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BURLINGTON INDUSTRIES, INC. v. ELLERTH

Opinion of the Court

privileges of employment, because of such individual’s
. . . sex.”

42 U. S. C. § 2000e–2(a)(1).

“Quid pro quo” and “hostile work environment” do not ap-
pear in the statutory text. The terms appeared ﬁrst in the
academic literature, see C. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment
of Working Women (1979); found their way into decisions of
the Courts of Appeals, see, e. g., Henson v. Dundee, 682 F. 2d
897, 909 (CA11 1982); and were mentioned in this Court’s
decision in Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, 477 U. S.
57 (1986). See generally E. Scalia, The Strange Career of
Quid Pro Quo Sexual Harassment, 21 Harv. J. L. & Pub.
Policy 307 (1998).

In Meritor, the terms served a speciﬁc and limited pur-
pose. There we considered whether the conduct in question
constituted discrimination in the terms or conditions of em-
ployment in violation of Title VII. We assumed, and with
adequate reason, that if an employer demanded sexual favors
from an employee in return for a job beneﬁt, discrimination
with respect to terms or conditions of employment was ex-
plicit. Less obvious was whether an employer’s sexually de-
meaning behavior altered terms or conditions of employment
in violation of Title VII. We distinguished between quid
pro quo claims and hostile environment claims, see 477 U. S.,
at 65, and said both were cognizable under Title VII, though
the latter requires harassment that is severe or pervasive.
Ibid. The principal signiﬁcance of the distinction is to in-
struct that Title VII is violated by either explicit or con-
structive alterations in the terms or conditions of employ-
ment and to explain the latter must be severe or pervasive.
The distinction was not discussed for its bearing upon an
employer’s liability for an employee’s discrimination. On
this question Meritor held, with no further speciﬁcs, that
agency principles controlled.

Id., at 72.

Nevertheless, as use of the terms grew in the wake of
Meritor, they acquired their own signiﬁcance. The standard
of employer responsibility turned on which type of harass-