be viewed as too sympathetic to other women. The result: The women in authority tend to overcompensate and go rougher on other women.

Two Democratic cornerstone pieces of legislation passed the U.S. House last week: The Lilly Ledbetter Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act. And Ledbetter cleared a major hurdle in the Senate, too. A summary of each act:

The Lilly Ledbetter Act changes existing law — and a U.S. Supreme Court decision — holding that cases of discrimination in the workplace have a 180-day statute of limitations in which someone can make a claim. The act is named for a woman who worked for Goodyear for 18 years in Alabama, and learned just before her retirement that she had been paid less than men doing the same job. For that reason, she couldn’t have filed a discrimination complaint within the 180 days required by law, even though the evidence showed she did indeed suffer discrimination in pay. The act changes the rules on the statute of limitations by assigning the 180-day limit to each paycheck. In other words, every time someone gets paid, that person has a new 180 days in which to file a pay-discrimination claim.

The Paycheck Fairness Act –

• requires the EEOC to survey pay data already available and issue regulations within 18 months that require employers to submit any needed pay data identified by the race, sex, and national origin of employees, giving the EEOC easier ways to detect violations of law and toughen enforcement.
• toughens the remedy provisions of the Equal Pay Act (EPA) by allowing plaintiffs to recover compensatory and punitive damages from employers. The EPA now provides only for limited damages and back pay awards, which tend to be less.
• allows an EPA lawsuit to proceed as a class action in conformity with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). Under present law, it’s difficult to bring EPA suits as class actions because the EPA requires plaintiffs to opt in to a suit. Under the federal rule, class members are automatically considered part of the class until they choose to opt out of the class.
• prohibits employers from punishing employees for sharing salary information with their co-workers.

Here’s how each member of the House voted on the Ledbetter Act and on the Paycheck Fairness Act.

And then a few days later, the Senate voted, 72-23, to limit debate on the Ledbetter Act — major step toward approval. President Obama already has voiced support for the bill.

What do you think of the Acts? Take our poll at the right of this story.

The study for the Journal of Applied Psychology appears in a 19-page paper titled Is the Gap More Than Gender? A Longitudinal Analysis of Gender, Gender Role Orientation, and Earnings. 

It contends that guys who think of themselves as traditional “breadwinners” and who believe that a woman’s place is in the home — or, at best, in a subservient position at work — make about $12,000 a year more in salary than men who think of women as equal partners at work and in the home.

Put another way, men who change diapers make about a $1,000 a month less than men who don’t change diapers.

The study uses a factor called “Gender Role Orientation” (GRO).  If you’re a man who has a GRO of -1, that means you think of women as your equals. If you’re a man who thinks a woman’s place is in the home, your GRO is +1.

The study shows that -1 group makes an average annual salary of $39,000. The +1 groups pulls in an average of $51,000 a year.

Like any legislative proposal, the PFA contains literally dozens of components, most having to do with ensuring that women get equal pay for equal work. But employers will find five of those components more meaningful than others:

• Elimination of an employer’s “affrirmative defense.” Under the Equal Pay Act, when an employer is found to be paying female employees less than male employees for equal work, the employer may assert an “affirmative defense”  that the pay differential is based on a factor other than gender. For instance, and employer may argue that a man had a higher salary in a previous job and thus commands a higher pay than a woman in the same job. The PFA tightens this affirmative defense so that it can excuse a pay differential for men and women only where the employer can show that the differential is truly caused by factors related to performance or responsibility.
• Elimination of the cap on damages. The Equal Pay Act stipulates that an employer found in violation is liable only for fixed amounts, such as differentials for back pay. That would change under the PFA: Employees could sue for and get punitive and compensatory damages, leaving the door open for windfalls even if the pay disparity is unintentional.
• Prohibition for disciplining disclosure of wage information. The law now stipulates that employers can classify some pay info as confidential and punish employees for disclosing that info. The PFA would bar employers from handing out discipline for such disclosures.
• Elimination of the “establishment” requirement. Under the EPA, in order to determine that there is wage discrimination, the wage comparison must be made between employees working at the same “establishment.” Some courts have interpreted this to mean that wages paid in different facilities or offices of the same employer cannot be compared even if the employer is paying workers different salaries for the same work. The PFA stipulates that a comparison need not be between employees in the same physical place of business. In other words, employees in Peoria and Los Angeles would be considered equals if their responsibilities were the same.
• Recordkeeping requirments. The PFA would require all employers to keep records of the methods they use to set employee wages. An employer would also have to provide yearly reports to the EEOC that describe the company’s workforce by position and salary as well as gender, race, and ethnicity.

See the text of the Paycheck Fairness Act, first introduced in March 2007.

We suppose you could subtitle this story “Why So Few Members Ordered the Hot Soup.”

Anyway, the club recently lost a court battle to exclude women from eating in the club’s dining room. The loss came despite a valiant effort by the club’s lawyers to invoke a novel reason for the men-only rule:

Some male members liked to dine in the nude. Therefore, the issue wasn’t one of discrimination, but rather one of privacy.

A presumably fully clothed judge rejected the reasoning and ordered the club to open up its dining room to women — who no doubt won’t have much of an appetite.

It’s an election year. That means candidates are loading up new pieces of legislation, and two of the proposals directly affect how you’ll do your job.

Here’s a summary of them and what they mean to HR managers and their companies.

The Civil Right Act of 2008

Proposed by Democrats Clinton, Kennedy and Obama, this revision of the existing Civil Rights Act would:

• Stiffen penalties for violations of the Equal Pay Act and institute tougher standards on employers who have to prove that a pay differential is the result of a factor other than sex and is related to job performance – such as differences in education, training or experience. With the new standards, HR managers would have to double- and triple-check to make sure the law is being followed, or suffer the consequences.
• Add compensatory and punitive damages to the remedies available to employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act, in addition to back pay, which is doubled if an underpayment is intentional and not in “good faith,” and make it easier for employees who win a discrimination or pay case to recover some legal expenses from their employers, such as the cost of providing expert witnesses. That makes the stakes – and the risk – higher for employers who choose to fight it out in court, and increases the demand that supervisors thoroughly document their decisions.

Americans with Disabilities Act More than 240 co-sponsors in the U.S. House have signed on to the proposed ADA Restoration Act, which would:

• Redefine “disability” to include simply “a physical or mental impairment” or “a record of a physical or mental impairment” or the state of “being regarded as having a physical or mental impairment” — meaning individuals no longer would need to prove that impairments “substantially limit” one or more “major life activities.”
• Prohibit courts and employers from considering the effects of medication or devices when determining whether individuals are disabled. That is, if you have an employee whose disability is lessened by medication or a medical device, you wouldn’t be allowed to take that into account when deciding if the employee is disabled.
• Shift the burden of proving qualification to perform a job from employee, who now must show that he or she is qualified, to employers, who must show the employee is not qualified.

What you can do

Since the legislation is still under study, members of Congress are looking for real-life examples of how the changes would unfairly affect business or the way in which employees are treated.

If you have an example – for instance, a situation with a disabled employee – you should contact your representatives with a description of the situation.