Thomas Reed is the head of the FCC’s Office of Communications Business Opportunities. His mandate is to seek out minorities and women to recruit them as business partners. Earlier in his career he was a senior prosecutor in the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice.
The FCC is being sued by a woman named Sharon Stewart who has worked for 30 years doing women’s outreach. According to her FCC bio, she has worked at the FCC since 2001. Her claim is that Mr Reed created and permitted a hostile work enivornment for her – specifically that men gathered in the cube next to her to watch pornography. She pointed out that Mr Reed had sex in his office with a female reporter for the Washington Post. The woman has since divorced her husband and married Reed.
Obama FCC Chairman Appointee Thomas Wheeler is fighting the lawsuit in court, claiming that men watching porn in the cube next to the woman in charge of Women’s Outreach and her boss pushing her career aside after she complained is just no big thang.
In my perfect world, this entire office would not exist, but Democratic members of Congress repeated have pressured the FCC to try to recruit women and racial minorities to get special attention from the FCC.