The Women-Friendly Workplace Campaign is NOW's proactive project aimed at stopping sexual harassment and other workplace abuses. NOW has been active on workplace issues throughout our history, from our successful efforts to end sex-segregated help-wanted ads in the 1960s and 70s to our campaign to stop sexual and racial harassment at Mitsubishi Motors and Smith Barney in the 1990s.

Launched in 1997, the Women-Friendly Workplace Campaign has taken on some of the biggest employers in the U.S., including retail giant Wal-Mart. The campaign puts a framework around NOW's wide-ranging efforts to end workplace discrimination while encouraging employers to institute family-friendly policies.

Whether they're working on automobile assembly lines, at Wall Street brokerage firms, in strawberry fields, at military posts, on the floor of a discount store or even at the post office -- women face unfair hurdles at work. We know that harassment and abuse are ways to knock women and people of color out of the competition for higher-paying jobs. The Women-Friendly Workplace Campaign gives consumers the organizing tools they need to use their clout in the marketplace to demand women-friendly workplaces.

Campaign Components

• Consumer's Pledge for individuals to sign, agreeing to support businesses that are women-friendly.
• Employer's Pledge for businesses to sign, promising to adhere to minimal standards for a Women-Friendly Workplace.
• Merchants of Shame -- those businesses that have bad track records on harassment, discrimination or assault in the workplace and are targeted for direct action and consumer pressure.