Final answer:
Sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual advances, conduct, or behavior that interferes with a person's performance or creates a hostile work environment. It can also extend beyond sexual conduct to include harassment based on other protected classes like race or religion.
Step-by-step explanation:
In 1980, the EEOC defined sexual harassment as unwelcome sexual advances or sexual conduct, verbal or physical, that interferes with a person's performance or creates a hostile working environment.
Harassment does not have to be sexual; it may be related to any of the protected classes in the statutes regulated by the EEOC: race, national origin, religion, or age.
Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment.