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Female supervisors more susceptible to workplace
sexual harassment
Women who hold supervisory positions are more likely to be sexually
harassed at work, according to the first-ever, large-scale longitudinal
study to examine workplace power, gender and sexual harassment. |
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| The study, which will be
presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological
Association, reveals that nearly fifty percent of women supervisors, but
only one-third of women who do not supervise others, reported sexual
harassment in the workplace. In more conservative models with stringent
statistical controls, women supervisors were 137 percent more likely to
be sexually harassed than women who did not hold managerial roles. While
supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women,
it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.
"This study provides the strongest evidence to date
supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire
than about control and domination," said Heather McLaughlin, a
sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the study's primary
investigator. "Male co-workers, clients and supervisors seem to be using
harassment as an equalizer against women in power."
McLaughlin and her co-authors examined data from the
2003 and 2004 waves of the Youth Development Study (YDS), a prospective
study of adolescents that began in 1988 with a sample of 1,010 ninth
graders in the St. Paul, Minnesota, public school district and has
continued near annually since. Respondents were approximately 29 and 30
years old during the 2003 and 2004 waves. The analysis was supplemented
with in-depth interviews with a subset of the YDS survey respondents.
The sociologists found that, in addition to workplace
power, gender expression was a strong predictor of workplace harassment.
Men who reported higher levels of femininity were more likely to have
experienced harassment than less feminine men. More feminine men were at
a greater risk of experiencing more severe or multiple forms of sexual
harassment (as were female supervisors).
In a separate analysis examining perceived and
self-reported sexual orientation, study respondents who reported being
labeled as non-heterosexual by others or who self-identified as
non-heterosexual (gay, lesbian, bisexual, unsure, other) were nearly
twice as likely to experience harassment.
Researchers also found that those who reported
harassment in the first year (2003) were 6.5 times more likely to
experience harassment in the following year. The most common scenario
reported by survey respondents involved male harassers and female
targets, while males harassing other males was the second most frequent
situation.
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