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FARAGHER v. BOCA RATON

Opinion of the Court

ening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; and
whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work
performance.”
Id., at 23. Most recently, we explained that
Title VII does not prohibit “genuine but innocuous differ-
ences in the ways men and women routinely interact with
members of the same sex and of the opposite sex.” Oncale,
523 U. S., at 81. A recurring point in these opinions is that
“simple teasing,” id., at 82, offhand comments, and iso-
lated incidents (unless extremely serious) will not amount
to discriminatory changes in the “terms and conditions of
employment.”

These standards for judging hostility are sufﬁciently de-
manding to ensure that Title VII does not become a “general
civility code.”
Id., at 80. Properly applied, they will ﬁlter
out complaints attacking “the ordinary tribulations of the
workplace, such as the sporadic use of abusive language,
gender-related jokes, and occasional teasing.” B. Linde-
mann & D. Kadue, Sexual Harassment in Employment Law
175 (1992) (hereinafter Lindemann & Kadue) (footnotes omit-
ted). We have made it clear that conduct must be extreme
to amount to a change in the terms and conditions of employ-
ment, and the Courts of Appeals have heeded this view.
See, e. g., Carrero v. New York City Housing Auth., 890 F. 2d
569, 577–578 (CA2 1989); Moylan v. Maries County, 792
F. 2d 746, 749–750 (CA8 1986); See also 1 Lindemann &
Grossman 805–807, n. 290 (collecting cases granting summary
judgment for employers because the alleged harassment was
not actionably severe or pervasive).

While indicating the substantive contours of the hostile
environments forbidden by Title VII, our cases have estab-
lished few deﬁnite rules for determining when an employer
will be liable for a discriminatory environment that is other-
wise actionably abusive. Given the circumstances of many
of the litigated cases, including some that have come to us,
it is not surprising that in many of them, the issue has been
joined over the sufﬁciency of the abusive conditions, not the