I doubt that such a firing is defensible as a sexual harassment claim. If you are creating a hostile work environment, someone first has to complain about it and you have to be given a warning and instructions on how to remedy the situation.

However, of course, you can always be fired for demonstrating questionable judgement.

All that it takes is one person to complain that they were offended, irregardless of the work environment, and a company with "zero tolerancy" towards sexual harassment will toss you out on your ass.

Frankly, it would have been easy to remedy - I was browsing a game forum with image signatures, which is where this image appeared.

Of course, at the time, the HR person didn't like me (I mistook her for my bosses personal assistant when I was hired), so that didn't help. Learned a lot of lessons from that situation - the biggest being "make the HR employees like you".

No, you're wrong. A firing on the grounds that sexual harassment took place has to go through a specific sequence of events, and a number of lines have to be crossed. If you were actually told that you are being fired under a sexual harassment claim, and none of these intermediate events took place, then you may have been improperly terminated.

Sexual harassment isn't just "someone did something that made me feel uncomfortable" -- it's a set of specific and defined offenses, with measurable impacts. You have to have done something which created a hostile environment for your peers, they have to report to management that you are making the environment threatening for them, management has to raise this to your attention and instruct you to stop the offending behavior, and you have to have failed to remedy the situation when you were instructed to.

A zero tolerance policy like you describe would just be a reiteration of the nature of your at-will employment agreement, as what they're saying is that they reserve the right to fire you for doing anything that is questionably dumb. But if you were told that there is a sexual harassment claim against you, you have rights too.

At will or not, I was terminated for sexual harassment.

Rights or not, it wasn't realistic to pursue it (an inexperienced 20-something against a multi-million dollar internet giant), and it was enough years ago now that I've gotten something more valuable out of it - experience.

So it took more than "one person to complain" - it took that and the HR person not liking you.

Which, in an ideal world, shouldn't have had any impact. Of course, it's not an ideal world, etc etc.

However, the original point stands - even "liberal software companies" will fire people for less than nudity on your screen.